Depth and Breadth: Inter-skills and Inter-disciplinary Education
A Preliminary Proposal Prepared by Professor Christienne L. Hinz (Historical Studies) and Professor Jennifer Rehg (Anthropology)
Design Team Members: Dr. Cory Wilmott (Anthropology) Dr. Matthew Paris (Library Services) Dr. Masangu Shabangi (Chemistry) Dr. Marcus Agustin (Mathematics) Dr. Michael Moore (Historical Studies)
Introduction:
SIUE's goal of joining the ranks of America's premier metropolitan universities is in large part responsible for its current institutional structure. Nationally recognized professional programs such as the Schools of Nursing, Dental Medicine, Business, Education, and the new School of Pharmacy cluster around the College of Arts and Sciences, which has assumed the twin tasks of providing a liberal arts foundation to the university population as a whole, as well as training other students in the “traditional” academic disciplines of the Natural Sciences, Humanities, and the Social Sciences. Accordingly, the goal of SIUE's General Education curriculum must be twofold. It must offer students of all professional and academic disciplines training in the discreet skill sets necessary to excel their academic and professional careers. Second, it must actively counter-balance the growing trend among metropolitan universities (and others as well) to graduate well-trained professionals/technicians but narrowly educated citizens.
A General Education Model:
The following General Education proposal is grounded in two models of general education, the Scholarly Discipline (or Academic Distribution) Model and the Competency-based Effective Citizen Model. Our proposal is situated within these models in the following ways:
I. The Core Competency Requirement (Gen. Ed. XXX series)
The Competency-based Effective Citizen Model focuses upon the broad educational needs of non-specialists; it argues that discreet, core, analytical competencies are necessary for the creation of an educated and informed citizenry.(1) Significantly, the overwhelming opinion among SIUE faculty and staff across disciplines, and across time(2) has been that our students matriculate and graduate as poorly trained critical thinkers. Our proposal disaggregates the multi-faceted task of critical thinking into constituent parts, or Core Competencies, that, once mastered separately, are meant to be re-aggregated in upper division coursework. The four areas of Core Competency necessary for critical thinking are:
A) Analytical Reading
Students must learn to read college level academic texts, scholarly articles, laboratory reports etc., (as apposed to
textbooks). Such courses might focus upon reading comprehension, vocabulary expansion, identification and articulation
of argument, identification and articulation of evidence etc.
B) Quantitative Literacy
Students must achieve functional quantitative literacy, which itself must be self-consciously defined by appropriate
professionals. Significantly, computational analysis must not be made synonymous with “logic” as taught in the
Department of Philosophy. A failure to correct this gap in our general education curriculum will prevent our University
from ever achieving its goal of becoming a premier metropolitan university.
C) Logic and Argumentation
Our students must continue to be trained in formal logic, deduction, inference, and the structure of argument (etc.) as
currently carried out in the Department of Philosophy.
D) Analytical Writing
Basic mechanical competency in formal, college level analytical writing is a fundamental skill the lack of which is a barrier
to academic success. Field-specific analytical writing skills at the intermediate and advanced levels will be developed in
other parts of the general education and baccalaureate curricula. Specifically, writing across the curriculum cannot be the
sole responsibility of the English Department.
II. Introductory Academic Distribution Education (111 series)
The Scholarly Discipline Model (Academic Distribution Model) takes full advantage of the highly specific knowledge base of professionals within traditionally defined disciplines who are trained to develop high intensity content courses based on research, theory, cutting-edge techniques and technologies.(3) The purpose of the Introductory Academic Distribution portion of our proposal is to expose students to discipline specialists with training in field-specific ways of knowing. All departments, academic as well as professional, will be required to offer courses that introduce field specific ways of knowing to potential majors and to non-majors alike.
Introductory Distribution courses are “writing intensive.” In this manner, students will gain experience in “writing across the curriculum,” and in so doing, will learn discipline specific methods of exposition, standards of evidence, and documentation. As our proposal currently stands, students would be required to take at least a single course in each of three broad areas, Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, and Humanities (the Academic Distribution Model).(4) Such courses are also meant to amplify student facility with the related and multiple skill sets established in the Core Skills portion of the curriculum.
III. Inter-skills and Inter-Disciplinary General Education (200 – 300 series)
The Core Competency requirement and the Introductory Distribution Education portions of this proposal lay the groundwork for students to attempt complex analyses utilizing mult-disciplinary techniques and nested skill sets. Courses at this level are especially well situated to the IS format. IS course offerings must be significantly expanded, the system standardized and administrative oversight provided to ensure consistency – truly integrated syllabi, course content, course goals and assessment vehicles. Intermediate and advanced work in the general education curriculum is the iterative learning springboard that will help launch the successful senior project.
Conclusion: General Education and SIUE
In keeping with national trends, the SIUE student body is increasingly under-prepared for college level coursework. For this reason, our proposal emerges from an uncompromising Core Competency framework. Our proposal also acknowledges the fact that the SIUE faculty and staff is the result of a national trend among institutions of higher learning to produce precisely educated specialists rather than broadly educated generalists. Our current faculty is also the result of perhaps a decade or more of active hiring practice at SIUE. Failure to take full advantage of this resource strength (and limitation) will serve neither our general education nor baccalaureate programs.(5) For this reason, our proposal emerges from a Scholar Discipline Model of General Education.
On the other hand, this proposal self-consciously seeks to counter-balance the tendency for the Scholar Discipline Model of General Education to produce overspecialized, shallowly educated citizens by providing multi-disciplinary, interdisciplinary, inter-skilled coursework using a Competency-based Effective Citizen model. The preliminary groundwork for such a curriculum already exists in our institution's demonstrated willingness to create team-taught interdisciplinary courses. It also exists in recent attempts to increase the coherence of “introductory” courses at the 111 level, and in the creation of the freshman seminar as a vehicle to introduce non-specialists in multiple ways of knowing.
(1) Robert Newton, “Tensions and Models in General Education Planning,” The Journal of General Education , (Vol. 9, No. 3, 2000),
pp. 176.
(2) See the 1994 General Education Review Report.
(3) Newton, p. 172.
(4) The usefulness and pedagogical meaningfulness of these categories are currently under debate.
(5) The Great Books Model of General Education is appropriate to small liberal arts colleges lacking professional or graduate programs;
and as such it is contraindicated at a large, metropolitan university like SIUE. See Newton, p. 169.