The First Year Experience
Yesterday was the first meeting of our First Year Programming Task Force. The purpose of the task force is to review the first year academic program offerenings and provide recommendations.
Although there is often a somewhat leisurely approach to issues as broad as this, we are nearly in crisis mode. At the February 9 Faculty Meeting, two of the most popular courses advisors use to complete a schedule for a first year students (PSY 100 Introduction to Psychology and SOC 100 Introduction to Sociology) were put out of reach of students in need of remediation in reading and/or writing. Our freshman writing course (ENG 106 Writing and Analysis I) became a co-requisite for those courses, to become a pre-requisite after a one-year transition period. Other courses may follow suit. We just can't do a good job teaching these courses if students have difficulty either reading or writing. Basically, some of us are of the opinion that we are just stealing the money of students who don't have an adequate base upon which to build.
At the March 9 Faculty Meeting a couple of days ago, the Division of Creative Arts and Technology proposed entrance requirements into their majors. Though not unusual for such a program, it does leave the possibility that some students may never fulfill those requirements and could be perpetual pre-CAT majors. So what are we going to do with them? Are the other divisions going to follow that same path to pre-ness, like we already have in Education and Nursing?
But the big blow was something that many of us didn't know was coming. The Gen Ed Committee has apparently been working on it since September and the Dean and Chairs have been discussing it at their monthly meetings since October, but the trickle-down to the run-of-the-mill faculty in some divisions just didn't happen. Or maybe it did, but I was just too busy with my tenure file to notice, as were other members of the faculty with their own pursuits. Or maybe it trickled down but the serious implications were not pointed out in some of the monthlymeetings of the divisions. Anyway, what happened on Thursday is that the course IDS 161 Freshman Seminar was deleted from the catalog.
Oh, the humanity! The crisis upon us demands Threat Level Red. Freshman start enrolling for fall classes on April 1. We have just removed what is normally 0.5 course units from their schedules (Remark: we count course units rather then credit hours. A half-credit class normally meets one time a week for 1 hour and 45 minutes, although sometimes its like a full-credit class (twice a week, for a total of 3:30) that only meets for half a semester. IDS 161 was the latter and was required of all traditional freshman. There is a course IDS 155 Pathways to Adult Learning that was untouched and covers topics of import to students who are returning to school (i.e. Adult Students)). Full time students here take 3-4.5 cu's, equivalently 12-18 hours). 80% of our students take one remedial class their first semester (our college's Mission Statement declares why this is so). Less than 20% take two. The majority of those needing remediation need it in mathematics. But the Reading and Writing segment is not insignificant (and there are the ESL students to consider as well here, who are not considered in the previous estimates). A student entering not needing remediation is normally given a load of 4.5 classes, of which Freshman Seminar was 0.5. Taking 4.0 classes or finding some other may to fill out a schedule is no problem for them. Those needing remediation in English have 1.5 filled by the remediation class, 0.5 or 1.0 in an Arts as Catalyst course (about which there are real issues), 1.0 often by Computer Literacy (which I teach knowing that the poor English skills they have make failure a real possibility), and they need at least another 0.5 or 1.0 to really be students with 4.0 cu's...and PSY 100 and Soc 100 were just removed from their reach. We have a gap. We have about two weeks to fill it. Those needing two remediation classes have 2.5 cu's accounted for and can usually fill up with the Arts as Catalyst and a Computer Literacy.
So...problems everywhere. Our deliberations yesterday puts forth a three pronged approach at solution, hoping to avoid a temporary patch in favor of the the longer view.
First off, in the Faculty Meeting, when the problem first really sunk in, the reaction was incredible. A new course was created on the spot: IDS 133 Special Topics in Freshman Studies (name to be tweaked, no doubt), offered for variable credit (0.5 or 1.0 cu's) to be a freshman level class whose main effort is to teach students how to be students by actually teaching them real subject matter (rather than the failed program we had before, wherein they study a book entitled, "How to be a Student" or some such), albeit with the foreknowledge that the course has no prerequisites and that there may be students in the classes with minimal skills in some areas. The teaching of these classes would be restricted to fulltime faculty and a few lontime adjuncts with special expertise (the Freshman Seminar classes were almost totally taught by adjuncts and members of the college's Staff). Several faculty members created versions of this almost on the spot. It took me a little longer, but I'm probably going to teach students how to be a blogger, stressing how to choose a topic, research, write, and how to use HTML. Other faculty are standing there with their heads spinning, wanting desperately that the course have some sort of structure and common content. I, for one, will try very hard to resist any attempt to do so.
Secondly, there the thought of offering sections of existing courses especially geared to ACF 97 (remedial English) students, taught by a fulltime faculty member or longterm adjunct inconjunction with a remedial writing professional. Pedagogy could be focused in such a way as to make the class material more accessible to the students without "dumbing it down" if the responsibility of teaching the students how to read and write belonged to someone else. Additionally, the students would have 2.5 cu's to work on the two subjects together and the teachers could share the load of teaching the students how to be students.
The third prong was to offer some additional offerings of courses that had no prerequisites (Arts in New York, for example), that would include more how of a How-to-be-a-Student focus. Or I could be wrong about what this prong was. I was tired. I wasn't interested in this one.
Anyway, that's where we are at. We are scheduled to have three more meetings. Things will probably change.
I welcome the input of others who have any experience with these issues...or anyone with any thoughts on the subject. Student input would be nice.
--Robyn Serven
--Bloomfield College, NJ