Brief History
and Overview of IUPUI General Education and Principles of Undergraduate
Learning – August 2005
Prepared by William
Plater, Executive Vice Chancellor and Dean of the Faculties; Trudy Banta, Vice
Chancellor for Planning and Institutional Improvement, and Sharon J. Hamilton,
Chancellor’s Professor of English and Founding Director of the Center on
Integrating Learning
Provided by Sharon J.
Hamilton to IUPUI Academic Affairs Committee Chair Betty Jones on 8-12-05
Foreword
The
emergence of a coherent, intentional program of general education at IUPUI has
followed a fitful course similar to most developments at this still-young urban
university, formed in 1969 though the merger of a number of graduate
professional programs with brand new schools in the arts and sciences. For more than a decade, ideas have flamed
brightly only to fade; consultants and national reports have been eagerly
embraced only lose to lose their urgency as spring semesters gave way to summers;
committees have labored only to have their reports languish; and yet there has
been a determination and constancy among small numbers of faculty from many
different fields and professions who have persisted over the years to the point
now of creating a solid framework for all of undergraduate education. Even as the participants have changed, there
has been a continuous dialogue and seriousness of purpose to the discussions.
The promise of the
latest stages of this transformation is great, and the Principles of
Undergraduate Learning embraced by the faculty as a whole have taken on
specific meaning and context within the 15 or so schools offering undergraduate
degrees. IUPUI has implemented a plan
for general education with a strong, clear purpose and sufficient flexibility
to accommodate the extraordinary range of students who pursue baccalaureate and
associate degrees in the state's richest variety of program offerings.
Through its Principles
of Undergraduate Education with their emphasis on demonstrated student learning
outcomes, IUPUI is about to begin a new era in its development. We are establishing the bedrock foundation on
which the future of undergraduate education can be built. Unlike most colleges and universities with a
century or more of tradition and evolution, IUPUI has had to invent itself and
its principles quickly, reversing the historical evolution of fundamentals from
a historic core to new programs and degrees as they are added.
At IUPUI, we have been
building inward from the well-established professional programs with their
graduate orientation to form a new, vital core in the traditional arts and
science disciplines. The result is a
conceptual framework that integrates and links the professions with the arts
and sciences out of both practical utility and a commitment to ideals and
values that define the purpose of baccalaureate learning. Our Principles of Undergraduate Learning have
been designed to serve as a foundation for both further education--whether in
the professions or in the myriad forms of life-ling learning--and for use in
leading productive lives as citizens and workers.
This necessity of
looking inward from the professions to what is honestly shared by all programs
has allowed the faculties to work together across disciplines and professions
to determine what elements and what relationships are essential--and thus
define the coherence, purpose, and shared values of baccalaureate education at
IUPUI. The Principles of Undergraduate
Learning belong to all faculties alike, and provide the tools necessary for the
decades ahead when American higher education must accommodate an unprecedented
range of interests, an increasingly diverse and mobile student population, an
explosion of new information, and mediated forms of learning which affect the
very structure of traditional higher education.
To the casual
observer, the history of general education at IUPUI may appear disjointed and
even contentious. Yet there is a
continuous thread of an idea and a harmony of discourse, which have linked each
of the separate efforts and produced a structure which should serve this campus
well for a long time to come. It has
emerged as a commitment of the faculty to student learning and to developing
student potential to its fullest. This
core idea--and thread--has been wrapped with other ideas in the processes of
debating the means and ends of general education, of accommodating electronic
learning and distance education, of understanding the importance of assessing
student performance and linking student work to overarching goals, of giving
meaning and purpose to degrees in ways that do not depend on continuous
enrollment or to residency at a single place, and of considering the very
diversity of the faculty itself, including the role of adjunct and part-time
colleagues.
We begin the new
millennium confident that we are providing our students and our institution
with the basis for distinction and success.
