GenEd is more than Core renamed, IH is out and Mosaic is in

Incoming students will never know Temple without the TECH Center, the newly renovated Johnson & Hardwick cafeteria, or the Tyler School of Art on Main Campus and their education won’t be complete without the new General Education courses.

GenEd is the replacement to the previous Core Curriculum that is now obsolete for students admitted to Temple for the 2008-2009 school year.

Previously, students took Core classes along with their declared majors.

To satisfy the GenEd requirements students must complete 11 courses under nine different areas within the curriculum.

The fields include Analytical Reading and Writing, Quantitative Literacy, Arts, Human Behavior, Race and Diversity, Science and Technology, U.S. Society, World Society and Mosaic Humanities, which replaced Intellectual Heritage courses that explored prominent literature from the past.

Core credits earned at Temple still apply to students who enrolled prior to this semester. Students enrolled in the Core Curriculum also have the option to take GenEd classes and have the credits applied to their academic records.

While Core classes and those under GenEd may look identical Terry Halbert, director of the GenEd program and member of the General Education Executive Committee, said courses are only similar by name.

“It took us years and years just to decide what could be changed,” Halbert said.

A series of “turf wars” as she called them, were fought between departments on who would get the changes and what would remain the same.

The decision to scrap the Core Curriculum came out of department chairs working with each other, and realizing professors often cross into other subjects within separate majors.

Some of the classes under GenEd were carried over from the original Core classes.

Halbert said it’s because it is still the same professors but a different way of teaching is being implemented.

“Within the last 20 years a lot of research has been done on how people learn and the conclusions showed that it is in groups trying to solve problems or work on issues that they think are important,” Halbert said.

Another new technique brought about by GenEd is that similar courses are offered by different departments. The basic concepts of the course are covered by different departments with some variation. The professor’s academic background is also a factor.

Professor Robert Yantorno teaches “Investing for the Future” in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department. He said students in the past had difficulty locating the course.

“They use to look under the business school and would never think to look under Electrical and Computer Engineering,” Yantorno said.

During the planning phase of GenEd, incorporating Philadelphia into the new courses was important to GEEC .

The city is now included in seven of the nine areas with 34 classes offering interaction with Temple’s urban setting. Course range from studies of arts and culture originating here to the role of law and justice within Philadelphia.

“Truthfully, I’m really interested in building up this Philadelphia experience,” Halbert said.

Mickey O’Malley, a freshman film and media arts major, is enrolled in “Dramatic Imagination,” an Arts course. Students in the class will attend live plays throughout the city.

“If you’re not from the region it gives you a chance to learn the area better,” O’Malley said. “You get to hang out in Philly and earn credits.”

With the 2008 school year just beginning GenEd remains untested, but Halbert said the program is being taught at colleges and universities across the country.

“The GenEd reform trend is nationwide,” Halbert said. “Schools are changing their required curriculum to look at the ways different areas of study blend or mix.”

Greg Adomaitis can be reached at g.adomaitis@temple.edu.

Incomplete Experience

Temple’s new general education curriculum promises to envelop freshmen in local arts and culture, but the structure of the program fails to push students into Philadelphia.

Temple is not afraid to tell students what they should know. Courses in one’s major are not enough to graduate: a litany of core classes covering everything from racism to mathematics to the history of Western thought are required of us.

The GenEd curriculum continues in that vein by pushing the Philadelphia Experience. Temple’s Web site describes this experience as a way to blend local exposure with the academic content of GenEd classes.

For this, Temple deserves recognition. There are 34 classes that are listed as part of the Philadelphia Experience. This is a healthy serving of Philadelphia for anyone who is looking for it.

The problem is that there are almost 100 GenEd classes available. Any student who doesn’t particularly care to learn about Philadelphia doesn’t have to. Temple can do better than this.

Students do not have a choice as to whether they will study race or ancient texts, and rightly so.

Temple realizes that the various topics covered under core requirements, and now GenEd classes, are vital to a well-rounded education.

Temple does not seem to carry the same attitude about Philadelphia. Instead of requiring a course about Philadelphia, it only offers the courses for those who want them. If students want to learn about their adopted city, they will do so, whether they are given a class on it or not.

Temple should require at least one class on Philadelphia for all those students who wouldn’t otherwise take one. Just like it is necessary to study race, it is necessary to educate Temple students about Philadelphia.

The class could teach Philadelphia’s history and neighborhoods. Not only would it help students understand why the city is the way it is, but how to improve on what is good, and fix what has gone wrong.

Temple graduates will be that much better equipped to take on the problems that face this city if they know where the problems came from.

Pilot gen-ed classes now mandatory

Beginning in the fall, all freshmen will be required to take Temple’s new general education courses in replacement of traditional core classes. Ongoing students will also have the opportunity to take gen-ed courses to fulfill the core requirements.

Terry Halbert, professor in the Fox School of Business and director of the new gen-ed program, led Temple into the transition after being asked to do so by Vice Provost Peter Jones in November 2005.

“The undergraduate time is a time to really be experimental and to explore who you are and what you’re interested in and what you really care about,” Halbert said. “That is what we hope in gen-ed you will be able to do. You are just getting a deeper understanding of what, in the end, you’ll want to do with your life.”

