| Presentation:
Overview of General Education Reform
UCLA’s reform of its General Education (GE) programs about 5 years ago led to a thorough review of both structure and content. The University of California (Berkeley/San Diego) Commission on General Education in the 21st Century (http://cshe.berkeley.edu/publications/publications.php?id=254) tends for obvious reasons to focus on what is done at large public research universities and endorses much of what UCLA has done to reform GE. Most approaches to GE programs have been of the “cafeteria” model rather than the “bundling” model, but examples of both can be found at UCLA. There are also two ways we can understand GE reform: one is in the area of content, and the other is in the “habits of mind” with which we approach that content. In UCLA’s Department of Musicology, this reform involved not only changing the kinds of music taught, but also transforming how courses address the relationship between culture and music.
General Education at UCLA
At UCLA, GE takes two distinct forms. On the one hand, UCLA offers discipline-based, quarter-long GE courses in three broad Foundation Areas, the main focus of the GE reform five years ago. On the other hand, UCLA also offers incoming first-year students a series of year-long interdisciplinary courses with a culminating seminar, known as GE Clusters, which have been in place for over a decade. While the latter may be thought of as a “reinvention,” it is also important to engage in “transformation,” taking what we have and working with it. Disciplinary-based GE courses at UCLA provide undergraduate students with focused perspectives on culture, society, arts, humanities, and scientific inquiry.
UCLA provides students with the opportunity for in-depth exploration of such topics in the hope that they will integrate ideas introduced in these courses with others they may take across campus. For many departments, building up their minor degree programs is a good way to offer students a broader educational experience, and we believe that GE courses can function as a gateway for students to become minors in a given discipline. The quarter system, while unsatisfactory in some ways, allows UCLA professors to develop a wider variety of focused courses within these curricular structures and to teach more directly from their own research. Engaging faculty in this way is essential to the success of the new GE curriculum.
Case study: Music History at UCLA
The conventional models for courses taught in music history in the 1970s and 1980s focused on the “appreciation” of canonic composers such as Beethoven and Bach, or of “great genres” such as the Opera and the Symphony. There was an unexamined cultural bias towards German composers because music history as a discipline was founded by German émigrés. There were some notably innovative courses in the old curriculum, such as “Women in Music,” “American Popular Song,” and “Sacred Music.”
The new models have introduced new genres and topics, including a greater emphasis on music in popular culture. Courses such as “Getting Medieval” or “Electronic Dance Music” span the classical/popular divide. By the 1990s, the department stopped teaching “appreciation” and focused instead on increasing students’ understanding of the cultural, political, and historical context out of which canonic works emerged. At the same time, new courses on the American musical, film and music, the Beatles, Rock ‘n’ Roll, jazz, Motown, blues, and LGBT music have been developed. The department still teaches a year-long survey course on opera, as well as courses on Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, and the symphony, but the content has transformed to reflect the discipline’s evolution.
Illustration
The Sound of Music is taught in Dr. Knapp’s course, “The American Musical.” The course takes a thematic rather than strictly historical approach and asks how the American musical (specifically through its music) addresses issues of national identity, including history and mythology, race and ethnicity, WWII, and exoticism. Dr. Knapp also asks about how musicals address personal identity by including themes of fairy tales, fantasy, idealism, gender and sexuality, and relationships. Through this thematic approach, students are encouraged to think like a musicologist by asking questions such as, “How does music contribute, by shaping or reinforcing (or even contradicting) content? How does the American musical “transfer” content to culture?”
The Sound of Music not only includes many important tropes of musicals (often shared with opera) and of nationalism (aligning landscape, people, and sensibilities), but also presents a problem in its distortions of history. Students learn both how musicals “work” and how they shape our views of history; thus, the musical allows us to see a “good Europe” (whatever the realities of Austria) that Americans can continue to see as the source of their heritage.
Discussion:
Some participants asked if it is possible to define and target something essential about the humanities that faculty want students to take away from their classes, no matter which discipline. Since students might take only one course in humanities, how can we ensure that they take away something valuable? Are students missing something essential about the humanities if the focus in our courses turns towards popular culture?
One participant described how she teaches music appreciation through film, using the music in the film to create a bridge to the compositional techniques of Western art music. In this way, popular culture becomes a way to make traditional humanistic material accessible.
