o you recall your “GenEd” experience as checking various boxes, a superfluous distraction from your major?
Every university has General Education requirements. Accreditors want to ensure undergraduates leave college a fully “educated” person. Historically, many students have seen such requirements as disjointed, if not burdensome: largely proscribed, dispersed across the disciplinary nooks and crannies of the catalog, and comprising far too much of their coursework. Plymouth State’s Cluster Learning Model has changed all that by spurring innovation in the field of General Education.
Until recently, the Panther experience largely mirrored much of the nation’s “distributive” approach. Our first GenEd program had students mainly choose from three broad liberal arts areas. In 1985, we honed-in on these and asked students to take a dozen-plus courses. But defining GenEd by major-specific courses that could “double” count in the discipline and GenEd resulted in a large program accounting for nearly half of the courses required for a baccalaureate degree.
In 2005, Plymouth State launched a more student-centered GenEd curriculum. It has greater interdisciplinary choice and focused on eight semi-tangible skills, including “working with technology.” Replacing a sampling of disciplinary content with skills conformed to a larger national shift, which Paul Hanstedt, a leading scholar of GenEd, called a move from the “original” GenEd of the 1960s to “GenEd 2.0.” With the arrival of President Birx in 2015, however, Plymouth State began setting the national trend and now we are shapers of “GenEd 3.0.”
Hanstedt summarizes GenEd 3.0 as a program that foregrounds high-impact practices such as project-based learning, delivered in first-year seminars and capstones, and which connects undergraduate research with real-world applications. We call it “Cluster Pedagogy”—teaching that embraces interdisciplinarity, practices project-based learning, and engages the spirit of openness: open textbooks, open labs, and the doors of the classroom opened-up to make connections between students, alumni, and other real-world partners.
Cluster Pedagogy is practiced throughout PSU’s curriculum and is especially prevalent in our General Education program, called HoME: the Habits of Mind Experience. We’ve identified four “habits of mind” (HoM) that correspond to skills that the National Association of Colleges and Employers highlight as most appropriate for successful preparation for academic life and work: Purposeful Communication, Problem-Solving, Integrative Perspective-taking, and Self-Regulated Learning. These are central features of the seven HoME courses students take outside of their major.
Panthers are on the cutting edge of GenEd innovation because we use high-impact practices that engage students in real-world issues. “There are only a handful of universities worldwide that have found a way to create a curriculum that prepares students for the messiness of the world they’re about to enter,” says Hanstedt. “Plymouth State was one of the first to do this, one of the most innovative, and one of the most thoughtful. I hope other universities and colleges—both in the US and abroad—are paying attention.”
Even outside the classroom, many facets of our innovation are integrated into the student experience. Residential Life & Dining Services infuses the four Habits of Mind throughout many aspects of its operations and activities and Student Life addresses the HoMs’ connection through a structured approach to activity development.
Faculty embrace HoME outside of the classroom curriculum too, through scholarship and service. In particular, seven specially appointed full-time professors from a range of disciplines support faculty governance and collaborate with Lamson Library’s CoLab on professional development workshops throughout the year. They conduct research, write grants, deliver presentations, and run roundtables at national conferences. Several also spent this past year collaboratively coauthoring a chapter for a forthcoming book on innovative General Education.
The seven faculty also support one of Plymouth’s earliest innovations in GenEd, incorporating it into faculty governance. In 2005, Plymouth was among the first to have faculty institute a sunset policy to ensure that GenEd courses were reviewed and consistently met the goals of the program. But if having a faculty governance committee that shepherds GenEd was innovative, adding seven HoME program faculty to help serve it was extra-innovative. It speaks to PSU faculty taking the GenEd experiences of their students as a serious commitment. Indeed, HoME is among the key experiences defining a Plymouth State education and there is no reason it should be anything less than cutting-edge.
PSU is not simply unique in delivering an appropriate and impactful Cluster education for the twenty-first century. We’re in the vanguard of innovative General Education, leading as a “3.0” model by creating a rich and coherent GenEd program that reaches across students’ four-year curricular (and extracurricular) journeys, to benefit their daily campus lives and prepare them for their future. ■ Professor John Krueckeberg is coordinator of the Habits of Mind Experience (HoME) program