General Education Essentials E-Book

Paul Hanstedt

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 265

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

General Education Essentials "Full-time and part-time faculty in any discipline and at any size campus with any type of mission can pick up this volume and learn something that will help her or him improve teaching and learning.???"--From the Foreword by Terrel L. Rhodes, vice president for Curriculum, Quality, and Assessment, Association of American Colleges and Universities Every year, hundreds of small colleges, state schools, and large, research-oriented universities across the United States (and, increasingly, Europe and Asia) revisit their core and general education curricula, often moving toward more integrative models. And every year, faculty members who are highly skilled in narrowly defined fields ask two simple questions: "Why?" and "How is this going to affect me?" General Education Essentials seeks to answer these and other questions by providing a much-needed overview of and a rationale for the recent shift in general education curricular design, a sense of how this shift can affect a faculty member's teaching, and an understanding of how all of this might impact course and student assessment. Filled with examples from a variety of disciplines that will spark insights, General Education Essentials explores the techniques that can be used to ensure that students are gaining the skills they need to be perceptive scholars and productive citizens. "This is THE ONE BOOK for academics to get up to speed about reforming general education." --Jerry Gaff, senior scholar, Association of American Colleges and Universities

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Series Page

Association of American Colleges and Universities

Foreword

About the Author

Acknowledgments

Introduction

General Education and Its Relation to the Major

Goals, Objectives, Learning Outcomes, and Related Matters

Part One: The Big Picture

Chapter One: Structuring General Education

Distribution Versus Integration

Distinguishing Interdisciplinarity and Integration

Integrative Components

The Trend in General Education

Conclusion

Chapter Two: Some Examples of Integrative Curricular Models

Three Curricular Models

Some Additional Models

Part Two: General Education at the Course Level

Chapter Three: Designing Effective General Education Courses

The Course Continuum

Major Courses as General Education Courses: A Cautionary Tale

Chapter Four: How the Purposes of General Education Can Reshape a Course

Case Study #1: A Major Course Revised into an Integrative General Education Course (British Literature)

Case Study #1.5: General Education and Course Structure (British Literature—Again)

Case Study #2: General Education and Course Structure, Continued (Physics)

Case Study #3: A Dual-Purpose Course Redesigned as a General Education Course (Sociology)

Case Study #4: Redesigning a General Education Service Course (Statistics)

Part Three: General Education at the Assignment and Assessment Level

Chapter Five: Designing Appropriate Assignments for General Education

Creating a More Productive Rhetorical Audience

Considering Some Alternatives

Further Examples

Mathematics and the Natural Sciences

Breaking the Mold

Chapter Six: The Chapter You May Want to Skip

Assessment That Lacks Integrity

Creating Assessment with Integrity

Conclusion

Appendix A: Syllabus for Artistic and Literary Responses to Science and Technology

Syllabus

Appendix B: Syllabus for The Way Things Work: Sky Diving and Deep Sea Diving

Appendix C: Syllabus for Traveling Without Leaving: Global Sociology

Appendix D: Syllabus for Elite Deviance: Crime in the Suites

Course Description

Appendix E: Syllabus for Does Gun Control Save Lives?

Appendix F: Syllabus for Statistics and Botany

References

Index

Also available from Jossey-Bass and AAC & U

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hanstedt, Paul, date

General education essentials : a guide for college faculty / Paul Hanstedt ;

foreword by Terrel L. Rhodes.

p. cm. — (The Jossey-Bass higher and adult education series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-118-32185-0 (pbk.); 978-1-118-32953-5 (ebk); 978-1-118-32954-2 (ebk); 978-1-118-32955-9 (ebk)

1. Universities and colleges—Curricula—United States.—Planning. 2.

General education—United States. I. Title.

LB2361.5H36 2012

378.1′99—dc23

2012004824

Credits

Chapter 5:

Hollis, Midterm Assignment from “Chemistry and Crime.” Taught Spring 2011 at Roanoke College, Salem, VA.

Poli, DNA Cartoon Assignment from “How Do Living Organisms Evolve.” Taught Spring 2011 at Roanoke College, Salem, VA.

Ramesh, Second Group Presentation Assignment from “Demystifying Foods: Why We Eat What We Eat.” Taught May 2011 at Roanoke College, Salem, VA.

