The Character Model for the American University (Part III)
General education programs are to impart to undergraduate students basic knowledge, or at least exposure, to a variety of disciplines in order to know how to study and live in a meaningful way. The first American institution of higher education to offer a general education curriculum was Harvard in 1825: students were free to choose courses according to their interests in subjects, although the range of choice was limited and the type of courses were liberal arts rather than professional or vocational ones.[i] Over time general education has become the primary mode to introduce students to a college’s curriculum and often is conflated with liberal education itself. Steiner defines general education as “common education” for any person and that liberal education, “being education for democracy, hence is general education.”[ii] Thus, the decline of the value of liberal education in the United States is also a decline in the value of general education itself, prompting several colleges and universities to revisit these programs because student learning outcomes are not being met and the failure to create a clear and consistent identity among faculty and students.[iii]
Besides a core or a Great Book curriculum, the alternative to general education program is competency-based education where students learn one skill at a time, which is a small component of a larger learning goal, before proceeding to the next competency to master.[iv] Students can skip learning modules entirely if they can demonstrate they already have mastery of them as evaluated by a form of testing. Unlike general education programs, competency-based education does not rely upon the credit hour for a student’s degree completion and has been adopted by some for-profit universities.[v] Although there has been criticism of competency-based education, it is increasingly becoming a viable alternative to general education programs at American colleges and universities.[vi] In the near future, colleges and universities will have to confront the choice of whether to retain and reform their general education programs or abandon them and instead adopt competency-based education.
By ending general education programs, colleges and universities would devote themselves to practical reasoning at the expense of theoretical or scientific thinking, as competency-based education is more suitable for professional and vocational training. It would also align colleges and universities to the singular goal of preparing students for the workforce rather than character development, civic engagement, personal and intellectual growth, or other non-economic objectives. For some institutions of higher education this may be a necessary or a forward-looking move, while for others it might be contrary to their institution’s mission, student body wishes, faculty interest, and alumni demands. For those institutions who do not want to adopt competency-based education, it is essential for those colleges and universities to reform their general education programs in such a manner to provide a public reason why general education is preferable to competency-based education.
While most colleges and universities share a common set of learning outcomes that entail a broad range of skills and knowledge, there has been no increase of greater understanding of these goals among students.[vii] To remedy this situation, there has been an emphasis on integration of knowledge, skills, and application in general education programs, although fewer than two in five require experiential learning.[viii] This integration usually was an applied or digital project (e.g., e-portfolios) that was conducted at the end of the general education program with most schools employing the distribution model.[ix] However, this recent emphasis on integration reveals that students are not able to synthesize what they have learned in their general education programs. As a result, students–and the public–do not see the point of taking general education: they are just classes one needs to fulfill before the real work begins in one’s major field.
This need to integrate knowledge comports with the character model in two ways. First, depending upon what type of character a college or university wishes to cultivate, all the courses in the general education program would be oriented towards that conception of character or human flourishing. For example, if a college decides that it wants to cultivate a responsible, democratic citizenry in its students, then a course in the sciences would have to be taught in that context: the study of biology in a general education program would not be isolated to its own discipline but presented in the context of a responsible, democratic citizen. This does not necessarily mean a “dumbing down” of content in biology–students would still need to master the fundamentals of that science–but students would be required to think beyond the narrow disciplinary parameters of their courses to the larger question of character. The courses in the general education program therefore would be given a context where students would be able to integrate their knowledge from specific classes.
In other words, colleges and universities would require the theme of character to make their general education programs intellectually coherent to students. To accomplish this, faculty would be required to revise their courses and coordinate with one another to provide a seamless and comprehensible general education program. Faculty should be encouraged and allowed to innovate to see what type of teaching pedagogies and techniques would be most effective, whether team-teaching, bimonthly meetings, coordination of syllabi in terms of themes and approaches, and reserving time in each course for students to integrated what they have learned from other classes with their current course content. Another possibility is to remove the disciplinary designation for general education courses (e.g., BIO 101) and instead mark them as general education (i.e., GEN 101), allowing faculty from any discipline to teach them. A third idea is to have a seminar as the capstone course of the general education program where students would have to synthesize their knowledge. Regardless of how it is implemented, the general education program will only be successful if faculty are willing to step outside their disciplinary boundaries and coordinate and communicate among themselves.
Second, the character model allows integration of skills, knowledge, and application not only across the general education program but also within courses by having students learn both theoretical and practical reason in their course. Students would be required to learn the theoretical knowledge of a subject but also learn how to practice or apply it, as in a laboratory, internship, service-learning or civic engagement activity.[x] For instance, a geography student would not only learn the foundations behind GIS but then show how to use it in an assignment, like mapping violent crimes in a local city. The student would also be required to demonstrate how his or her theoretical and practical reason is related to the larger question of character. Thus, the student learns not only theoretical and practical reason in a specific subject but is given a larger context to understand how these skills, knowledge, and application are valuable.
By having students learn both practical and theoretical reason in a general education program that is intellectually coherent and oriented by the college’s or university’s mission, the character model can make a public case of the value of American higher education. The public already is primed favorably towards character and colleges and universities are uniquely situated to teach character in a way that is different from other societal institutions, thereby demonstrating their value to the public. This “product differentiation” should be embraced by American colleges and universities if they wish to retain their public value. And there is no greater opportunity to demonstrate this product than a reformed general education program that emphasizes the character model to students and the public.
[i] Herbst 2004, 223; Kimball 2010, 332; Fitzpatrick 2013.
[ii] Steiner 1984, 6.
[iii] Harvard and Duke are the latest universities to revisit their general education programs. Flaherty 2016. For more about the decline of the value of liberal education, see Trepanier 2017a, ix-xvi.
[iv] Voorhees 2001; Daugherty, Davis, and Miller. 2015; Rasmussen, Northrup, and Colson. 2016.
[v] Cooper 2016; Fain 2017.
[vi] For more about the criticisms of competency-based education, see Fitzpatrick 2013.
[vii] Hart 2016, 3-5. The skills to be imparted to students by the general education programs are writing; critical, analytic, ethical, and quantitative reason; oral communication; civic engagement; intercultural and research skills; and information literacy; and the types of knowledge were classified as science, mathematics, humanities, global culture, sustainability, American history, technology, foreign languages, and the arts. Ibid., 15.
[viii] Ibid., 6-9.
[ix] Ibid., 12-13.
[x] For more about service-learning and civic formation, see Trepanier 2013, 14.
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