Preliminary BRIDGE Proposal
“Simplifying Our Successes”
Purpose/Role that General Education should play at SIUE
General Education should serve two overarching goals: to give our students a breadth of educational experience, and to allow our students to receive an education which meets the goals stated in the following documents: SIUE values; CAS Desired Characteristics and Capabilities of Graduates; Statement of Objectives for the Baccalaureate Degree. These three combined give a sense of purpose to our educational endeavors, and to ignore the common themes is to betray our common sense of purpose.
The common themes here include producing graduates who are well-informed, participating citizens in our democracy, capable of self-reflection and life-long learning. Graduates should be capable of ethical and rational reasoning, particularly in the framework of problem solving and critical thinking. These graduates should be able to demonstrate informational, quantitative and scientific literacy, as well as strong oral and written communication skills. Graduates will be exposed to a diversity of ideas, cultures, and backgrounds. And graduates demonstrate responsibility to self and others, holding all to a high standard in all arenas, academic and otherwise.
Broad Model of General Education that our team is planning on designing:
We plan to design a simpler general education program which faculty, staff and students can keep track of. The purpose of all requirements will be based on the role of general education, as seen through the lens of SIUE Values, CAS Desired Characteristics, and the Statement of Objectives for the Baccalaureate Degree. Students should engage in a broad range of courses that allow them to develop as people, citizens, and learners within these goals and broaden their values.
Institutional needs and strengths of SIUE that are driving our team's design
• The Dean's Scholars general education program is serving as our inspiration for General Education revision. In our initial discussions, we all felt that the general education program for Dean's Scholars and Chancellor's Scholars was more intuitive, simpler to understand by faculty and students, and provided our students with a broad exposure to a wide variety of topics.
• SIUE's strengths include a wider culture that has consistently insisted that access to higher education is an important goal. This is a part of our stated mission. We should not throw this away, but rather allow general education to be more rigorous, so that our students are leaving with the skills and education that we expect of them.
• As cited in the 1994 General Education report, our faculty often bemoan preparation levels of our students, particularly in terms of their communications skills and their quantitative reasoning skills. In other words, we should be re-establishing a culture of high expectations, and holding our students and ourselves to those expectations. We should then give our students the tools they need, and hold them accountable for using those tools. Faculty and students must make the process rigorous, and accountable.
• Class sizes must be limited, in order to allow quality of pedagogy. This is particularly true for freshman seminar and 111 classes. To quote from the 1994 General Education report, “Our general education courses must teach both subject matter and behavior. These courses must be the rigorous academic experiences upon which the rest of a student's intellectual development can rest.”
• The categories of Skills, Introductory, Distribution, etc. in our current general education program have lost much of their meaning. The Dean's Scholar general education program allows students flexibility in designing their own educational experience while giving a breadth to their education that should be an expectation of a college graduate.
• We pride ourselves on being excellent as a teaching institution. We should continually challenge ourselves to live up to this claim, and to do better.