The Principles will endure, but they will be used and honored in our
ability to change quickly to meet the real needs of students and of society as
we continually assess our own performance and seek ever to improve. The Principles of Undergraduate Education are
the framework in which we place individual courses, through which we create new
degrees, and by which we attract new faculty who share our optimism about the
future or higher education in one of the world's most promising urban research
universities.
|
William M. Plater Executive Vice
Chancellor and Dean of the
Faculties 108 Administration
Building (317) 274-4500 FAX: (317) 274-4615 |
Preface
Taking the Roads Less Traveled
The task of designing and
implementing a coherent institution-wide program of general education seems to be
one of the most formidable challenges we face in higher education. In fact, faculty on many
campuses elect not to confront this issue at all. They recognize how divisive it can be for
scholars from a variety of disciplines to try to reach agreement in defining
the knowledge and skills all students should develop as foundation for the
major and for life-long learning. So they simply provide a list of introductory
courses in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences and require students
to take two or three courses from each category. A primary justification given for this
approach is that students will be exposed to a variety of ways of knowing and
will make their own meaning of the collective experience.
Colleagues
at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis have confronted the
challenge directly--bringing faculty from twenty-something schools as disparate
as medicine and music into discussions about the meaning of undergraduate
education. As described in the Introduction,
this process took nearly a decade to complete.
Committees were appointed, reports were written, exceptions were taken
to one or more aspects of the content, and subsequently this sequence of events
had to be repeated with a new committee.
In the midst of this process IUPUI was visited by a team representing
the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools--our regional accrediting
body--and told by team members that the approach to general education that was
underway was not promising: It would take too long to complete and indeed
agreement might never be achieved. The
team was correct that completing the process would take time, but finally, in
1998, six Principles of Undergraduate Learning (PULs) were approved by the
Faculty Council.
IUPUI faculty took another road less
traveled in deciding to integrate the PULs with the learning outcomes for each
major, thus enabling students to practice and strengthen their generic skills
throughout their years at IUPUI. To
accomplish this integration might have taken another decade. But conversation about the Principles was so
widespread and had been underway for so long that nearly everyone on campus had
heard of them by the time they were approved.
Some schools with disciplinary accreditors to satisfy, notably Nursing
and Allied Health Sciences, had already begun to integrate the PULs with their
own curricula by 1998, and most others were considering ways to do so by the
time the Principles were formally adopted.
By far the easiest way to assess
learning outcomes in general education and the major is to purchase a
standardized test and provide for its administration centrally so that faculty do not have to assume much of the
responsibility for it. IUPUI faculty
would have none of that; from the outset they have insisted on developing their
own assessment mechanisms for their general education-infused majors.
Since IUPUI has no campus-wide curriculum committee, no central group has the authority to approve curricula. In the absence of a body to review and approve courses that should enable students to learn the PULs, each school is responsible for recommending the course of study that will do that for their students. In this environment it behooves us to take stock from time to time of the schools' progress in integrating the PULs with their curricula for majors and in assessing student achievement of the Principles.
Thus in 1999 we undertook a study of
the implementation and assessment of the PULs within the individual schools
that constitute IUPUI. To carry out this
work we appointed three senior faculty, all of whom
had participated in the early campus discussions of general education that
ultimately led to the adoption of the Principles. For the last year these Faculty Associates
for Undergraduate Learning have worked with the Director of Campus Writing to
document the progress associated with the PULs in the schools.
Not surprisingly, the status of
implementing and assessing the Principles is uneven when viewed from a
campus-wide perspective. Faculty in the
Schools of Nursing, Allied Health Sciences, and Engineering & Technology
are farthest along the path. But with
the implementation of the Principled Curriculum, both Liberal Arts and Science
faculties are beginning to build a solid foundation for development and
assessment of the PULs for students in all majors.
This is a
decades-long work in progress. Our next
task must be to ensure that the data derived from assessment are employed in
every discipline to improve instruction and curricula continuously. We are
indebted to all the faculty who have devoted their
time and energy over the last ten years to the difficult work of achieving
agreement on the PULs among their colleagues.