Appendix B: Price, Syllabus for INQ 250: Scientific Reasoning I: The Way Things Work: Sky Diving and Deep Sea Diving.” Taught Fall 2011 at Roanoke College, Salem, VA.

Appendix C: Mehrotra, Syllabus for INQ 260: “Traveling Without Leaving: Global Sociology.” Taught Fall 2011 at Roanoke College, Salem, VA.

Appendix D: Brogan, Syllabus for INQ 260: “Elite Deviance: Crime in the Suites.” Taught Spring 2010 at Roanoke College, Salem, VA.

Appendix E: Lee, Syllabus for INQ 240: “Statistical Reasoning: Does Gun Control Save Lives?” Taught Fall 2009 at Roanoke College, Salem, VA.

Appendix F: Childers, Syllabus for INQ 240: “Statistics and Botany.” Taught Fall 2009 at Roanoke College, Salem, VA.

The Jossey-Bass

Association of American Colleges and Universities

AAC&U is the leading national association concerned with the quality, vitality, and public standing of undergraduate liberal education. Its members are committed to extending the advantages of a liberal education to all students, regardless of academic specialization or intended career. Founded in 1915, AAC&U now comprises more than 1,250 member institutions—including accredited public and private colleges, community colleges, and universities of every type and size.

AAC&U organizes its work around five broad goals:

A Guiding Vision for Liberal Education

Inclusive Excellence

Intentional and Integrative Learning

Civic, Diversity, and Global Engagement

Authentic Evidence

Through its publications, meetings, public advocacy, and programs, AAC&U provides a powerful voice for liberal education. AAC&U works to reinforce the commitment to liberal education at both the national and the local level and to help individual colleges and universities keep the quality of student learning at the core of their work as they evolve to meet new economic and social challenges. With a nearly one-hundred-year history and national stature, AAC&U is an influential catalyst for educational improvement and reform.

AAC&U has worked intensively on the issue of general education reform since the early 1980s. AAC&U general education initiatives aim to ensure that every undergraduate student experiences a relevant and challenging general education curriculum. In addition to working with campuses to strengthen their general education programs overall or to reform specific aspects of them (e.g. science requirements or diversity requirements), AAC&U initiatives address strengthening general education for transfer students, embedding high expectations and meaningful assessment of student learning, and general education as essential for enhancing curricula and pedagogy. Every year, AAC&U sponsors a spring meeting on General Education and Assessment in February and a summer institute for campus teams on the same topic in June.

For information about all of AAC&U's resources, see: www.aacu.org

Foreword

As a twenty-five-year-plus faculty member, it was a pleasure to read General Education Essentials; I wish I had such a resource when I began my university teaching career. Of course I had been an undergraduate student, so I knew what general education was, what a major meant, electives, and so forth, but I had no idea that there actually were concepts and theories that underlay and justified general education as an important, integral part of a quality undergraduate education. I thought that general education was a set of courses students were required to take so we would be exposed to all the areas traditionally associated with being a well-rounded, educated person. Therefore, as a faculty member I simply had to teach my introductory course as I always did; students could take the course and learn about the basics of American government and be much better persons as a result. Little did I know at the time.

Paul Hanstedt has a deft touch in crafting this book on general education—that too-often least-valued part of an undergraduate education. Before students enter college they are told in a variety of ways that general education is something to “get out the way” as soon as possible in order to get on to the really important part of their education—the major. Hanstedt, though, manages to bring to bear the latest research on the purposes and impact of general education for student learning and a whole set of practical examples and approaches to teaching general education classes that, together, hold the potential to improve faculty pedagogy and students' undergraduate experience. As a long-time faculty member with both domestic and international teaching experience in large and small colleges, Hanstedt draws upon his experience in multiple environments for his insights into reformulating general education. As a literature and writing professor, he brings an ease with language and an ability to describe and portray general education as a living and breathing integral part of the preparation of students for success in a complex world of change; a world that also requires our approach to and representation of general education to change as well.

As the author points out early in this book, change in what we mean by general education has happened: “Indeed, the rate of change is such that some would argue the main title of this book is inaccurate: it's not ‘general’ education we're after anymore, a term many associate with ‘breadth’ and that evolves from Enlightenment and Victorian era ideas about what makes a person cultured. These days, more often than not, the term of choice is liberal education, indicating not a left-leaning slant to scholarly thinking but a sense of what it means to create liberated human beings—people who are independent and flexible in their thinking and capable of responding to the demands of a changing world in civic-minded, deliberative ways.” The need for change has become an alarm for many.

