Dear colleagues,
The CCS Review Steering Committee is providing additional information about the faculty and staff retreat on the Common Course of Study on Friday at 10 a.m. (Zoom link).
The retreat will mark the transition from reviewing to beginning discussions about revising the Common Course of Study. The event will be highly interactive and center around two substantial breakout sessions. We hope that the information given below may allow all of us to make productive use of the two precious hours that we will be spending together.
- We will not spend time summarizing the main findings of the concluded CCS review. We refer you to the information booklet. It has been updated and now includes takeaways from the open meetings with students and faculty/staff held in December.
- We ask that you please fill out a short Breakout Room Survey indicating which of the five available breakout rooms you would like to join during the first breakout room session. Each room will be dedicated to a different topic.Please note: There are obviously more than five topics related to the CCS that merit discussion. The topics selected for breakout rooms are those that will likely most benefit from a collective discussion bringing together a breadth of perspectives. If a CCS issue is not represented by a breakout room (in either of the two breakout sessions) it does not mean that it is less important. It simply means that it can be better addressed in a different format than a faculty retreat.In the second breakout room session, attendees will be assigned to one of the two rooms by the hosts of the meeting.
- Those interested may also want to familiarize themselves with two additional resources. The first is a tentative list of guiding principles, as they have emerged in the course of the CCS review, for the upcoming CCS revision. If you have questions or comments regarding these, the Steering Committee welcomes your feedback by email so that we can collect it for a separate conversation at a later point.Second is a list of further readings that reflect some of the topics and trends that currently shape discussions about general education and general education reform in higher ed.
Finally, a compilation of core curricula of Lafayette’s 24 comparison schools is available upon request.
We look forward to seeing you on Friday at 10 a.m. Due to the virtual format, the retreat is BYOC&D – Bring Your Own Coffee and Donuts!
Cordially,
The CCS Review Steering Committee:
Alex Brown (Mechanical Engineering; CEP)
Markus Dubischar, co-chair (Associate Dean of the Curriculum)
Larry Malinconico, co-chair (Geology and Environmental Geosciences: CEP chair)
Julie Smith (Economics)