Review Process
The workgroup charged with the review and certification of
course proposals for the Foundations of Society and Culture area of the
College’s new general education curriculum held three two-hour meetings on
March 8, April 5, and April 19, 2002.
At the first of these meetings, the workgroup addressed the question of
how to vett the proposals that departments were putting forward for Society and
Culture GE credit. The process the
group adopted was as follows:
·
Establishing
Criteria: Eight sample course
proposals were selected by the
workgroup’s chair and resource person and forwarded to every member of
the group for review and reflection. This sample was representative of the
courses submitted for inclusion in the Society and Culture area and included
proposals from History, the Social Sciences, Interdepartmental Studies
Programs, and departments in the Humanities.
At the second meeting of the group on April 5, these proposals were
discussed and a set of normative criteria (see below) was established that all
courses were expected to meet for inclusion as a 5-unit GE course in the
Foundations of Society and Culture.
·
Review Process: Prior to the second meeting, the workgroup
was divided up by the chair into five teams, each with three members. Each team was broadly representative of the
different disciplines in the Social Sciences and also included a representative
from both the Academic Senate and the different interdepartmental studies
programs on campus. At the end of the
second meeting on April 5, these teams were assigned an equal number of
randomly distributed course proposals and were given a two-week period to
review them. The five teams were:
Ø Group
I: Otto Santa Ana (Chicana/o
Studies-FEC); Mark Sawyer (Political Science); Steve Reise (Psychology)
Ø Group
II: Henry Yu (History/Asian American
Studies); Jeanne Arnold (Anthropology/FEC); David Chung (USAC)
Ø Group
III: James Schultz (German/LGBTS);
Scott Bartchy (History/UgC); Lynn Itagaki (English/GSA)
Ø Group
IV: Michael Curry (Geography); Bryan
Ellickson (Economics/FEC); Teofilo Ruiz (History)
Ø Group
V: Darnell Hunt (Sociology/African
American Studies); Robert Frank (History/UgC); Cindy Mosqueda (USAC)
·
Final Disposition
of Course Proposals: At the final
meeting of the workgroup on April 19, each team presented its lists of courses
that were approved either for all or part of the requested GE credit in Society
and Culture. In addition to these
approved courses, the different teams also submitted lists of courses whose
requests for credit in Society and Culture were not approved, and their
rationale for these non-approvals. A
number of proposals with problems that the teams were unable to resolve were
brought to the workgroup-as-a-whole for discussion and resolution.
83 courses were approved for GE
credit in the Foundations of Society and Culture. These included 55 courses in historical analysis, 18 in social
analysis, and 10 that could be counted in either historical or social analysis. The list of courses is appended.
Society and
Culture Workgroup Evaluation Criteria
At its second meeting on April 5, the workgroup engaged in
an extensive and lively discussion with regard to the fundamental
characteristics of a general education course in the Foundations of Society and
Culture. The group reached a general
consensus on the following points:
·
General Aims of a
Society and Culture Course: For a
course to receive general education credit in this area, it has to adhere in a
substantial way to the general language adopted by the Academic Senate for courses
in the Foundations of Society and Culture.
That language states:
Foundations of Society and
Culture (3 courses, 15 units)
The aim of courses in this area is to introduce
students to the ways in which humans organize, structure, rationalize, and govern
their diverse societies and cultures over time. These courses focus on a particular historical question, societal
problem, or topic of political and economic concern in an effort to demonstrate
to students how issues are objectified for study, how data is collected and
analyzed and how new understandings of social phenomena are achieved and
evaluation.
Consequently, a GE course in
Society and Culture should introduce students to
Ø The
ways in which humans organize, structure, rationalize, and govern their
societies over time;
Ø Some
of the principal issues and challenges societies confront in their efforts to
establish governments, regulate social relations, satisfy economic needs, and
record their histories; and
Ø The
theories, methodologies, and “ways of knowing” that social scientists and
historians employ in their efforts to analyze and arrive at new understandings
of human societies and their historical development.
·
Transfoundational
Courses: Courses in other
foundation areas of knowledge are often concerned with many of the same
questions, issues, and problems that engage social scientists and
historians. For these courses to
receive GE credit in the Foundations of Society and Culture, however, their
syllabi must clearly demonstrate that the focus of the course is
Ø To
analyze a society’s historical development and/or its political, social,
cultural, and economic arrangements; and
Ø To
introduce students to some of the principal theoretical approaches and methods
of history and the social sciences.
