By: Katherine Waters, Staff Writer
Students may be seeing a change in their schedules in the next few years; the General Education Reform Steering Committee is examining the general education requirements for students and determining if these requirements should be changed or kept the same.
“Our task is to think through general education on a very broad level,” says Dr. Dan Mathewson, lead facilitator for the committee. “So we start with questions like, ‘what is general education,’ ‘why do we do it,’ ‘what is best for Wofford’ and ‘what are our goals for general education at Wofford for our students?’”
The committee is currently in its fourth semester of research, which has included researching general education, its place in education and models used at other schools. Dr. Christine Dinkins, the coordinator of assessment for the steering committee, has been holding discussions with students, faculty and staff to examine their opinions on general education classes.
“It’s been important to have that [discussion with students and teachers] as a voice for our committee to look at,” she says. “We talked to almost all of the departments…not just in terms of what they think GenEd should be, but to listen to each discipline about how they see themselves vis-à-vis GenEd, what they see as their role and how they connect to it.”
In addition to these discussion sessions, faculty and staff were also invited to a sort of book club where they would read literature on general education and then meet with others to discuss their ideas and reactions that came from the readings. Mathewson stresses the importance of these types of meetings in order to make the workings of the committee more public.
“It’s been really important to us that everyone in the faculty and staff feel like they can access these conversations as much as they want to in order to give their own input,” he says. “We don’t want anyone to feel like this is happening behind closed doors. This is a conversation that we have wanted our community to shape in order for GenEd to continue being something that we’re really proud of.”
The intentional openness of the committee allows all aspects of the campus community to feel knowledgeable about the process or to take action (contacting the committee or submitting additional responses) if they so choose. The focus groups not only had students and teachers involved; staff members were also an essential part of the discussion.
“We’ve tried to be as inclusive as possible because we feel like that’s incredibly important, especially at Wofford,” says Dinkins. “Staff were widely invited to participate, because so many of these different areas of course cross over into the departments that are headed by staff. That’s been a key part of our inclusive listening and talking… we want staff to be an important part of this process.”
Although the committee is taking into account other possibilities, the current general education model is not guaranteed to change. Mathewson clarified that if, after all of their research is conducted, the current system is deemed the best fit for the students, then the requirements will stay the same.
“The end goal is to have the best model of general education requirements that will serve the needs of our students,” he explains. “So we intentionally didn’t close off the possibility of leaving GenEd the way it is, if that’s honestly the best model we have to accomplish our goals. If we find that the goals we have do not match with what we’re currently doing, then absolutely we’re going to try to find a program that better fits or accomplishes those goals.”
Besides the input from the campus community and the current GenEd model, Wofford’s strategic vision has served as a guide for the purposes that the requirements should fulfill. Of course, the very name of a liberal arts institution may hold a lot of power in what a student will take during their four years, but the committee wants the GenEd credits to mold Wofford students into the “well-rounded, exceptional citizens of the 21st century” that the college strives to develop.
“It’s a question of liberal arts schools and general education, but also Wofford as a liberal arts college and general education,” says Mathewson. “Not that we’re going to reinvent the wheel, but I think it’s quite important that we create something unique to our institution, that serves the needs of our students that come here and that are going out into the world, given who we say we are and who we want to be.”
