General Education at Fredonia 

Revised General Education Program Guidelines

Upper Level Guidelines

1. Several of the guidelines refer to "critical literacy". That term refers to written, oral, quantitative, visual, and electronic media literacies.
2. The committee suggests that the sections of the new program by grouped as follows:

    

   1. Basic Written Communication
   2. Mathematics 
   3. Foreign Languages
   4. Arts
   5. Humanities
   6. Social Sciences
   7. Natural Sciences
   8. American History
   9. Western Civilization
   10. World History or Non-Western Civilizations

    

3. The committee recommends that the title "America and Self" in Part VIII be changed to "Aspects of American Society"
4. The committee recommends that a new general education be called the College Core Curriculum (CCC or 3C Program)
5. It must be recognized, and agreed upon by participating faculty, that the guidelines require that the emphasis in assessment of student performance be on critical thinking and critical literacy. Consequently, instructors must indicate the ways in which papers and examinations will address those issues.
6. Departments should determine the ideal size of CCC courses, and the committee will work with the VPAA and the deans to attain departmentally recommended ideal class sizes. It must be recognized that one of the implications of #5 is that class size will have to be controlled. It will not be possible for instructors to meet the guidelines if there are too many students in their classes. The guidelines, in fact, call for us to meet one challenge of our Middle States self-study, that which called for greater faculty-student contact.
7. It is to be hoped that many of the courses that will be proposed for the new program will be either new of thoroughly rethought. Faculty are welcome to submit existing courses that meet the guidelines. The introduction of a new general education program gives us an opportunity to create new courses that are specifically directed to general education rather than majors.
8. For the new program to work properly, it will have to be monitored. In addition to having department chairs, school directors, or interdisciplinary coordinators or directories checking into the syllabi of CCC courses, the committee will review syllabi in every semester to be sure that courses are in compliance with the program. This kind of oversight implies no distrust of faculty. It simply recognizes that any program involving so many people requires constant oversight. The person who takes this position will no be interfering with instructors' freedom to run their classrooms as they see fit. This person will simply be ensuring that the program maintains its integrity. 
9. Departments may see exemptions for students in their majors from CCC categories that are covered by the major if the major is shown to satisfy all the requirements of those categories. 

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