With the help of students, faculty and advisers on the General Education Executive Committee, Temple has designed a program which requires 11 courses in nine different areas: analytical reading and writing, mosaic humanities, quantitative literacy, arts, human behavior, race and diversity, science and technology, U.S. society and world society.

Different from the core, three themes are designed to cross the whole gen-ed program. These themes are globalization, sustainability and community based learning, Halbert said.

Community-based learning is still in the process of being integrated. Out of the 101 gen-ed courses being offered in the fall, 40 percent will have some form of a Philadelphia experience intertwined.

Halbert described this type of learning as the whole gen-ed premise.

Sophomore public health major Andrea Bernheim said she is interested in courses with community-based learning.

“It’s definitely better than the regular core courses where you just sit inside a classroom and listen to a teacher lecture for two hours,” Bernheim said.

“The reflection of experience back onto what you’re learning is a really valuable way of learning,” Halbert said. “That’s what we know, that people don’t learn by just having things said to them or by being passive. They really have to be experiencing in some way, or active in some way with learning.”

Freshman kinesiology major Elizabeth Diamond said she is excited about the new courses that take students out of the classroom.

“I think that we should take advantage of the fact that we’re in the city, because it’s a great city. I’m all for that idea,” Diamond said.

Courses like Sustainable Environments, which takes students to water works and green rooms, Education in the Global City, which takes students into schools and community centers to learn about the experiences of immigrants, and Philadelphia Arts and Culture, which takes students on a different art excursion every week, are trying to take advantage of all of what Philadelphia has to offer students.

Freshman business major Audrey Barroso said she is going to avoid taking the gen-ed courses.

Barroso said she enjoys a more structured, traditional classroom. After taking a pilot gen-ed course, she found that the structure did not feel the same as the core classes.

“They don’t look very focused,” Barroso said. “They have unusual topics against the traditional [classes].”

About 60 gen-ed courses have already been piloted. The courses were designed by faculty members who wrote proposals for their course which included the gen-ed requirements.

Halbert said they are currently designing new ways to assess the courses to make sure they provide adequate quality control of the classes. “There’s a lot of disparity sometimes between the grade and really if the student learned anything,” Halbert said. “It’s going to take years [to assess], but when we are making mistakes, we are going to correct them.”

Dr. Julie Phillips, an administrator who works with gen-ed development, said the new Mosaic courses will also be taught thematically instead of the traditional chronological approach seen in the intellectual heritage courses.

Ongoing students can take Mosaic I or II to fulfill their second IH requirement, Phillips said.

The gen-ed program as a whole requires one fewer international course and one fewer math course than the core.

“Even though there’s one fewer course that deals with global issues globalization is a theme that we have across the entire gen-ed program,” Halbert said.
Halbert says there are two things that have changed since the core was designed: technology and the understanding of how people learn.

“There’s this tidal wave of information coming at you and none of us can really have it all, we can’t hold it all in one head,” Halbert said. “So instead of trying to focus on content, what people know, the actual facts, we are focusing on how people learn and how they use information, how they discriminate between pieces of information.”

Sarah Fry can be reached at sarahfry@temple.edu

New Gen Ed classes need world affairs requirement

When it comes to the improvement and expansion of Main Campus, students tend to focus on housing and technology. But academics – the real reason you’re paying tuition – often go ignored.

Journalist and professor Ted Gup addressed this in his April 11 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

“I find it profoundly discouraging to encounter such ignorance of critical issues,” Gup wrote. “I challenge [students’] right to tune out the world, and I question any system or society that can produce such students and call them educated.”

Gup finds it incomprehensible that students who have almost constant access to technology can know so little about current events and world affairs. He is right in this opinion.

As undergraduates, Temple students are required to take several courses in math, science, race and other areas to broaden their educations. There is no current events requirement.

“Gen Ed will hopefully take us in that direction,” said Peter Jones, vice provost of undergraduate studies.

Beginning in fall 2008, core requirements will disappear, and General Education classes will take over. As Jones explained, core classes were targeted more toward students with those specific majors, whereas Gen Ed classes are designed to teach broad ideas.

While Jones feels that “current affairs should be prevalent in every class,” this idea does not guarantee that students will be completely educated about current events. Even if professors encourage discussion of world affairs in their classes, that is not the main focus. Professors need to stick to the topic at hand, which leaves little time for digression.

Jones assures that with the 36 Gen Ed credits students will be required to take, those students who want to learn about current events can choose to take courses in those areas.

“The university has the responsibility to offer students opportunities,” he said.

Students who are genuinely interested in what’s happening in the world will have the option of taking Gen Ed classes relevant to those issues.

But if Gup’s article proves anything, it is that giving students’ options is not enough. Even though students can easily educate themselves about current events through the Internet and have the option of taking world affairs classes, the motivation doesn’t seem to be there. If students aren’t voluntarily learning about these things, it is up to Temple – and all universities – to step in and take the responsibility.

Students should be required to take at least one course focused on current affairs. The class syllabus can be altered every semester to include the latest events, as well as general issues that have affected people over long periods of time.

Jones admitted that it is too early to tell how the Gen Ed curriculum will affect students and that alterations may need to be made over time.

“It is vitally important that students understand current events,” he said. “It’s critical.”