After three years of debate, USM’s faculty senate voted on Nov. 6 to make the fall of 2011 the first semester of the new General Education core curriculum.
The new curriculum will replace the present core requirements, the current form of which the University has required all students to fulfill since 1987.
The General Education curriculum was designed to be taken throughout a student’s entire career at USM, which effectively makes it impossible for a student to get their core requirements “out of the way.” The courses are markedly different from the current core curriculum; they are designed to be more interdisciplinary and challenging.
The fight in the senate lasted three years, but the Gen-Ed curriculum has been in the works for around eight years, said Jerry Lasala, chair of the faculty senate and physics department.
The new curriculum is composed of five stages:
- Entry Year Experience classes form the base of the program, with classes like Shopping: American Consumerism, and Literature and Medicine.
- Tier 2 classes, which are similar to the current core requirements.
- The Mid-Career Seminar, which is still in development.
- Cluster Courses, which are interdisciplinary classes linked by a common theme.
- A final Capstone course rounds out the core requirements.
The classes are meant to be taken in sequence, though students can enroll in some simultaneously.
“It has no effect on currently matriculated students, unless they choose to,” Lasala said. “Students always have the option to graduate under a newer catalog than they one they were admitted in.”
The new curriculum passed with a vote of 24-3, with one person abstaining at the last faculty senate meeting in Lewiston.
“There were concerns that many people have and I suspect many people still have about several areas in particular [like] whether we really had the faculty available to teach the courses,” Lasala said. “Some people felt that the course definitions were overly restrictive to the faculty,” he added.
“It was for a long time on the fence. I always thought the basic principles of the [curriculum] were great,” said Lasala. “I think the time had come for us to give this a try and see how it works. It’s quite possible that with the faculty on the whole, support was not as lopsided as it was in the senate.”
Eileen Eagan, professor of history, was one of the faculty concerned the new curriculum would be a strain on already overworked professors.
“I’ve been skeptical of it since the beginning. I think it’s problematic,” she said. “The courses are smaller, so you would actually need more faculty. It’s really only going to delay [students’] progress throughout the program,” she added.
Eagan also argued that the Entry Year Experience classes, which became part of the curriculum this year, were too small to be an accurate gauge for the success of Gen-Ed. Advocates have said the Gen-Ed classes will improve retention; a higher percentage of students who previously took EYE classes stayed in college. USM ran pilot versions of the EYE classes each fall since 2006.
“It’s like a totally invalid statistic, because it was only a few students who took those courses,” she said.
Deborah Johnson, chair of the Psychology department and the Core Curriculum Committee, which is in charge of implementing and monitoring the new core curriculum, said the committee has looked at the pros and cons of the Gen-Ed requirements. She feels the curriculum is solid.
“There’s always concern about changes in the curriculum,” she said. “We’ve very carefully looked at the staff needs.”
Judy Tizon, associate provost of undergraduate education, said the new curriculum will actually make it easier for students to graduate.
“The way that the new Gen-Ed is structured, actually makes it fastest for students,” she said. “Currently you can only take one core requirement in your major, that rule has been eliminated. It’s all based on the learning outcomes.”
The new core requirements are expected to run in tandem with the old classes in the fall of 2011. “What we’re doing is double-dipping,” said Tizon.
Students matriculated in 2011 are required to take the new classes, but students matriculated in earlier course catalogs will be able to take the same amount of classes they normally would have. The new courses will be assigned letters, similar to the curriculum for students matriculated in earlier years.
Tizon hopes the new curriculum will help to retain students and boost enrollment. The number of students enrolled at USM this fall was one percent less than expected, accounting for about $1 million in lost revenue.
“We won’t know until we do it, but it’s designed to improve student success and student persistence so more students will remain at USM, not drop out,” said Tizon. “The increase in student persistence is a powerful plus for our budget.”