At a time when numerous reports from academics and the media are calling for change because U.S. students are not performing at the same levels as students in other parts of the world, especially in several Asian countries, many of those same countries are looking to the U.S. system of higher education as the answer to the shortcomings in their own graduates as identified by the business leaders in their own countries. Hong Kong, Japan, and Korea are all introducing general education into their baccalaureate degree programs because they believe that general education provides U.S.-educated students with the creative and integrative skills their own students lack—skills essential to be competitive in a rapidly changing world economy that demands more versatile and innovative abilities than they are finding among their own country's college graduates.

Not only does this book present a cogent argument for the central role general education plays in an undergraduate's education; it also deconstructs what this more sophisticated and useful conception of liberal education means for faculty who are engaged in teaching the courses that comprise general education programs across the country. It is still the case that preparation of new faculty in graduate programs usually contains nothing about general education, liberal education, or the critical role they can and need to play in a student's higher education. Nothing prepares new faculty to understand what it means to teach a course included in the general education program and how it needs to be different from a course that primarily serves as an introduction to a content area. Nor is there anything in graduate preparation of faculty to suggest that general education courses shouldn't be only introductory courses. Advanced courses, including capstone courses, can be and need to be part of a general education program if students are to develop the skills and abilities necessary for success.

In this concise guide for college faculty, readers will encounter a cogent argument for a contemporary liberal education—the big picture—followed by an examination of the courses that often comprise the curriculum of general education, and finally a look at the critical importance of the assignment in achieving the purposes of a reconceived program. A third to a quarter of most undergraduate curricula is composed of general education requirements, yet to hear my faculty colleagues discuss general education, its primary role is to expose students to the breadth of knowledge associated with the well-rounded, educated person. This is an outdated and unexamined notion that ignores both the fact that today's students have no problem having access and exposure to an incredibly broad array of knowledge and content, and the recognition that having students take a collection of mostly introductory courses does little to enhance a student's educational understanding of important disciplines, traditions, and intercultural or civic understanding beyond being able to answer television game show questions.

In Part Two, the author moves beyond the theoretical and conceptual basis for liberal education and provides strategies and a rationale for designing courses and building intentional programs of study within a general education program. General education is a program of study not unlike disciplinary or interdisciplinary majors. The author argues that general education deserves the same attention and consideration as any organized field of study. Indeed, general education does much of the heavy lifting in grounding and building the essential learning outcomes that both faculty and employers have firmly concluded are necessary for student success as citizens and employees.1 To illustrate the arguments for an intentional approach to general education, the author provides examples of colleges and universities that have been successfully establishing coherent general education programs.

In Part Three, the author turns his attention to two of the book's most important components of powerful general education programs—assignments and assessment. Research on student learning and pedagogy has concluded that a significant reason students often do not demonstrate learning around particular topics or issues is because they were not clearly asked to demonstrate the desired learning. In other words, the assignment was not constructed in such a way that it asked for demonstration of the learning being expected by the instructor. Teaching and learning centers across the country have been stressing to faculty the importance of developing clear and focused assignments for many years.

Coupled with the reconsideration of assignments to enhance learning, the emergence of new approaches to assessment have begun to reinforce the usefulness of assessments that can provide evidence of student learning, or its lack, that faculty members can actually use to improve their classroom pedagogy and effectiveness. Assessment no longer needs to be something that is imposed from the outside for accountability reporting, but is becoming a valuable teaching resource for enhancing student learning and faculty success. Campus-level evidence is emerging of the positive usefulness and impact of good assessment.2

General Education Essentials does what previous books on general education have not been able to do. This book manages to provide a compelling theoretical framework for the principles and practices of liberal education necessary for college graduates in the twenty-first century; to connect the theory to examples of faculty-led implementation on different types of campuses; and to do so in a style and manner that is readable and useful for the typical faculty member who may have limited exposure to or interest in general education. Full-time and part-time faculty in any discipline and at any size campus with any type of mission can pick up this volume and learn something that will help her or him improve teaching and learning. If an entire campus embraced the contents of this book, their general education program could be transformed and the performance of their students enhanced.

