Rationale -- The Bucknell Faculty
CLA Document
Bucknell's Faculty has the characteristics that make it uniquely able to meet the most fundamental needs of our students in a general education program. The range of specialized scholarly and professional activities of faculty members is matched by their interest in helping students to understand how these activities can contribute to the undergraduate experience. The faculty members of professional programs at Bucknell--in management, education, and engineering, for example--offer curricular strengths and experience with realworld applications that are lacking at colleges devoted exclusively to the traditional liberal arts. Efforts at interdisciplinary cooperation among faculty members are designed as much for enhancing the experience of students as for advancing the faculty members' own scholarly development. Faculty members welcome the assistance that a variety of offices across the campus can offer in instructing students in, for example, the use of computers, writing techniques, library resources, and race and gender materials. The flexibility with which faculty members adjust to changes in the students they teach and in the disciplines of which they are themselves students, as individuals or departments or in other groupings, is a valuable asset and an essential resource whatever form the curriculum takes in the future.
Just as the student body has needs to be met which are often conceptualized as deficiencies, so too the Faculty's diversity of perspectives often appears to override and stand in the way of the concerns of any single curricular conception, and especially to militate against a general education program based on a core curriculum with agreed-upon readings and course content. Faculty members, whether as individuals or as members of particular groupings, tend to hold strong views on a wide range of topics that affect the curriculum. There are widely differing views on, for example: whether or not students should be required to take particular courses or configurations of courses and, if requirements are necessary, what courses or groups of courses should be required; whether the focus of a student's study at Bucknell should be the major or the broader curriculum within which the major plays a role; whether the curriculum should be infused with particular values and, if so, what those values should be and how they should be presented; the priorities, if any, that should be
given to certain nonacademic factors in the curriculum, for example, career development, social development, participation in extracurricular activities such as athletics, music groups, theater, religious organizations; the extent to which the curriculum should be seen as mirroring the external world of the moment and as implicitly incorporating the viewpoints of that outside world as opposed to examining and passing on to a rising generation a continuing tradition. The GEC believes that agreement by the Faculty on a single position in any of these distinctions is unlikely and as potentially destructive to the mission of the University as the refusal to acknowledge the multiplicity of competing models of learning in the University. The Common Learning Agenda proposed here is, therefore, conceived more as a structure of and process for curricular change than as a final resolution.
The Common Learning Agenda should introduce students to the many worlds of the Faculty, in their differences as well as, and in particular, to the ways in which faculty members transcend these differences in their daily work. Faculty are likely to be the people most familiar with the context in which learning is taking place and with the outside world they are preparing students to enter. Likewise, faculty are better able to understand the need for students to develop historical and reflective thinking abilities as ways to situate themselves as life-long learners prepared to transcend short-term vocational aspirations. In order to enable our faculty members to work constructively in this common effort, the present proposal recommends a structure in which the faculty members of each division of the College will discuss with one another the purpose and rationale of study in their division. Divisional discourse seems a promising way to work toward a curriculum with intellectual integrity. Although unanimity in each division is too much to hope for, the fact that members of a division tend to share a disciplinary language and assumptions about what they study and how it is taught offers the prospect of their reaching greater understanding of the task the College faces in constructing a curriculum that will meet the needs of our students.
