Last Monday, convocation covered a topic that concerns all of Goshen’s present and future student body. That topic was the reviewing and revising of the general education program.
Ross Peterson-Veatch led an active presentation about the thought process that is the framework of GC’s current general education requirements, and how he and other faculty and staff are currently revising these requirements. Peterson-Veatch is director of curriculum at the Center for Intercultural Teaching and Learning (CITL).
Peterson-Veatch spoke about how general education courses are designed to help deal with complexity, diversity, change. These aspects of learning are part of the goal of a liberal arts education, which promotes integrative learning to aid students in a cosmopolitan approach to content mastery.
With this learning goal in mind, GC believes that general education requirements should encompass three things: what students should know, what students should be able to do, and what students should feel responsible for. After this short presentation on the core values of general education, Peterson-Veatch had the student body in attendance fill out a survey of what they thought would be valuable classes to take as general education courses associated with these three learning goals.
Dave Shenk, a senior Spanish major and history minor, is in the process of documenting the results of the survey for the general education board.
Shenk said that he was excited that the “faculty and administration are taking time to hear students’ feedback and opinions on these issues. [Hopefully] the results help us as a community to adjust our curriculum in order to create a more effective and complete educational institution.”
