UNIVERSITY OF OREGON March 8, 1994
Dear Members of the University of Oregon Assembly:
The Assembly Committee on MulticuJtural Curriculum (ACMC) reported as required to the Assembly at its March meeting. The minutes of the meeting include the attached report, which we commend to your personal attention.
Initial discussion of the ACMC's report took place at the Assembly meeting. The Assembly instructed the ACMC to draft legislation implementing its report in time tor consideration (with the required notice of motion) at the April meeting of the Assembly on April 6. The Assembly also encouraged the academic units of the university to discuss the report in preparation for the April Assembly meeting. We urge, therefore, that each department, division, School, or College, as appropriate conduct such a discussion. A discussion in reasonably small groups can, we hope, lead to a fuller airing of the issues and a better informed electorate when the Assembly vote takes place. It can also provide important feedback to the ACMC. Academic units or individual faculty are strongly encouraged to provide responses to the report to ACMC Chair Paul Engelking (engelki@oregon) so that the ACMC can take into account responses from the community in crafting the legislation. Evidently, timing is important here. Meetings held in the first week of the Spring quarter will be useful, but meetings held before Spring Break will be more effective.
Davison Soper, President of the University Senate, and members of the ACMC will be pleased to attend such meetings as their schedules allow. Names, e-mail addresses, and telephone numbers are listed below.
Paul Engleking, Chair - engelking@oregon, ext.4656 John Orbell - jorbell@oregon, ext. 5061 Jack Whalen - jwhalen@oregon, ext. 3939 Jean Stockard - jeans@oregon, ext. 5005 Karen Sprague - ksprague@molbio, ext. 60g4 Roland Greene - rgreene@oregon, ext. 0521 Tim Gieason - tgleason@oregon, ext. 3741 Joe Wade - joewade@oregon, ext. 3211 Marshall Sauceda- msauceda@oregon, ext. 2994 Hillary Aitken, student representative
We both would add most sincere thanks and appreciation to ACMC members and the Chair, Paul Engelking, in particular. That group has meet weekly since October. The committee has sought input widely and repeatedly, and has considered a range of possibilities before coming up with the proposal now before the University faculty. We trust that, irrespective of opinions about the proposal or these issues, all members of the faculty will join in thanking our colleagues for their service to the University of Oregon.
Sincerely,
Norman K. Wessells and Davison Soper
Attachment
Introduction
Although the Assembly Committee on Multicultural Curriculum will make a specific recommendation to the University Assembly, we believe that the following guidelines are appropriate no matter what decision is ultimately reached by the Assembly. These are presented to the entire University community in the hope that they will promote greater harmony, communication and understanding among us all.
1. We encourage faculty to incorporate multicultural material within their classes, where appropriate. Although individual courses within the University may focus exclusively on multicultural issues, many more could probably be enriched by such material -- whether in discussion of key ideas, or in presentation of the history of the discipline and the work of particular scholars or artists.
2. We encourage the campus community to use the freedom and equality offered by the University setting to promote harmonious relationships among diverse groups. In the interest of developing long term understanding and tolerance, we encourage all members of the University community to reach out beyond their immediate peer groups to forge linkages with others. Faculty may facilitate such linkages in their classrooms by creating activities and assignments that encourage cooperative strategies and the exercise of mutual respect.
3. Finally, we encourage all members of the University to be accepting of diversity in all areas of our lives together -- to be tolerant of differences in race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and physical ability, and respectful of variations in political views, religious beliefs, and life styles. The academy cannot prosper and grow without tolerance for the entire range of intellectual approaches and commitment to freedom of expression.
Report
There is campus-wide agreement that an important goal of liberal education is increased appreciation for unusual ideas, and tolerance of unfamiliar human behavior. This is not a new goal, but the tolerance aspect of it has gained particular urgency because of the increasing cultural diversity of everyday American life. The Assembly Committee on Multicultural Curriculum has heard very strong support for teaching and learning in the following areas:
American Cultures: Issues of race and ethnicity, as well as dominant and minority cultural status, that apply particularly to contemporary U.S. society.
Pluralism and Tolerance: Monoculturalism vs pluralism and tolerance vs discrimination, addressed either as general issues, or within the experience of a particular group of people.
International Cultures: Comparison and analysis of social structures and world views that differ from those prominent in the United States.
Across campus, individuals and groups differ in the relative weight they would give to each of these areas, and disciplines vary in the degree to which two or more of the areas overlap. Ideally, a liberally educated student would be exposed to the key ideas in all three areas, but this is probably not possible in a single course. We think that a difficulty with the present Multicultural Requirement (summarized at the end of this Report) is that it does not clearly separate these areas. Hence the current tri-lemma: under one general heading, the current requirement tries to accomplish everything. The result, in some cases, is that the requirement accomplishes little and is perceived as ineffective. It was to correct this problem that an earlier committee contributed enormous time and energy. We have benefitted greatly from the explorations and insights of this earlier committee.
We hope now to be useful to the community at large by delineating the distinct goals of a multicultural curriculum, and by proposing a way to begin to achieve them. We recognize that our proposal falls short of perfection. We anticipate, however, that the strong commitment to sensitivity and tolerance that we have encountered will lead the community to improve on our proposal. In the following paragraphs, we outline the methods we used to arrive at this proposal, the proposal itself, specific suggestions for implementing the proposal, and our estimate of the practical impact of the proposal. For comparative purposes, we have included descriptions of the current requirement, and the change that was proposed to the Assembly last spring.
