Undergraduate education at Illinois is in the process of a new experiment.
This semester marked the start of a multiyear pilot designed to analyze what general education is and what role it serves on a research campus such as the University of Illinois.
The first step was the rollout of six fall 2015 Grand Challenge Experience classes for first-year students centered on one of three themes: health and wellness; inequality and cultural understanding; and sustainability, energy and the environment. These themes were identified during the first round of the Campus Conversation on Undergraduate Education.
The classes, which include about 25 students each, are grouped under themes to provide students a hands-on introduction to the real-world challenges of improving health, reducing inequality and ensuring environmental well-being.
Led by the Office of the Provost, the 2013 round of the Campus Conversation involved nearly 600 campus faculty and staff members, and graduate and undergraduate students.
"We set out to consider what it means to be an educated person at this moment in history," the Campus Conversation report said, "and how the University of Illinois – a public research institution with a land-grant mission and an international reputation for excellence – should prepare students to live and lead in the 21st century."
Lauren Goodlad, a provost fellow and professor of English who has been directing the Grand Challenges Learning initiative, said the Campus Conversation underscored the need to take a new look at general education.
"General education was a big topic in the Campus Conversation, and those discussions led to the formation of several working groups, which created the basis for this three-year pilot," she said. "General education is not an easy thing to change because it involves all of the colleges, but there was a strong feeling that we wanted to explore what gen ed could really be."
Charles Tucker, the vice provost for undergraduate education and innovation, said the new approach builds on the strengths of a campus where topics like health, inequality and sustainability are looked at from many disciplinary perspectives and in more than one college. From the students’ perspective, he said, the intent is to make general education choices more coherent, meaningful and relevant to their everyday concerns.
“In a broad sense, the pilot will eventually help students at every level by recommitting the campus to innovative education,” Tucker said. “We need to produce engaged, well-rounded, thoughtful citizens who have skills with enduring value, and Grand Challenge Learning is one of many ways we can do that.”
Goodlad said the response to date from faculty members has been very strong, especially in the humanities, arts, social sciences and life sciences. The campus expects to offer 25 Grand Challenge Experience courses in spring 2016, with plans for future first-year experience courses to meet other general education requirements such as behavioral science and quantitative reasoning.
Goodlad believes the core strength of the pilot is the way it builds on the strengths of a public research university. "I'm struck every day by the great things that are already going on here and the chance to bring some of that energy to our gen ed offerings,” she said.
The initiative does not stop with the offering of first-year experience courses. Part of its make-up is a new partnership that enables any Grand Challenge Experience instructor to partner with a staff member from the Office of Student Affairs to enhance experiential learning. Plans are already underway for an experimental Critical Framings Module in which up to eight professors from across campus will collaborate to offer students a sense of what their individual research and disciplinary perspectives bring to the grand challenge topic in question. “This is what makes these topics ‘grand challenges’ to begin with,” Goodlad said. “If a single discipline could offer solutions, we wouldn’t be talking about it now.”
Another piece of the pilot that will soon be announced is a call for campus courses intended to gather some of the best existing classes that faculty already teach on health, inequality and sustainability. “We know that the campus already has many wonderful courses on these topics,” Goodlad said. “The call for campus courses will create an opportunity for any instructor to become involved in the pilot initiative.”
Goodlad said one of the hoped-for outcomes would be an increase in double majors, minors and electives as students are exposed to new approaches that require expertise in multiple disciplines.
"The idea is to let students learn what it's like to be on a research campus from early on—an idea that has the potential to move beyond grand challenge topics," she said. "We're not focused on certifying students in a particular pathway, though that option will be available for those who want it. What we really want is to make our general education course offerings one of the best reasons to attend the University of Illinois.”