Meeting Notes (prepared by Mary Gauvain, Chair)
February 26, 2003

Present: T. Bandyopadhyay, E. Elliott, R. Head, C. Wall, L. Wright, and M. Gauvain (chair)
Absent: S. Lyubomirsky

This was the first meeting of this Committee and much of the time was spent discussing the charge from the CHASS Executive Committee, including what the Executive Committee hopes will come out of the committee’s deliberations. The following initial questions were raised :

• Why is such a major curriculum change being considered now, especially at a time when resources are limited and faculty members are stretched?
• What is the timetable for this change?
• Will proposed changes from this or any other committee actually be implemented? (Along these lines it was noted by one committee member that the UCLA model that is used as an example in the Report of the General Education Review Committee was never implemented.)
  

Other discussion items that were brought forward and will be addressed in subsequent meetings were:

• Whether changes to the curriculum of the magnitude proposed in the documents that were circulated to the committee are feasible on our campus on a large scale, that is across the entire university or whether we should be thinking of a multi-faceted approach in which the traditional General Education Model continues to exist alongside more innovative approaches. This way there would always be a traditional path that some students could choose alongside another approach as an option. How to plan such a program is not clear, but a dual path model is not unreasonable to discuss at this point.
• The workload impact of such proposed changes to the curriculum at the departmental level, especially in relation to limited resources, interference with serving the major, and whether the establishment of a major and non-major track in departments is desirable, practical to implement on a regular basis, and pedagogically sound.
• Much concern was raised about the current use on campus of disciplinary introductory courses as breadth courses. This tends to create a mixed (and oftentimes unsatisfied) group of students in these courses, ranging from those committed to the major already, to those exploring the major, to those there for breadth only.
• There was also much discussion about problems associated with interdisciplinary courses, including team teaching and problems that emerge when a single faculty member teaches such a course on his or her own and is required to tread far outside his or her area of expertise

A few ideas the committee will explore further are:

• Areas of content overlap among the faculty across departments to see if there are some natural bridges that might lead to the creation of a set of courses that are thematically linked but still tied to the disciplinary expertise of the faculty teaching any particular segment in the course sequence (the Hewlett three sequence course on Vietnam from different disciplinary perspectives is seen as a model here).
• Courses that have been offered on our campus over the last decade that may be well-suited to the type of curriculum changes being proposed, e.g. courses that have been offered in the Honors Program.
• The establishment of formal mechanisms for encouraging and supporting faculty who teach any of the innovative or more traditional breadth courses that become part of this instructional effort. All those present agreed that these types of courses should be taught by ladder faculty, preferably those who are excited about teaching in this type of setting and are able to inspire and instill intellectual confidence in the students who are in these courses.
• We also discussed the importance in designing these courses for thinking creatively about the nature of the student body at UCR, for example that many of the students are the first in their families to attend college and that the student body is extremely diverse. These should be seen as resources in the development of these courses not as obstacles to overcome.