I wish I had had this book when I was starting my own teaching career. I would have been a better teacher, and my students would have been better prepared for life after college.

Terrel L. Rhodes

Vice President for Curriculum, Quality, and Assessment

Association of American Colleges and Universities

1College Learning for the New Global Century. 2007. Washington, D.C.: Association of American Colleges and Universities.

2 “Assessing Liberal Education Outcomes Through VALUE Rubrics.” Peer Review. Fall/Winter 2012. Association of American Colleges and Universities.

About the Author

Paul Hanstedt is Professor of English at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia. During his tenure there as director of general education, he led his campus in a successful curricular revision that resulted in a theme-based general education program featuring writing, quantitative reasoning, and oral communications across the curriculum. The corecipient of a half-million-dollar grant from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education for sustainable faculty development, Hanstedt also received a Fulbright to spend a year in Hong Kong as part of a team supporting the universities there as they designed and implemented general education programs. In addition to his work in curricular, course, and faculty development, he is an active writer of fiction and nonfiction, recently publishing Hong Konged, a memoir of his year in Asia with his three children under the age of ten.

Acknowledgments

I must begin by expressing my gratitude to the Fulbright organization, as well as to Po Chung, without whom my time in Hong Kong and this subsequent book would not have been possible. Similarly, many thanks go to Tom Osgood, Glenn Shive, and the people on the ground at the Hong Kong America Center who made it all work.

My thinking in matters of general education (and otherwise) has been invaluably shaped by my Fulbright colleagues that year: David Campion, Joe Chaney, Janel Curry, Hedley Freake, Gray Kocchar-Lindgren, and David Pong. In particular, I owe a debt of gratitude to Hedley Freake, who first pointed out to me the idea that curricular models are not either-or but rather exist on a continuum. After that, everything began to fall into place.

I also acknowledge the support of Roanoke College, my home institution, particularly its wise and patient president, Mike Maxey. In addition I owe a great deal to various faculty and administrators, past and present, for their support: John Day, Michael Hakkenberg, Richard Smith, Adrienne Bloss, Susan Kirby, Sabine O'Hara, Katherine Hoffman, Gail Steehler, Chris Lee, Robert Schultz, Wendy Larson-Harris, Chris Buchholz, and many, many others, without whom my understanding of general education would be greatly diminished. Thanks also go to Dan Johnson of Washington and Lee University, whose wisdom in the field of psychology was invaluable to me throughout this project.

I thank the administration, faculty, and staff of the Hong Kong Institute of Education. My time there taught me a lot about the complexities of developing and implementing a sophisticated curricular model. In particular, I thank President Anthony B. L. Cheung, Professor C. C. Lam, Dr. K. S. Lee, Dr. William Sin, Dr. Huixian Xu, Dr. Iris Kam, Elaine Cheng, Nana Lai, Tracy Yeung, and the infinitely wise and gracious Dr. Anita Kit Wa Chan. Additional thanks go to Dr. Christopher Deneen, of Hong Kong University, and Dr. Gavin T. L. Brown, of the University of Auckland, for their constant support, complete unwillingness to settle for easy answers, and slightly off-kilter perspectives on what is and is not funny.

Many thanks as well go to the Association of American Colleges and Universities, particularly Debra Humphreys and David Tritelli, for their support of this project and my work more broadly.

I conclude by pointing to four scholars and writers whose work has influenced my own efforts in the classroom, on the page, and in workshops. Pretty much any time I discuss matters of course design, I am thinking about the work of Barbara Tewksbury, whose approach to course design is a model of common sense; in addition, James Zull, whose book The Art of Changing the Brain helped me understand the biological basis for learning; James Bean, whose Engaging Ideas has become a bible for all who are interested in writing- and thinking-across-the-curriculum; and Jerry Gaff, whose “Avoiding the Potholes: Strategies for Reforming General Education” has influenced everyone working with curricular reform in liberal education for the past thirty years. Anyone interested in making sense of an academy overwhelmed by changing expectations, tightening budgets, and myriad social and political forces intent on reshaping the university will find comfort, insight, and clarity in the work of these four scholars.

Finally, my love and thanks to Ellen and the kids for being kind and reminding me of what matters.