·
Skills vs.
Content: Courses that address in a
general way issues of historical and social import, but whose primary purpose
is to develop student “skills” in a particular area (e.g. language acquisition
or quantitative reasoning), or a greater appreciation of the arts and
humanities, do not satisfy these criteria and would not receive GE credit in
the Foundations of Society and Culture.
·
General Education
Principles: Courses submitted for
GE credit in the Foundations of Society and Culture should satisfy at least two
of the College’s general education principles.
These principles should be clearly delineated in either the syllabus or
in a separate statement that addresses how the course advances the aims of
general education in the College. . In
light of the foundational focus of the new general education curriculum, these
courses should also aim to provide students with a broad introduction to a
discipline’s central concerns and principle ways of creating and evaluating
knowledge.
·
Upper Division
Courses: With rare exceptions, GE
courses in the Foundations of Society and Culture should be lower division
offerings. Where an upper division
course is submitted for GE credit, it cannot be limited to majors or require a number
of pre-requisites.
·
Reuniting: In addition to information about student
in-class time, the syllabus of a course submitted for 5 units of GE credit in
the Foundations of Society and Culture should provide evidence of the
following:
Ø The
kinds and amount of reading that students are expected to do in the course of a
quarter.
Ø The
nature and length of a course’s required writing assignments (e.g. a 5-7 page
critical essay; a 2-page book review; etc.)
Ø Descriptions
of any library and/or literacy assignments and exercises.
Issues
Two issues were of particular concern to the workgroup. These were:
·
Diversity: One of the general education principles that
the GE Governance Committee urged the faculty to keep in mind when
re-evaluating old GE courses and conceptualizing new ones was “cultural
diversity.” Specifically, the
Governance Committee called for
“General education courses that
contextualize issues of race, ethnicity, gender and multicultural interactions
worldwide. Such courses should provide
a diversity of cultural perspectives with the aim of enhancing understanding
and tolerance of difference while illuminating the values, ideas, and goals
that individuals and groups hold in common.”
Many of the courses that were
submitted for inclusion in the Society and Culture area indicated that one of
their key aims was to introduce students to questions and concerns of cultural
diversity. In general, the workgroup
agreed that a sensitivity to difference was evident in most of the courses that
claimed to address cultural diversity issues.
An introductory history of India, for example, or a Classics course
addressing in some detail the treatment of women, homosexuals, and slaves in
the ancient world certainly introduces students to a diversity of cultural
perspectives and they also enhance one’s understanding of difference.
In contrast, some
faculty and both of the workgroup’s undergraduate student representatives also
noted that in many of the courses that marked off cultural diversity, issues of
difference were usually not a central concern of the course (e.g. a course on
the history of India will consider inter-communal relations, but it also
addresses a great many other subjects as well.) This group pointed to the 18 May 1993 Academic Senate Resolution,
which determined “that all undergraduates study multicultural interactions, and
develop the ability to analyze complex, multicultural issues from different
perspectives.” The resolution goes on to call for support for development of
new courses and “the revision of existing courses” to achieve this end. In this
light, traditional surveys or other diversity sensitizing courses were held to
require revision, or at least to not fulfill the GE diversity principle. This
group felt that appropriate discussion of diversity requires focused lectures,
readings, and discussion about specific groups (e.g. race, gender, class,
language, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and religion) that generate
“interaction, ” which this group took to mean competition, subordination and
resistance. They also noted that a cultural diversity GE course should get
students to engage these categories by situating them within specific social
and historical contexts. On the basis of these criteria, this group found that
very few of the submitted syllabi adequately addressed the cultural diversity
GE principle.
Ultimately, this difference of
opinion within the group regarding both the meaning and applicability of
cultural diversity to different kinds of GE courses was not resolved.
·
Interdisciplinary
vs. Disciplinary in GE: Though GE
courses do not have to be interdisciplinary, many members of the workgroup felt
strongly that courses in the Foundations of Society and Culture should
introduce students to as wide a range of disciplinary perspectives as
possible. The proponents of this
position also felt that for an introductory course in a particular discipline
to be given GE credit it should have to demonstrate the ways in which students
would be introduced to the widest possible breadth of knowledge about a given
subject. Other members of the workgroup
were of the opinion that on the grounds of both academic freedom, and the
criteria stipulated in the Senate description of the Foundations of Society and
Culture, courses with a more traditional disciplinary focus had to be accepted
for GE credit in this area.
In the end, this issue was not
resolved by the workgroup.