Now we are grateful to
We are still some distance from our
goal of establishing a robust scholarship of teaching, learning, and assessment
at IUPUI, that is, faculty activity that provides students with a strong
foundation of knowledge, skills, and values but also seeks direction for
continuous improvement through the collection of evaluative data and reflection
on the implications of the findings for practice. We invite others to travel this road with us,
either as evaluators who can make recommendations along the way for improving
our program or as participants in a similar approach to general education and
assessment on their own campuses.
|
Trudy W. Banta Vice Chancellor for Planning and
Institutional Improvement (317) 274-4111 Fax: (317) 274-4651 |
Introduction
A Brief History of the Principles of Undergraduate Learning at IUPUI
In 1991, the Council on Undergraduate Learning,
comprised primarily of deans of academic units responsible for undergraduate
education, and the Academic Affairs Committee of the Faculty Council established
a Commission on General Education to “oversee development of a centrally
coordinated approach to general education for undergraduates at IUPUI” (General
Education at IUPUI: Report to the Campus Community, October 1993). Prior to
1991, design of the general education curriculum for students had been the
responsibility of each school.
In its earliest deliberations, the Commission
identified three possible approaches to general education:
1. the distributive approach, which defines required areas and
specifies requirements within those areas;
2. the core curriculum approach, which involves the development of a
set of courses required of all majors; and
3. the process approach, which
focuses on the learning experiences of students and coordinates those
experiences across disciplines to provide all students with knowledge and
skills considered appropriate by the faculty.
While the campus had been employing a more or less distributive
approach, there was no guarantee of commonality of general education
experience. A core curriculum had been explored and then rejected by the
School Liberal Arts and the
A process approach to general education
necessitates widespread and ongoing involvement of faculty. Consequently,
within the first two years of its formation, the Commission involved more than
two hundred IUPUI faculty in the following six initiatives:
1.
First Annual Symposium on General Education April
1992
2.
Report to the Faculty September 1992
3.
Faculty Study Groups on General Education 1992-93
Academic Year
4.
Second Annual Symposium on General Education April
1993
5.
Report to the Campus Community (the “Blue Book”) October 1993
6.
Open Faculty Forum on General Education November 1993
Concurrently, “outside forces and institutional
pressures” influenced the work and plans of the Commission. The 1992 NCA
accreditation team strongly urged the IUPUI campus to identify desired outcomes
for general education that were amenable to meaningful assessment. This
required the inclusion of academic unit administrators and curriculum
committees throughout the decision-making processes and initiatives of 1992-93.
During the summer of 1993, members of the IUPUI Commission on General Education
participated in what was, at that time, the annual Lilly Endowment Workshop.
During the intensive two weeks of this workshop, the team synthesized the two
years of deliberations by faculty and administrators and, based on the
conclusions of the faculty study groups, developed a “description of an
approach to general education that support[ed] the institution’s mission and a
plan for reconciling the process approach with the NCA’s
recommendations” (General Education at IUPUI, October 1993). Out of these
deliberations came the initial set of eight Principles of Undergraduate
Learning (Working Draft: General Education at IUPUI, October 1993):
1. Higher order thinking involves uses of reading,
writing, speaking, quantitative reasoning, and computer technology. Students
develop these ways of learning in all general education courses.
2. Critical thinking requires the ability to
integrate knowledge and experience. Students learn integration through
exploring their own values and intellectual commitment and demonstrating their
expertise in a discipline as it applies to a context wider than the discipline.
3. Intellectual adaptability requires familiarity
with ways of thinking and knowing in a range of disciplines.
4. Self-awareness increases ability to learn from
and about others. Through curricular and co-curricular activities, students
learn about themselves as whole human being, i.e. their intellectual, physical,
emotional, and spiritual selves.
5. Knowledge is constructed and verified through
collaboration. Collaborative learning gives students a voice in creating
knowledge.
6. Engagement in co-curricular activities outside
the classroom builds community in order to advance learning. Students become
part of the University community by participating in campus activities.
