Beginning in Spring 2022, UNO embarked on a journey to redesign our general education curriculum. This process, which started as a series of campus surveys, focus groups, and discussions, has matured and gained momentum over the past year. These conversations have pointed to the importance of creating a general education experience that empowers students to meaningfully engage in the intellectual life of UNO. UNO’s general education program should invite students on a journey to explore important questions by engaging with a breadth of perspectives and methodologies, inspire them to find their calling through impactful courses, and prepare them to change the world by developing foundational, transferable, and durable habits of mind most characteristic of a liberal education and our democratic principles.
During AY 2023-2024, a variety of progress has been made resulting from increased collaboration between the General Education Committee, the Faculty Senate, and faculty at large. Collectively, this work centers on three questions in particular: 1) What foundational knowledge, skills, and context do all our students need? 2) How will that be organized so that it is cohesive and consistent at both the course and general education program level? 3) What assessment (student and the program-level) is needed that can both guide the future of the program and provide clear evidence of what it is and is not accomplishing. Skillfully addressing these questions will strengthen our university; leading our students to greater success at UNO, engaging them in an exploration of the enduring grand questions of humanity, inspiring them to find their calling, and enabling them to change the world by equipping them to address questions that haven’t even been asked yet.
Current Status and Initiatives
Several faculty-led initiatives during Spring 2024, in partnership with the General Education Committee, have shaped the trajectory of campus conversations about the importance of liberal arts and general education. These initiatives have include:
- Reading Circles: Matt Tracy, and Connie Schaffer from the Center for Faculty Excellence (CFE) are hosting reading circles during the Spring 2024 semester to explore the value and transformative potential of the liberal arts and how this might inform the structure of a new general education curriculum at UNO. Nearly three dozen people are participating in these discussions.
- Gen Ed as an HLC Quality Initiative: Academic Affairs requested, and received approval from the Higher Learning (HLC) Commission, to designate general education reform as a formal HLC Quality Initiative. This provides access to additional expertise while demonstrating UNO’s commitment to quality improvement, meaningful general education reform, and academic excellence while voluntarily holding ourselves accountable with external stakeholders.
- Gen Ed Assessment Seminar: Aligned with the HLC Quality Initiative, a small group of faculty including representatives from the General Education Committee, Faculty Senate, and the Center for Faculty Excellence, participated in an HLC virtual seminar series in February designed to improve UNO’s general education assessment processes. This workshop will help identify potential general education models, and lead to the incorporation of assessment best practices.
- Teagle Foundation Planning Grant Proposal: A team of experienced educators led by Dana Richter-Egger, Connie Schaffer, and William Melanson, with the support of the General Education Committee, submitted in December a concept paper for a Teagle Foundation planning grant for additional support in laying the groundwork for successful general education reform. The Teagle Foundation aims to support institutions interested in reinvigorating the role of the humanities in general education while increasing the coherence and relevance of this part of the undergraduate curriculum. Though ultimately not selected, the conversations started by this team have helped germinate ideas for potential new general education models and have laid the groundwork for potential future grants proposals.
Resources / Models at Other Institutions
Approaches to general education exist on a spectrum, with distribution models on one end and integrated curricula on the other end. Distribution approaches typically ask students to take some number of courses across different academic divisions of the university and are often viewed by students as a disconnected set of requirements which they attempt to “knock-out” before moving on to other interests.
Paul Hanstedt (2012) describes an integrated general education curriculum, on the other hand, as one that makes “deliberate attempts to create explicit connections among courses, fields, majors, disciplines, and traditionally academic and nonacademic areas” (p. 12). An integrated curriculum “goes beyond simply requiring students to take courses from different disciplines and instead expects them, with the help of their professor, to explore the connections among these different areas” (p. 13). An integrative approach, as Hanstedt argues, means more than a brief introduction or passing mention of these connections. Rather, integration in the context of general education is a deliberate, explicit, and continuous effort to have students reflect on these connections in the context of the course content and their lived experiences.
The trend for general education programs in the United States has been a move away from purely distributional models and towards models that combine distribution alongside integrative elements. General education programs may move further towards the integrated end of the spectrum by adopting one or more of the following structural characteristics:
- Core experiences: a single course, or sequence of courses, common to all students that provide opportunities for students to engage in discussions, conversations, and reflection about topics relevant to students’ lives.
- Synthesizing experiences: this might include interdisciplinary projects, portfolios, capstone projects, service learning, or other types of community-based learning.
- General education themes, clusters, or anchor questions: courses organized around common topics or questions to help make the connections between disciplines, courses, and the world beyond the university more explicit. For example, students may study climate and society, sustainability, or humanistic, scientific, and social science perspectives. Alternatively, individual courses and related content could be organized around animating questions (e.g., What is the impact of migration on Nebraska, what are the causes and consequences of economic inequality, etc.).
General Education Reform Models
Relevant Articles about General Education
Communications
Coming soon!