Council on General Education

December 7, 2006

 

Minutes

 

Members present:  Amy Carr (Chair), Kathleen O’Donell-Brown, Margaret Sinex, Paige Goodwin, Susan Meiers, Tessa Pfafman, Marty Barclay, Phyllis Farley Rippey; Candace McLaughlin (ex officio),  Judi Dallinger (ex officio).

 

Members absent:  Jongnam Choi, Annete Glotfelty, William Thompson, Dean Zoerink, James Schmidt (ex officio),

 

Guest:  Al DeRoos

 

The meeting was called to order by the chair at 3:30 PM.  No minutes were submitted for approval (for they had been approved at a GERC meeting).

 

  1. Al DeRoos explained the request from the Illinois Board of Higher Education and the Illinois Community Colleges Board to accept the Associate of Arts in Teaching (AAT) Science degree with the proviso that such transfer students would be required to do only 3 additional hours in both general education social sciences and humanities to fulfill WIU’s general education requirements.  This request would mean that AAT science degree students would not be required to complete WIU’s general education requirements in Human Well Being and Multicultural Education.  DeRoos reported that Northern Illinois University, Illinois State University, the University of Illinois at Springfield, and Eastern Illinois University have all approved this request. 

 

After discussion by the Council, raising questions about the general education requirements that would apply to such transfer students should they wish to change their major from teaching after beginning their program at Western, it was determined that once these students had completed the two additional required courses (1 in humanities and 1 in social science) they would not be required to do any additional general education courses for the university but would be subject to the additional general education courses required by the College of Arts and Sciences should they elect a new major in that college.

 

A motion was made by Rippey to approve the request to require no more than one additional course in the humanities and in the social sciences [for a total of TWO additional courses] for AAT science transfer students to complete their general education program at WIU.  The motion was seconded by Goodwin. 

 

Motion approved 7 to 0 (chair not voting except in tie)

 

  1. The Council was asked to make a recommendation to the General Education Review Committee regarding the confusion caused by references in the catalogue description of the general education requirement to both “disciplines” and “departments.”  Requirements limit student choice of courses in an area to no more than two courses in any one discipline.  In at least one place in the catalogue, there is reference to a requirement that students may take no more than two courses in any one “department.”  Taken literally, this could prohibit students from taking two courses in sociology and two courses in anthropology because both disciplines happen to be housed in one department.

 

In revising its major, the Department of Biology has newly described what in the past have been understood to be subfields as “disciplines,” e.g., microbiology, botany, etc.  Unlike the situation in the Department of Sociology/Anthropology where the two constituent disciplines are understood to be separate and distinct and, thus, both available for the students to take up to two courses in each, the newly described disciplines in the Department of Biology are not considered by the Council to be distinct for purposes of general education and, thus, students may take no more than two course from any of the disciplines of biology in fulfillment of their mathematics and natural sciences requirement. 

 

Presently, students wishing to take courses in two different disciplines that happen to be housed in the same department must request permission from CAGAS to do so.  CAGAS routinely approves the requests, given that that Council understands the intention of the general education program to distribute courses across disciplines and not departments. After discussion of the problem that this inconsistent language use has presented, the Council agreed that catalogue language changes should be recommended. 

 

A motion was made by Meiers to approve the recommended catalogue language change to be:

 

 “Students may take no more than two courses from any one grouping below” and that courses should be listed in the catalogue groupings so that disciplines such as sociology and anthropology would be grouped separately and disciplines within the Department of Biology would be grouped together. 

 

Motion seconded by Barclay. 

 

Approved 7 to 0 (chair not voting except in tie)

 

The meeting adjourned at 4:10 PM.