Introduction

Perhaps it's best to begin by stating the obvious: today's faculty are busier than ever before. In the past few decades, research and publication expectations at universities at most B.A.-, M.A.-, and Ph.D.-granting institutions have gone up. Teaching loads, by contrast, have not gone down. Indeed, with tighter budgets, chances are that faculty will see more students, not fewer, in their classrooms. And with new initiatives ranging from assessment to diversity to green campuses, the degree to which faculty are expected to serve on departmental and university committees, advise students, and perform other forms of service has generally risen.

In addition, lately academia seems to be taking its cues from corporate America and embracing paradigm shift at a dizzying rate. Every year it seems that the administration comes to the faculty with a new catchphrase, an altered mission focus, a new five-year plan. It's not uncommon for faculty facing an institutional discussion of “curricular change,” “curricular revision,” “core development,” “general education,” “liberal education,” or “integrative learning” to find themselves groaning inwardly and thinking, Oh, no. Here we go again.

Or maybe not. Maybe some of us—graduates of liberal arts institutions perhaps, or those in a field that embraces interdisciplinarity, or maybe just those who are broadly curious—have a different response. These folks may remember with fondness the startling realization they had in a required class outside their intended major, or the spark of connection they experienced when they understood that what was happening in the mathematics class and the philosophy class were not so very different.

In the end, it probably doesn't matter how we respond, intellectually or emotionally, to the possibility of curricular change because chances are, it's going to happen. Every year the American Association of Colleges and Universities hosts a general education workshop, offering teams of faculty the opportunity to spend five nights in eight-by-twelve cinderblock dorm rooms and five days discussing curricular revision with their colleagues and experts in the field. And every year universities from all over the world have their applications declined because there isn't space to accommodate everyone who is interested.

The reasons for this surge in interest in curricular revision are many and are covered in detail in Chapter One. Suffice it to say, though, that much of it has to do with the recognition that the world is changing dramatically and quickly and that the old ways of doing things might not be effective enough anymore. Indeed, the rate of change is such that some would argue that the title of this book is inaccurate: it's not “general” education we're after anymore, a term many associate with breadth and that evolved from Enlightenment and Victorian era ideas about what makes a person cultured. These days, more often than not, the term of choice is liberal education, indicating not a left-leaning slant to scholarly thinking but a sense of what it means to create liberated human beings—people who are independent and flexible in their thinking and capable of responding to the demands of a changing world in civic-minded, deliberative ways.

So what does this mean for the people who teach the classes, serve on the committees, and do the scheduling for the next term and the term after that? Quite a bit, actually: it means new opportunities and new challenges. It means lots of discussions with colleagues in their own and other departments; it means some heated debates, some anxieties, and some new insights that may cause us to look at our work and our students in different ways.

Most of all, though, it means something of a learning curve. There are new terms, new assumptions (often counterintuitive), new data, new methodologies. And while we'd like to think that university faculty would by nature be inclined toward lifelong learning and adaptation to change, when it comes to engaging in an entirely new way of thinking about our work, some of us may be resistant. Perhaps it's because we're so busy or bound to tradition but as one scholar pointed out at a workshop I once attended, “Statistically faculty are more likely to leave their spouses than change institutions.” In short, we like our jobs the way they are.

The purpose of this book is not necessarily to alleviate any anxieties we might have about general education, liberal education, or curricular change, though that would be a nice by-product. Rather, I designed and wrote this book to give a quick introduction to current trends in general education reform, as well as a sense of its implications for our work, particularly in the classroom.

General Education Essentials: A Guide for College Faculty is divided into three parts, moving from macro to micro. The titles of each part pretty much speak for themselves. Part One, “The Big Picture,” discusses curricular design overall, the trends and options, and why general education is evolving the way it is.

Part Two, “General Education at the Course Level,” looks at the implications of this evolution for our work in the classroom: how will it affect syllabi, content, what we do and don't cover in the classroom? As with Part One, Part Two consists first of these ideas in the abstract and then offers several illustrations designed to clarify and spark instructor thinking.