This approach is good, but it is also important to teach students media literacy to understand how they have been affected by popular culture. Thus, there is something important about learning how to interpret and critique it, which is not something they have already learned when they get to college.
The question remains, what should students take away? If the experiences in the course get students to read and interpret popular culture critically, do the students miss out on musical fundamentals or a sense of inherited culture? In other words, is the goal in the humanities to get students to appreciate great works that they wouldn’t have the chance to understand otherwise, or is the goal to make students better readers of culture?
This seems like a question of whether institutions want students to take what is taught and be able to generalize it to other topics or learn something grounded in a specific disciplinary point of view.
Music and other aesthetic experiences are always shaped by the contemporary culture. The whole idea of “great works” that all students should learn is an ideology that is itself shaped in specific historical and political contexts.
The question we have not addressed is “So what?” Have we concertedly stepped outside our own disciplines to understand what the justification is for what we do? The humanities are the “meta-courses,” – ethics courses, for instance – but we have not really united to identify some central questions and values. No matter how good the individual courses, as a whole, the discipline does not necessarily make the case to students about what the humanities are.
Different disciplines do not necessarily unite or agree on what critical thinking outcomes they share, but it can be done, and these foundations exist. Institutions need to articulate a set of core competencies that can cut across disciplines.
In engineering departments, there is an accreditation system that has objectively-defined goals. For example, at the end of the course, students have to be able to design a rocket engine that flies. Thus, goals can be objectively assessed.
UCLA is currently refining its “capstone” model to articulate goals for students. The cluster program has these goals built into freshman seminars and major and minor course series. But within individual courses, the goal is to have students demonstrate that they can apply course themes and content to analyze the cultural functions of how, for example, music works in a musical. What students need to learn is that they already have some idea of how music works (its conventions and meanings), but faculty have to awaken this in the students, tell them why it matters, and give them the skills to articulate and analyze the content.
Q: Do you tell them these are the goals ahead of time? What is the test?
A: Yes, we tell them ahead of time in the syllabus. And the test is the final paper.
It’s good to have a list of learning objectives in the syllabus. Some people do not like the phrase “learning outcomes” because it sounds like “no child left behind,” but we do need to ask how can we know students are learning and what they are taking away from the course.
Q: What should General Education courses achieve? What is the overarching outcome of humanities courses that encourages people to develop courses on specific topics and to teach those topics in a specific way?
A: New focuses come out of critical thinking. For example, diversity is an important goal for general education courses at UCLA (8 general education courses are listed in the application materials, including critical thinking and diversity). Some courses develop out of disciplines, while others develop out of what GE courses need to do broadly.
Q: Consider the example of alumni who return to the department and offer to donate two million dollars because the courses they took were so enriching. Can we assess whether we’re getting this kind of success? Can we measure success of courses by how they enrich the self?
A: Critical thinking is important across campus, but this is not specific to the humanities. How do we approach humanistic goals, such as the cultivation of self and ethics?
Q: Should we be able to teach or make students more ethical?
A: Some schools try, but there seems to be a consensus that humanities majors are no more ethical than other students on campus.
Q: Do we encourage ethical behavior through other means, such as broadening perspectives, emphasizing diversity, etc.?
A: The old tendency in humanities was to celebrate some kinds of art as the best. That is a problem because it says by extension that some cultures are better.
Recommendations:
- Articulate a set of core competencies for general education courses in the humanities to promote. These competencies should cut across disciplines, and should go beyond “critical thinking.”
- Continue to consider the extent to which courses in the humanities (or, perhaps, a mix of courses) should lead students to engage more thoughtfully with:
- heritage (by studying great art and literature of the past)
- issues of diversity (by considering other cultures and viewpoints)
- their own culture (by engaging directly with popular culture)
- Consider the role humanities might play in teaching ethics and civic engagement to help students become better citizens.
Resources/References:
Websites
- List of General Education Requirements at UCLA: http://www.registrar.ucla.edu/GE/
- General Education in the 21st Century: A Report of the University of California Commission on General Education: http://cshe.berkeley.edu/publications/docs/GEC-WEB.FINAL.pdf.
POWERPOINT PRESENTATION
What Should Gen Ed Courses in the Humanities Achieve? Reinvention Center Conference Proceedings 2008. Washington, DC. Raymond Knapp, UCLA Department of Musicology. |
