Thursday, July 24, 2008
Written by Dave Haney, Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, assisted by Sonya Long and Ezell Williams, Coordinator of Special Projects for University College
This is the first in a regular series of blog postings, presenting news and commentary on various happenings in University College. Feedback is welcome—feel free to add comments.
In our first year of existence we in the college have worked hard to define our purpose, to establish our infrastructure, and to get to know each other, since the units that make up University College come from various parts of the university. (Check out the “University College History” link.) I want to thank all of the faculty and staff in the college for embarking on this adventure with energy, good will, and great ideas, despite massive changes that range from the details of phone systems and budget codes to major shifts in goals and resources.
I want to give a special thanks to the Academic Affairs office staff: my assistant Sonya Long, the provost’s assistant Sandy Sanders, and the folks who handle budgets, contracts and related matters: Darlene Risk, Monica Harless, Peggy Hicks, and Ginger Watson. Thanks also to Lesa Felker, who has had to coordinate multiple curriculum changes for us and who is rewriting major sections of the Undergraduate Bulletin to accommodate University College, and Sheryl Mohn, who has to explain us to a daily series of callers. Reorganizing 18 units, over 70 people, and over a million dollars in budgets is no easy task, and our staff has done this with creativity, efficiency, and good humor on top of all the other work of Academic Affairs.
We are experimenting with a decentralized and “flatter” than normal administrative structure: the central college administration consists of a vice provost and one assistant, with the bulk of the college’s work being done by the individual units working both autonomously and collaboratively.
Here are highlights of some of our major initiatives.
General Education at Appalachian
The new General Education curriculum is focused on integrated, engaged, active learning across the undergraduate curriculum, with a heavy emphasis on transferable skills of reasoning, communication, and connections with the world. Thanks are due to the hard working faculty and staff members who are managing this huge project: Carter Hammett-McGarry, Mike Mayfield, Lynn Moss Sanders, Nick Rudisill, Elaine Gray, and Kristin Hyle. The General Education staff is both proud and excited about the progress that has been made this summer. It is clear that many faculty members, across the disciplines, share this excitement; although there is also a good deal of very understandable anxiety about such a major shift in the curriculum, to be implemented in fall 2009, which is only a little over a year away. Everyone involved should keep these points in mind:
Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Stan Aeschleman is fully in support of the new program, and he is ready to provide resources and be personally involved in this critical final year before implementation. Through faculty grants and summer workshops, he has already provided over $130,000 of direct support to faculty in the past two years, in addition to providing ongoing support for a robust and highly qualified administrative staff to implement and sustain the program.
Although this is the biggest university-wide curricular change in many years, we are not creating a new curriculum so much as we are creating a new structure for the development of a continually evolving , faculty-driven curriculum and a new way of thinking about general education.
This work is very important: Our efforts are being closely followed in the state, the nation, and even internationally: our general education administrators have presented at national conferences; I have made several presentations to the UNC system, and just the other day I met with Dr. Ta-Wei Lee, president of Ching Yun University in Taiwan, who is interested in our model. We are at the forefront of an exciting global shift in thinking about liberal education, and the work we are doing now will affect both Appalachian and this international conversation for decades to come.
Yes, the devil is in the details, and yes, the new curriculum is difficult to get one’s head around, especially if you have not been intimately involved in the past three years of campus conversations about general education reform. Therefore the General Education staff is working hard to provide explicit and clear information both through conversations with individual units and through constant updates to the general education web site: http://generaleducatio...ate.edu/
If any part of the curriculum, the timeline, or your role in this process is not clear, please contact the general education office.
The AsU-Learn Moodle discussions, http://appstate.remote-learner.net/course/view.php...an>, have generated an excellent conversation regarding the nature of the initial themes, and they have helped to highlight some gaps that are now being filled. Summer grant recipients are well on their way to developing exemplary integrated courses for those themes; faculty members are looking broadly at how they can meet the demanding goals and learning outcomes of the new curriculum, while continuing to engage their students in substantial investigations of issues of interest to, both, students and faculty.
Fall 2008 will be incredibly busy for all departments, programs, and individuals who wish to be involved from the start in the new form of general education. Over forty pilot sections of the First Year Seminar will be offered to the incoming freshman class, covering topics as diverse as and the study of games and documenting our world through film, radio and photography. Themes for the perspectives will be finalized in September; courses proposed to fill those perspectives are due in October, and the faculty coordinating committees will make their final decisions about the first iteration of the new program in November.
Where are we now?
