The evolution of Monmouth College

By: Andrea Emery
News Editor

 Change is good.

Monmouth College has been undergoing curriculum changes since the fall of 2000. Since President Mauri Ditzler’s inauguration in the fall of 2005, an immense amount of effort has been put toward improving the curriculum.

During former president Richard Giese’s term at Monmouth College, the Curriculum Review Task Force was formed. The Task Force was formed from a Teagle Grant, an educational foundation with an interest in strengthening higher education, and was dedicated to revising the then current curriculum; since its inception, many improvements have gradually been made.

Along with the creation of the Curriculum Review Task Force in 2000, two programs, Communication Across the Curriculum (CAC) and Quantitative Literacy Across the Curriculum (QAC) have been formed.

Steven Price, director of CAC, assistant professor of English and head of the Writing Center, says the new curriculum is an effort to help both students and faculty to use communication to be more effective. Price hopes to get both students and faculty to use communication more effectively.

“The new curriculum is purposeful, real and more effective,” Price said.

The CAC program networks effective communication between the CATA department and English department. The long-term goal of the CAC is to integrate communication skills to each department on campus.

As director of the CAC, Price helps departments identify writing and speaking goals. He hopes to make the curriculum more effective by integrating communication skills into each department in the near future.

Joanne Eary, director of the QAC and assistant professor of math, says the QAC is responsible for helping to implement the math requirement. Courses within QAC teach such concepts as math in context, simple algebra, math modeling and graphing.

According Craig Watson, head of the English department, the faculty has worked closely to develop a more distinctive type of curriculum rather than requiring students to take electives unrelated to their field of study.

Students entering Monmouth College will now take a prescribed series of four courses throughout their four years. Entitled Integrated Studies, each of these courses come together to create what Waston calls the “spine” of the curriculum.

The first, Introduction to Liberal Arts (ILA), is a freshman course. This course helps first year students to learn and apply both speaking and writing skills. Global Perspectives, a class which replaced Comparative Societies, is a course designed to take materials learned in ILA and then turn students’ attention toward the rest of the world. Reflections, a course designed specifically to help students understand themselves and find a place in the world, is ideally taken the junior year. The senior course, Citizenship, is designed to help students apply skills learned throughout the college experience and apply them to create projects which focus on how students can be responsible citizens.

Each of these courses was created through steering committees under the Curriculum Review Task Force. Committees are made up of a distinctive group of professors who bring diversity to the task force.

Both Price and Watson say they look forward to what the new curriculum will bring to students at Monmouth College.

“Integrating articulate links from the ‘spine’ of the curriculum to each student’s major” is what Price stresses most.

Watson is energized for the future.

“I’m very excited about the curriculum. It has been a huge amount of work. In the end, I hope that students graduate from Monmouth College with a distinctive liberal arts education.”

With the supportive faculty, students at Monmouth College can be guaranteed change for the coming years.