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Meeting Minutes

September 5, 2006

Reminder: The next GETF meeting on September 12th will be in IG Greer, room 224.

Announcements:

The Faculty Interest Group Committee met last Friday. Dr. Keefe compiled a one page announcement of the grant opportunity. The members of the committee reviewed the announcement and made a few suggestions. The observations/questions were as follows:

The grant applicants need to be directed to the goals and outcomes. Dr. Keefe will have them put on the front page of the GETF website.

Q: Does the announcement imply that 20 new courses will begin in the fall? If so, should we list a specific number of courses? Why not take the opportunity to add as many courses as possible?
A: Dave sheds some light on the situation from an administrative standpoint. The cost of teaching 20 new courses per semester will be $60k. (This works out to be $3k per new course.) If a proposed course is a revision of an existing one, this will not cost the university anything. The cost is per faculty member, not by course. He proposes approximately 5-7 classes in Fall 2007 and the same in Spring 2008. However, there is no way to know how many courses will be offered without seeing the proposals. This will determine how much money will have to be spent on additional faculty pay.

Q: Is it possible to fund 5 faculty members working on the same project? If so, does this mean that 5 different sections of the same course would be offered?
A: There are many different scenarios for developing and/or revising these courses. These issues will have to be addressed on a case by case basis. We do need a clearer idea of the process because money is involved. Therefore, we need to propose different scenarios at 9-15 meeting in order to clarify the process. The FIG Committee will work on these examples between now and then.

There were a few other suggestions as to the wording of the announcement. Dr. Keefe will revise and send out via e-mail this week.

September 13th Forum:
Announcement will be sent out this week.
The agenda will read as follows:
Goals and Outcomes- These will be addressed and hard copies will be available.
Approval Process- The approval process of the goals and outcomes will be addressed.
(The public comment deadline will be 9-18 and the GETF will vote on 9-19.)
History of GETF- The development of the taskforce will be briefly mentioned.
Papas Report- Dave will present.
Faculty and Alumni Survey data- Greg will present. (A handout will be developed.)
Departmental Statements- Alexandra will present. (It was decided that we do not need an executive summary of statements because they are on the website in their totality.)

Some discussion ensued about the departmental statements. There are some departments that are underrepresented on the survey, but it has been made clear to these departments that statements are welcome at any time. It was established that if we do receive feedback about the goals and outcomes from them, we do not include them in our report due to the late date of their response. This only means that these departments were not included in the development of the goals and outcomes; they will still have the opportunity to participate in the curricular development.

Each presenter for the September 13th forum will speak for approximately 10-12 minutes.

There were some general concerns about the September 13th forum. There has been some resistance from a few departments as to the intentions of the goals and outcomes, especially in regard to the fourth goal. Overall, the departmental statements illustrate a relatively good sense of unity. The consensus of the committee is that people are hesitant about the way that the goals and outcomes are to be implemented rather than the goals and outcomes themselves.
Because of this, we need to place emphasis on goals rather than how the goals will be implemented. “Real comments” and “paranoid delusions” need to be differentiated. We need to reiterate that we do not have a model to date and implementation will come later in the process. At the same time, we do not want to be too defensive. We may want to admit that it took the GETF a while to come to agreement on the goals and outcomes, especially goal number four. A suggestion was made to open the forum with a timetable of the GETF and how long it has been in existence.

September 15th Forum:
Notice will go out this week and an announcement will be made at the forum on the 13th.
The goals of this forum will be to discuss curriculum development, faculty grants, and the formation of interdisciplinary faculty interest groups.

Questions arose as to specifics of potential courses:

Q: What if interdisciplinary courses cross traditional boundaries?
A: We need to be a role model for a new way of thinking about general education. We must get beyond the mid-twentieth century way of thinking of courses in terms of categories such as science or social science. We can rewrite policy to account for this new concept.

Q: What credit will the student receive in this case?
A: In the case of the few interdisciplinary courses that exist now, the student gets an either/or credit, depending on what they need.

ASU’s Humanities and Social Sciences have a long standing tradition of creating interdisciplinary coursework already. Therefore, one of the major goals when developing the new curriculum will be to get interdisciplinary courses started within the Sciences.
All committee members are strongly encouraged to invite everyone they know to this forum. A suggestion was made to mail out hard copies to all departmental secretaries to post in their respective copy rooms.

General Education Power Point presentation:
In Dave’s Power Point presentation, he lists seven different dimensions in which GenEd structures differ. Dr. Keefe posed the question of how to proceed with these dimensions. Comments were as follows:

One of the main things to address is vertical development as opposed to horizontal development. The consensus is that we look at more models that incorporate vertical development.

Q: Will there be a common core or will this be ruled out?
A: A point was made that we need some commonality in order to follow from the goals/outcomes. They do not necessarily need to be common courses, as long as they support the goals and outcomes and have a commonality in experience. The question of a common set of core courses has yet to be dealt with.

Time ran out in the discussion, but there was a suggestion to think about presentation in order to guide discussion next week. Also, if there are any GenEd models that the committee members think need to be evaluated, please bring them to the meeting next week.