Goals and Objectives

Goals and Objectives 4/22/05

1. Faculty evaluate the degree to which their courses reflect the goals of a liberal education, including sustainability, transferability, and the contextualization of knowledge.

Sustainability might be understood to have pedagogical, cultural, technological, and environmental applications. Broadly construed, it involves imagining the limits and repercussions of knowledge and actions into the future by having critical engagement with the social and ecological implications of one’s work. Among other things, this might also involve teaching specific skills and knowledge in such a way that students learn not only that particular skill or information, but they also learn skills to acquire knowledge independently.
Transferability relates to the teaching of skills with applications beyond the immediate classroom. This might involve interdisciplinary approaches and encouraging technical and intellectual adaptability.
Contextualizing knowledge involves engaging the historical and cultural specificity of one’s own discipline. This encourages multicultural sensitivity by recognizing that all knowledge and meaning, no matter how familiar or strange, is particular to its own context.

2. Faculty strategize ways of more fully defining and promoting the BA/BS on its own terms.

3. Department considers ways to expand its relationship to other departments, possibly through mutually enriching faculty exchanges. Department encourages administration to formalize procedures for encouraging such exchanges.

4. Department assesses the full capacities of faculty and considers methods for employing them, possibly through more elective options, as they are viable.

5. Department strategizes its visiting hires to best meet needs of curricular enhancement.

6. Department develops new emphasis area in Studio Visual Culture Practices. This requires assessment of current faculty capacities to contribute, as well as assessment of what needs would have to be met by new (and visiting) hires.

7. Department defines and/or clarifies expectations of chair, faculty, and committee limits and responsibilities.

8. Department develops criteria for establishing distinct teaching, research, and service tracks for faculty, and encourages the independent validity of each track.

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End of the 2004/5 year report: last edited on 15 September 2005 at 10:53 pm by pm866-17.dialip.mich.net