Rationale -- The Wider Context: Foundations for the Future
CLA Document
There is space here only to refer in passing to the many concerns that Foundations discusses in some detail, all of which have curricular implications. That document presents a strategic plan for Bucknell "to offer effective educational programs, meet its admissions goals, develop budgets that support its educational goals, and continue to succeed in resource development" and thereby to counter the persistent criticism of higher education for its "incoherent curricula, unjustifiably high costs, lack of accountability, and an excessive emphasis on research that causes teaching to be neglected."
Foundations proceeds to set out six "Common Learning Objectives" that represent "six distinctive elements in the mosaic that is a Bucknell education," noting that they will be construed in different ways by different faculty members and departments:
integrating compartmentalized disciplinary knowledge and multiple perspectives;
understanding our natural and fabricated worlds;
developing international and multicultural perspectives;
fostering creativity, personal reflectiveness, and moral discernment;
nurturing independent and collaborative learning;
creating a holistic, supportive community of mutual respect.
Foundations concludes its analysis by defining four Strategic Goals whose achievement would enable Bucknell to "attain a clearly distinctive educational image:"
Bucknell should situate itself as an institution to provide for its students a balanced appreciation of scientific, technological, human, and social ways of knowing.
The six common learning objectives ... should be conceived as the special province of neither "general education" courses nor the major, but of both.
Undergraduate independent study should be extended as a special feature across the University.
Bucknell should seek to create a positive and synergistic community from the competitive and sometimes divisive tendencies of some aspects of our learning environment.
From this broad analysis, Foundations offers a set of recommendations of which the first, on the academic enterprise, includes a number of specific mandates that have a bearing on general education. We are to develop a common learning agenda with aims that include: enhancing the effectiveness of departments' and programs' courses for majors and nonmajors and integrating them with broader learning goals; enhancing existing and supporting new programmatic initiatives that bridge disciplines; and seeking ways to educate students about racial and gender diversity and to make them tolerant of difference. The most specific aim is, in fact, to develop a general education program that will give special attention to the Common Learning Objectives.
The concerns described in the detailed analysis of these points in Foundations have guided our work in the past few months. We sense, too, that our work is but one part in a mosaic of efforts by many other individuals and groups whose continuing efforts to meet the most fundamental needs of students also are guided by Foundations and its Common Learning Objectives.
