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General Education

Design Committee Updates

FEBRUARY 2020

This month the GE Design Committee spent a day discussing the foundations of general education, possible models of general education and their corresponding problems, and life skills general education courses should teach.

As the group works to design a more effective and efficient GE program at BYU, they are guided by these values and beliefs.

General Education should be about…

  • Developing democratic character
  • Adding to the human conversation; bilingual in humanity I.e. understanding the experiences of others who are different from us
  • Expanding faith and reason; the search for truth is godly, education is part of our divine nature
  • Understanding reverence; recognizing that there is something greater than our individual lives, which requires both intellectual and spiritual humility
  • Giving service; education should help us be anxiously engaged in bettering the world

A successful GE program at BYU would encourage students to “enter to learn, go forth to serve,” not “enter to learn, go forth to earn.” The committee wants to create ethical/moral action-oriented graduates who want to make the world a better place. If a GE program at BYU can’t include that framework, where can it be accomplished?

Current Tensions in General Education…

  • Tension: There is a lack of a robust assessment program with current GE courses. Faculty aren’t receiving needed feedback to measure how their course aligns with general education and how students are benefitting from the course.
    • Possible Solutions: Students could take a “pre-flection” of what they expect to get from the course and then a re-flection at the end to see if the expectations align with reality. Instead of teaching a specific class/section, faculty could be stewards of a GE course and constantly review the intended outcomes of the course. Once every three years, faculty are required to meet together to discuss why the course is a requirement and how it meets the purposes of GE.
  • Tension: Courses tend to drift from GE courses to major courses and vice versa.
    • Possible Solution: Flag courses that are prone to drift and monitor those courses a little closer.
  • Tension: Should it be a consideration of GE to help students find a major? Sometimes students take a class because they like a professor and then declare a related major, but when they take a class from another professor in that major they realize they don’t actually enjoy the major. If part of GE includes helping students find a major, there are more efficient ways to do that than by asking a student to spend an entire semester in a specific area.
    • Possible Solution: In certain classes, a faculty member may help students identify a passion for a specific topic that aligns with different majors. With this method, the student may not enjoy the class as a whole, but they can gain some direction from overlapping disciplines.
  • Tension: Getting student and faculty buy-in to support a GE program
    • Possible Solution: Link the BYU AIMS more directly to learning outcomes and assessment, which will also ease the burden on faculty to come up with outcomes/assessment on their own.
  • Tension: Designing a GE course that appeals to everyone when students have different background I.e. Combatting “Get GE out of the way”.
    • Possible Solutions: Different levels of courses could meet a requirement. GE isn’t just delivering content, but also teaching skills and abilities. Make the courses more interesting for students and faculty to take and teach.
    • Create a core of GE while also preserving student freedom. Design a core of classes that are controlled by GE or taught by GE specific faculty and then let students choose “Love of Learning” classes to supplement the rest of the GE requirements. Departments could recommend a specific set of GE courses that will help them be a better candidate for their field at graduation.

All GE Courses Should Teach…
(in no particular order)

  • Discipleship: understanding others, recognizing our own assumptions/perspectives, identify who is my “other”
  • Ethics
  • Interdisciplinary thinking, problem solving
  • Leadership
  • Civics education/engagement
  • Service/experiential learning
  • Agentive/contributor (being an active participant in the human conversation)
  • Commitment to truth
  • Seeing God in all disciplines
  • Intellectual self-awareness

Common themes from the above list that a GE program could focus on…

  • Communication
  • Stewardship, citizenship, civics
  • Thinking, modes of inquiry, metacognition, information literacy
  • Life skills, building a whole person

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