September 2, 2008
Themes revision requests due from departments
September 15, 2008
Final themes announced for Fall 2009
October 15, 2008
Course proposals due from departments
November 28, 2008
Course recommendations due to Gen Ed Council from FCCs
December 1, 2008
Gen Ed Council meets to review courses
December 8, 2008
University College council meets to review courses
December 15, 2008
Gen Ed Council sends final list of courses out to chairs, deans, etc.
January 2009
AP&P will consider all proposals
February 23, 2009
Fall 2009 schedules due from departments
University College Administrative Appointments and Searches
New administrative appointments in University College include the naming of Leslie Sargent Jones, former associate dean of South Carolina Honors College at the University of South Carolina, as the director of the Heltzer Honors Program; former honors program director Lynn Moss Sanders as First Year Seminar faculty coordinator; English professor Georgia Rhoades as director of Writing Across the Curriculum; and Jay Wentworth as interim director of interdisciplinary studies. Alexandra Sterling-Hellenbrand, former chair of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, will direct the global studies degree program, Edwin “Chip” Arnold will continue to direct the Appalachian studies degree programs, Chuck Smith will continue to direct the sustainable development degree program, and Martha McCaughey will continue to direct the women’s studies degree program.
Ezell Williams, ASU class of ’03 and former student body vice president, and most recently the program associate in the Heltzer Honors Program, has been appointed Program Manager for Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) and Coordinator of Special Projects for University College. In addition to assisting the WAC program, she is developing University College communications, researching and analyzing university-wide scholarships, and supporting external funding efforts for the college. Kristan*bleep*erill, who has been writing grants for Sustainable Development and the sciences, and who is now (in addition to her teaching duties) Coordinator of Interdisciplinary Research for University College, teams up with Ezell to support all University College units in external funding efforts, from grant writing to corporate and private fundraising.
A search is underway for an Executive Director of Advising and Orientation, to replace Martha Stephenson, and for an administrative assistant for the Heltzer Honors program.
University College Interdisciplinary Degree Programs Approved
University College oversees Appalachian’s Bachelor of Arts degree in interdisciplinary studies, as well as five new degrees approved in June by the UNC Board of Governors. They are the Bachelor of Arts degree in Appalachian studies, global studies, sustainable development and women’s studies, and a Bachelor of Science degree in sustainable development. These five academic areas were previously offered as concentrations through the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies, which has since been dissolved. For more information about each degree program, please visit:
Appalachian Studies -
http://www.appstudies....tate.edu
Global Studies -
http://www.globalstudi...tate.edu
Interdisciplinary Studies -
Sustainable Development -
http://www.susdev.appstate.edu
Women’s Studies -
Program Directors, faculty and staff are working hard to move these programs from departmental concentrations to independent degree programs operating outside of a departmental structure. This reorganization is requiring some major rethinking of faculty, administrative, and staff roles, but it very much fits the collaborative design of University College.
Summer Reading at Appalachian State University
“The Glass Castle” by Jeannette Walls has been selected for the 2008 Summer Reading Program. In her memoir, Walls weaves an almost unbelievable account of her mother and father’s unorthodox approach to parenting, the family’s unconditional love for one another, and Walls’s and her siblings’ ability to prosper in spite of the obstacles, including homelessness and alcoholism, they faced growing up.
Volunteers leading discussion groups for the 2008 Summer Reading Program are invited to attend a workshop co-sponsored by the Summer Reading Program and the Hubbard Center for Faculty Development. The workshop will provide you with an opportunity to discuss the book and plan a variety of strategies for prompting student discussion. For more information, please visit http://www.summerreadi...tate.edu.
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The summer reading program will be integrally involved in the new general education program, with discussion of the summer reading book being required in the new first-year seminar.
Forum Lecture Series, Year of Darwin, Schedule Released
Appalachian State University will celebrate the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth during the 2008-09 academic year with a series of lectures and events focusing on Darwin’s ideas and their impacts on society, and his theory of evolution. Many of these events are being coordinated with departmental and program events as well as course work. This is exciting not only as a celebration of a major intellectual force in the modern world, but also as an important experiment in a year-long, thematically unified lecture series.
A yearlong lecture series will feature prominent scientists, philosophers, historians, and theologians. Among the speakers are Pulitzer Prize winners Edward Larson and Jonathan Weiner. Other speakers include Niles Eldredge, curator at the American Museum of Natural History and recent curator of a traveling exhibit on Darwin. All talks are free and open to the public.
Visit: http://www.universityf...tate.edu for a full listing of all talks and events.
The University Forum Committee, which is sponsoring this series with generous support from the provost’s office, was revived only last year, and it hit the ground running with the highly successful talk by Gloria Steinem in February. Thanks to committee chair Howie Neufeld and the University Forum Committee for this major contribution to the intellectual life of our campus.
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