7. Understanding our culturally and ethnically
diverse society includes learning about conflicting values, traditions, and
histories, and developing empathy for others. Students develop this
understanding through coursework, service, co-curricular activities, and work
experience.
8. Service beyond the self is a way to achieve
meaning. Through regular service, students learn how to enact their personal
and civic responsibilities to others.
While a few schools and academic universities began
to integrate these eight principles into their curricula, most schools did not
accept the principles in this first iteration.
In 1994, the Council on Liberal Arts and Sciences
(CLAS) was formed, initially to explore the possibility of a merger between the
two schools. When CLAS realized a merger was not possible, the Council turned
its attention to curricular commonalities between the two schools, and, in
1995-6, began work on a common “core curriculum.” During these CLAS
conversations, the Dean of Liberal Arts condensed the eight principles of
undergraduate learning into five, eliminating explicit attention to service
learning and co-curricular activities, and moving collaborative learning into
prefatory comments. CLAS agreed upon this set of five principles as a
foundation for its core curriculum, and began to call its proposed curricular
structure “The Principled Curriculum.” This proposed core curriculum, based on
five Principles of Undergraduate Learning, was approved by the respective
Faculty Assemblies of the
Concurrently, discussions about the Principles of
Undergraduate Learning were occurring among many different campus committees
and academic units. A General Education Advisory Committee was formed in 1994
to replace the Commission on General Education, and it began work to have the
Principles approved by the whole campus. In the course of these conversations,
many faculty proclaimed the need for ‘Values and Ethics’ (which had been embedded
in ‘Understanding Society and Culture’) to have its own explicit, separate
Principle. In late 1997 to early 1998, the five Principles of Undergraduate
Learning became six, as ‘Understanding Society and Culture’ and ‘Values and
Ethics’ became discrete principles. These six Principles of Undergraduate
Learning (the current PULs) were approved by the IUPUI Faculty Council in 1998.
With the campus-level approval of the PULs and the
Schools of Liberal Arts and Science approval of the Principled Curriculum based
on the PULs, the next step was to make explicit the role of the PULs in
undergraduate education across the campus. Schools and academic units were
asked to show, in their annual reports of student learning, how the PULs were
integrated with the course goals and learning outcomes of academic programs. By
1999, most schools had explicitly integrated the PULs into their curricula, and
described this integration in the annual report of student learning submitted
to the Office of Planning and Institutional Improvement. The final step (to
date) has been to gather specific information on how the PULs are taught,
learned, and assessed in each school and academic unit, and to identify some
exemplary best practices employed by faculty. In the spring of 2000, three
Faculty Associate positions were created in order to collect and collate this
information campus-wide. These Faculty Associates, working with the Director of
Campus Writing, met with faculty and administrators from every school and
academic unit on campus to determine how their curricula advanced student
understanding of the PULs in relation to specific course and program
requirements. Their work forms the major part of this progress report.
During the summer of 2000, three summer institute teams
met to explore three different aspects of the undergraduate learning experience
at IUPUI: the Diversity Inquiry Group; the Asheville Institute Team, and the
That leads directly to another initiative directly
related to general education, the implementation of the PULs, and the
documentation of student learning in relation to the PULs: the IUPUI Student
ePortfolio. Currently moving to beta testing phase, the student electronic
portfolios are designed for students to track and document their learning
experiences at IUPUI, beginning with the PULs, and then moving into the work of
their chosen major or professional school.
With so many initiatives in their developmental
stages, this can only be an interim report of our progress toward implementing
a plan for general education at IUPUI. However, it is a plan built upon the
work of hundreds of faculty over the past ten years, with structures in place
for continued growth and coherence, and with the ultimate goal that student
learning at IUPUI will indeed exemplify excellence in terms of documented
learning achievements not only in the major but also in foundational and
transcendent areas of knowledge and skills: the IUPUI Principles of
Undergraduate Learning.
|
Sharon J. Hamilton Director of Campus Writing University Library, Room 1140C 755 (317) 278-1846 Fax: (317) 278-3602 |