Colleges revamping core lessons

LESSONS LEARNED: Bob Shea, director of the Bryant University Center for Teaching and Learning, says that schools are held more accountable for students’ education than in the past. / PBN PHOTO/DAVID LEVESQUE
LESSONS LEARNED: Bob Shea, director of the Bryant University Center for Teaching and Learning, says that schools are held more accountable for students’ education than in the past. / PBN PHOTO/DAVID LEVESQUE

There’s little argument against the benefits of earning a college degree. There is, however, growing sentiment that the once-vital achievement for those wanting to enter nontrade professions has shifted from being the final step to being just a first step in work-readiness in a competitive job market, in which employers want a more equal mix of knowledge and creative expertise from applicants.
For students, that means acquiring the perfect blend of technical know-how and soft skills such as critical thinking, civic engagement and leadership capability, according to local college educators and administrators.
“I think that institutions are increasingly being held accountable for what their students know and are able to do, and I think that’s a good thing,” said Bob Shea, director of the Bryant University Center for Teaching and Learning. “When I started teaching 20 years ago, things were dramatically different. We need to think about the way that we structure the scaffold for students to get to a level of performance we’re confident in.”
Bryant University last winter designed a new core curriculum for students effective for the class of 2016 – who began school this fall – partly in order to address these concerns. The school is not alone in the move.
Across Rhode Island, colleges and universities are revisiting, revamping or augmenting their foundation-learning programs to better meld creative and technical learning and teaching, to encourage experiential-learning opportunities, and to improve the way they measure how students are responding to and achieving outlined goals.
Beginning with this year’s freshman class, Providence College instituted a new core curriculum after exit surveys from students indicated they felt they weren’t well-equipped in some skill areas, particularly written and oral communication.
Brown University, which has an open curriculum in which students design their own set of core courses, reworked its writing requirement beginning with the class of 2015. Students now must demonstrate work on their writing at two different points in their time at Brown. They previously were allowed to complete work at their discretion. Johnson & Wales University is finalizing a core revision that will be implemented in September 2014. The board of directors at Roger Williams University currently is assessing the school’s curriculum with a goal of presenting changes by 2016.
“The fundamental issue of job readiness on the part of college graduates is pretty widespread,” said Donald Farish, president of Roger Williams University. “It wasn’t very long ago that graduates had demonstrated above-average intelligence by virtue of their degree but they were generalists in a sense. [Now] unless you are job-ready you won’t do very well in the job market.”
Bryant University’s new first-year curriculum is called the Gateway, which replaced its foundations-for-learning course and is designed as a 10-credit series of courses aimed to improve freshman writing proficiency, critical thinking, cultural awareness and ethical reasoning.
All students will take a writing course, “Global Foundations of Character and Leadership,” and “Global Foundations of Organizations and Business.”
The program is capped off with a 72-hour immersion course, set to take place for the first time in January 2013, called Innovation Design Experience for All, which Shea said will put students into teams matched with a set of advisers to produce a solution to a “real-world problem” in a variety of business sectors.
Bryant received a $147,500 grant from the Davis Educational Foundation for the program. That grant was largely used for faculty development.
“I wouldn’t describe [the changes] as a complete overhaul. The Gateway is only a piece of the general education,” Shea said. “It’s the piece we’ve focused on this year and the broader conversation continues.”
Hugh Lena, senior vice president of academic affairs at Providence College, calls the new core curriculum there a revitalization that requires fewer core credits for graduation with similar goals from the previous requirements.
“It’s leaner. We wanted to place a lot more responsibility on students for their own learning,” Lena said. “Our goals are related to the importance of the liberal arts at PC and the Dominican tradition of searching for the truth; that there are questions for which there is no easy answer.” The program emphasizes smaller class sizes, a greater focus on seminar-based learning and more opportunities for student engagement.
Revisiting core curricula hasn’t been exclusively about redefining job readiness. Colleges, the educators and administrators say, review and revise curricula as part of the reaccreditation process, or when it simply has been too long since that last was done.
PC had not revised its core curriculum since 1971 before this year. An examination in the mid-1990s yielded no changes. This revision, Lena said, took three and a half years to implement.
Brown commissioned a task force to study its undergraduate education in 2007, something that hadn’t been done there in 20 years.
“The first thing we wanted to look at seriously was the structure of our curriculum, to see if it still made sense,” Bergeron said. “As a result, we looked more closely at the way we were dealing with Brown’s longstanding writing requirement.”
Regular data confirms, she said, that students choose their courses wisely. A survey for the class of 2011 revealed, with an 81 percent response rate, that 67 percent of the class had secured employment following graduation and that 22 percent were entering full-time graduate or professional-study programs.
The biggest change to Johnson & Wales’ core curriculum, said Angela Renaud, dean of the John Hazen White School of Arts & Sciences, will be an emphasis on “academia integrated learning” that will seek to give students practical experiences where they can apply acquired knowledge and skills from one subject area to the next.
The school also has introduced two new major degrees, a bachelor of science in communication studies and a bachelor of science in liberal studies.
In both new majors, students will be required to take courses that connect them more directly to the skills required on the job, such as project management and technical writing, among others.
“Eventually students are going to interact with the rest of the community that’s defined as work,” Renaud said. •

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