Thinking About How to “Tell the Story” of
the New Curriculum to Our Advisees

Particularly over the coming years, it is going to be vital that advisers help their students make sense of the intertwined elements of our General Education Program, as well as the ways in which those elements fit with departmental majors.  In order to facilitate this conversation, we suggest emphasizing a number of key elements:

o         Four year program:  Monmouth’s general education curriculum is distinctive in that it spans across the four years of undergraduate education

o         Reinforcement of basic skills: The new curriculum emphasizes skills (communicative, quantitative) that are reinforced at different points in the program, including both general education courses as well as in the major.

o         Integration is key: making it explicit to the students how the courses work together to form a solid liberal arts education.

o         Integration must be intentional, explicit, and reinforced: we have to keep retelling the story.

o         Healthy coordination: courses in general education and the work in the major(s) go hand in hand.

o         Courses in general education expose students to new horizons:  unfamiliar material, new perspectives, and different approaches all encourage students to think about new things, or to think about things in a new way.

o         Integrated Studies is developmental: each course draws upon the previous and offers new challenges to the students, ones that are appropriate for their stage of development.

o         General education is clustered thematically: e.g., we ask students to think about “global perspectives” in their second year, drawing upon the emphasis on culture in their study of foreign language.

Prepared by Hannah Schell for Advising Workshop August 2006