Reflections (General Education/”Integrated Studies”)

Updated January 2005

Rubric description.

In these courses we will 1. Learn how our society and other societies past and present have struggled to formulate ethical and moral frameworks, to understand and represent their  place in the cosmos, and to grapple with the realities of human existence, including joy, death, pain, suffering, and evil and 2. Critically evaluate how these fundamental questions can, do, or should affect the manner in which we choose to live our lives, interact with others and live in the world.

Goals of the rubric. Courses will be developed with the following goals in mind. Courses will:

1. Have an aspect of active learning – opportunities for students to thoughtfully engage the issues and ideas put before them. This could happen in robust classroom discussion, debates, etc.
2. Be taught in a style that is conducive to class discussion, with an emphasis on the interaction between students and the students with the instructor.  
3. Be constructed, and taught, with an eye toward where they fall in the overall curriculum and general education experience. Courses might look back to what the theme and material for the First Year Seminar and the goals and content of Global Perspectives and look ahead to the senior year Citizenship course. Reading level and amount, and the level and challenge of assignments should be appropriate for course level proposed (200 or 300 level).
4. Have an aspect of the historical-cultural-social context of the ideas explored. They should be “situated” and not taught as “floating concepts.”
5. Courses should avoid a mono-vocal or single worldview approach. This could be accomplished by a range of materials historically or cross-culturally, or through a variety of perspectives on a particular issue.
6. Will draw upon texts and materials that represent the scholarship of the relevant field (reflecting academic research, reputable academic publishers, peer reviewed journal articles, etc.). Texts selected for the course should reflect a balance of viewpoints and sources.
7. Should provide opportunities for reflection – courses should ask students to individually reflect on the material, its intellectual and spiritual implications for their lives and for the communities of which they are a part. This might be accomplished through a journal or other supplemental writing exercises, as well as speaking exercises. This would be a minimal requirement/suggestion for these courses (and we would want to make sure it doesn’t dominate the course).
8. Advisors will strongly encourage students to take a Reflections course that is outside of their major program.
9. Some of these courses could likely serve as writing intensive courses.

Implementation.

1. Reflections will be part of the “Integrated Studies” developmental model of general education.
2. Students will be encouraged to take the course during their sophomore or junior year; they must have completed First Year Seminar and not yet have taken their Citizenship course.
3. Reflections courses will initially be of two types.

A.     Some Reflections courses will not be cross-listed with departmental courses (these will be “pure”/core). All of the students in those courses will be taking the course for general education credit. These courses will have a class size of 20-25 initially although the desire is to get class size down to 15-20.

B.     Some Reflections courses will be cross-listed with departmental courses. In those cases, a student can take the course for departmental credit. In fact, a student may not be taking the course to meet the Reflections course requirement but to meet some other requirement, or, simply out of interest. These courses will vary in size, but likely will be between 25-30 students.

4. The CRTF will oversee the formation of a committee of interested faculty to serve as the initial body to make decisions about which courses will count for Reflections. Once a general list is approved, this task could become the work of a sub-group of the curriculum committee OR a special Reflections group could continue to make those decisions and to monitor and assess the courses. We will also likely need a Reflections “shepherd” to coordinate course offerings, etc. The rubric shepherd will monitor to see what has been effective and make changes in the future accordingly.
5. Ideally, Reflections courses will not be cross-listed with departmental courses. While this model of implementation is not possible immediately, the rubric will be assessed with an eye toward moving towards all “pure courses.”
6. All Reflections courses (regardless of type) will be under a process of course review (specific evaluation at the end of the semester) in order to monitor the success of the course in general and specifically in terms of the goals outlined above.

Text originally prepared by Hannah Schell, Chris Fasano, Frank Gersich and Cheryl Meeker, March 2004; amended by Reflections workshop participants in January 2005.