Part Three, “General Education at the Assignment and Assessment Level,” is slightly less symmetrical. It too begins with a discussion in the abstract of the implications of current general education trends for the types of work we ask our students to do. I offer multiple examples in multiple fields exploring some of the techniques we might use to ensure that students are gaining the skills they need to be insightful scholars and productive citizens. Chapter Six, “The Chapter You May Want to Skip: Institutional Assessment and General Education,” may at first seem like a departure from a microfocus on the classroom, but perhaps university assessment should be driven by what happens in the classroom rather than the other way around.

As is perhaps clear by now, what follows is by no means an exhaustive discussion of general education; rather, the emphasis is on giving faculty enough information to get them into the conversation. Beyond that, I've assumed that because we're all scholars, readers who are interested in a particular topic will take the time to do further research.

Chapter One is essential for understanding the shift from distributive to integrative models of general education, but readers can pick and choose among the chapters depending on their particular need and the degree to which they want abstract theories (Chapters One, Three, and the first section of Chapter Five), or specific curricular ideas for implementation (Chapters Two, Four, and Six and the later sections of Chapter Five).

General Education and Its Relation to the Major

When I first led a curricular revision on my own campus, I made the announcement that whatever the specifics of the curricular model we developed would be, it should in no way have any impact on the majors at my college. My thinking at this point, I'll confess, was fairly cynical. As is the case at many other campuses, curricular revision at Roanoke College was a touchy subject. Faculty were worried about how it might affect their teaching, their workload, their majors, their time for research. It was my sense that by drawing a very clear demarcation between the majors and general education, we could ease faculty anxieties about the former and aid the progress of the latter.

In retrospect, I think this was an unproductive decision. I say this not because I now believe that general education should be allowed to reshape majors and other programs. Rather, I wish I'd kept the conversation about general education and its relationship to the major going because separating the two may limit the ability of general education to aid the major in creating better graduates. Allow me to explain what I mean by this. There are many who assume general education works as shown in Figure I.1.

Figure I.1 General Education as Foundational

In this model, “general education” is assumed to encompass simple foundational skills that, once gained, will enable students to do the “real” work. (I've actually heard this term used, at several institutions on several continents.) I understand something of the impulse behind this way of thinking. It's nice to imagine that someone else can teach our students “basic” skills before they get to the major, relieving us of that duty and allowing our courses to pursue more high-end work.

Unfortunately, this approach fails to acknowledge something that most faculty experience nearly daily: just because a student has learned something in his first year doesn't mean he'll remember it in his advanced classes. The brain isn't a lockbox that holds every piece of information it encounters, providing easy access when retrieval is appropriate. Rather, as a biologist friend puts it, the brain operates more like a use-it-or-lose-it circuit board, creating strong neural networks when information is applied regularly and allowing unused networks to fade into nearly irretrievable obscurity.

Then there's the fact that many of the skills we consider basic and foundational aren't really that. Ronald Kellogg, a University of St. Louis psychologist who studies writing, asserts that the kinds of expository work we ask our students to do is akin to becoming an expert violinist or chess player, requiring a minimum of five thousand hours of solitary practice simply to rise above the level of amateur (2008). As much as we may like to believe that a required first-year course in writing (or math or oral communications or anything else) exonerates us from ever having to teach these skills in our major courses, the fact is that such an approach will likely leave both us and our students disappointed and frustrated.

Perhaps a better way to think about general education in relation to the major looks something like the model in Figures I.2 and I.3. In both of these models, general education runs throughout a four-year curriculum. As a result, several things occur:

Figure I.2 General Education and the Major: An Alternative Perspective

Figure I.3 General Education and the Major: Another Alternative Perspective

Students have the opportunity to develop the skills associated with contemporary general education throughout their time at college.

Consequently, having repeated practice with these skills at increasingly complex and intellectually demanding levels, students will have a better chance of learning them.

Also consequently, majors will benefit by having students arrive in their classes more practiced in these essential ways of thinking.

Some would argue that some of the skills in question should be taught in the majors, not in general education. And indeed they should be: reinforcing skills like critical thinking and quantitative reasoning in a student's major, where intrinsic motivation is likely to be higher, not only provides students with added practice in these areas but hammers home the point that these skills matter; they're not just some stuff that some committee somewhere decided was good for students. But to think that majors can carry the burden for teaching these skills on their own ignores the reality that content in most fields is growing at an exponential rate, making absolute coverage increasingly difficult, if not impossible. (More on this in Chapter One.)