Ideas from Kim MacKay (Cornish), 10/30

Here are a couple of thoughts to consider:

Part of my 'charge' as coordinator for Integrated Studies is to engage
in a fifth-year review of the program. Because I'm trying to take an
even more 'programmatic' view (rather than leaving that scope more in
Shawn's capable, but now absent, hands), I've been thinking a lot about
it and about how intimately tied program goals and assessment are:

that is, it's not uncommon for 'assessment' to be framed around fairly
traditional/conventional goals (standard assumptions about what 'college
writing' is supposed to be and look like, for instance), and these
assessment criteria are often abstract and imposed from the outside;
and, in some essential ways, divorced from approaches to learning
applied in specific classes/programs. If the program *goals* are
multiple and include, say, developing certain 'habits of mind,' but the
assessment is 'can students write a five-paragraph essay,' then the
assessment is not likely to be aligned with the goals, not likely to
'measure' the outcomes the goals likely lead to.

Conversely, if assessment becomes the driving force--the program
'proving' its validity and success by demonstrating 'success' in areas
and ways that may not be pertinent, really, to the program or the
students in it, the program can easily become distorted to meet those
abstract requirements.

This, of course, is true especially for first-year programs: everybody
and his or her dog 'knows' what students (in the abstract) need to know
and need to be able to do, and they want it all taken care of in the
first year, so that students are 'fixed' by the time they get to 'real'
classes. One of the issues I've been hammering on--and if I remember
correctly, this is pretty much true for all the CLEA schools--is that in
4 years, students take what would be the equivalent of one full year of
general studies courses: that is, if our students were enrolled in a
traditional Liberal Arts college, they would take various introductory
courses in the first year, all (in one way or another) reinforcing study
skills, among other things, those students would apply--either directly
or indirectly--in the fields they would enter later in their college
careers.

Using the Cornish program as an example, though, students in the first
year take about 1/3 of their credits in Integrated Studies and that's
pretty much the most emphasis placed on traditional academic experience
in any given year. And yet, folks (in other departments mostly, but not
only) assume that those students should come to them after the first
year as prepared for 'higher level' classes as they would be under the
traditional system. Not possible, from where I sit, or even necessarily
desirable.

Maybe one of the questions we should be asking--and in a way, this fits
under the heading of 'continuity' is this: what are the goals for a
liberal/general studies program in a CLEA institution overall. I know I
have a kind of goal: Assuming that at least some of our students may
well want to pursue an academic path after conservatory, they have the
abilities to make that choice and are ready to do what they need to do
to follow it by the end of their four years here. That is, they won't be
able to slide into an academic graduate program directly--the credit
distribution makes that unlikely--but that they are prepared to do what
they need to do to get themselves ready for that other choice and then
pursue it.