Methods
In October, 1993, the ACMC began work by soliciting comment and opinion from the campus community. We held open meetings, often with campus guests, at bi-weekly or weekly intervals through February, 1994.
In addition, we held a public forum, and met with several governing groups representing the students, the faculty and the administration. For the most part, the committee simply listened and asked questions. Copies of all written messages to the committee, and the minutes of our meetings, are publicly available in the Knight Library.
As we listened, we recognized certain deeply-held values, which recurred in many contexts. We discussed various ways to incorporate these values into the curriculum, focussing initially on the educational objective, rather than fiscal constraints. Finally, we estimated the classroom capacity that would be required for various implementation plans. Considering both the educational goal and the cost of implementation, we came to the recommendation before you. Our decisions throughout were reached by consensus.
Supporting recommendations
In addition to the primary recommendations below, the committee suggests that following guidelines for implementing any multicultural requirement:
Incorporate multicultural values into the curriculum in general by
Departmental reviews of majors requirements to add special emphasis where appropriate;
Course development; Faculty workshops; Summer course development support;
Increase the number of 100 & 200 level courses;
Increase number of multicultural courses satisfying general education requirements.
Incorporate multicultural values into the sense of campus community with
Learning communities;
FIGS;
Freshman Seminars;
Workshops;
Short courses/lntense sequences.
Implement multicultural values in a way that assists productivity and assures quality with
Requirements that work with the general education requirements;
€ Short courses/lntensive courses;
FIGS;
Curriculum Committee review of courses for the requirennent.
Proposal
We propose that students take two classes, drawn from two of the general areas listed below.
American Cultures Pluralism and Tolerance International Cultures
At present, we estimate that the University is about 20 courses shy of the total number of courses needed for incoming students to meet this requirement (see detailed discussion in Section 2. below). In addition, the present distribution of courses among the three areas may not represent the ideal desired by the UO community. We expect that faculty and students who feel strongly about these issues will want to work together to develop courses in areas that are now under-represented. To encourage the development of workshops and other non-standard course formats that might be especially effective (for instance, short but intensive courses or Freshman Seminars), we recommend that "two coursesR be interpreted as a minimum of six credit hours that span two of the three areas. We anticipate that a large fraction of the courses that would satisfy the multicultural requirement would also satisfy other general education requirements (see a discussion of this issue with respect to the current requirement, below).
Implementation
1. Nature of courses that satisfy the requirement. A critical feature of any curriculum requirement is a clear statement of its goal, so that the potential of courses to satisfy it can be judged by the regular faculty curriculum committees. The descriptions below are our initial attempt to clarify the goals of teaching and learning within each of the three general areas. We recognize that our work in this important area is incomplete, but we hope that we have at least made the ideas crisp enough to provide a basis for reasoned discussion.
American Cultures: The goal is to focus on race and ethnicity in the United States. The idea is to consider racial and ethnic groups from historical and comparative perspectives. We have identified five racial/ethnic groups: African-American, Chicano/Latino, Native
American, Asian-American, and European-American. Courses that satisfy the requirement will deal with at least two of these groups in a comparative manner. They need not deal with discrimination or prejudice, specifically, although many certainly will.
Pluralism and Tolerance: The goal is to gain scholarly insight into the origins and dynamics of prejudice, intolerance, and discrimination. These issues may be addressed with respect to specific groups of people, in which case, courses that systematically analyze discrimination of any kind, by any group, against any other group, at any time or place, would be appropriate. In addition, courses analyzing the general principles underlying tolerance, or the lack of it, will meet the requirement.
international Cultures: The study of world cultures in critical perspective. Students would take one course that either treats an international culture in view of the issues raised in the preceding categories, namely race and ethnicity, pluralism and monoculturalism, and/or prejudice and tolerance, or explicitly describes and analyzes a world-view -- i.e. a system of knowledge, feeling, and belief -substantially different from those prevalent in the twentieth-century United States.
2. Practical Aspects of Implementation
We propose that the revised multicultural requirement take effect with the entering class of Fall, 1995. Currently enrolled students are responsible for the multicultural requirement that is in effect now
Minimum number of classroom seats required:
We estimated the minimum number of seats needed each year to satisfy a one-course requirement to be between the total number of incoming students (ca. 3900) and the number of degrees granted annually (ca. 2950~. This is approximately 3500 ~ 500 seats per year.
Number of seats currently available
We reduced the number of seats available in existing courses to correct for two effects: 1. Classroom seat counts over-estimate actual class sizes. 2. Some students take additional approved courses after having satisfied the requirement. To compensate for the first effect, we used ~projected enrollmentsH obtained from the Registrar, instead of room capacity. To correct for the second effect, we examined student enrollment patterns, and determined that 38% of the projected enrollments in approved courses are students who have already satisfied the requirement. Thus, all estimates of capacity are conservatively based on the fraction (0.62) of projected enrollments that corresponds to students satisfying the requirement for the first time (see Figure 2).
Our estimates of the classes that would potentially satisfy the new requirement in each of the three key areas were more subjective. They were based on work of the previous committee, as well as current course descriptions, and we think that the error in our estimate of the total number of such courses is approximately 10-15%. Clearly, more careful consideration of potential courses by the Curriculum Committee will be required. Figure 3 shows the class capacities that could be achieved with various combinations of the areas we have delineated. For comparison, we have included the current requirement, as well as the altered two-course requirement that was proposed last spring.
Current Requirement
Under the current requirement, a student entering the University in the Fall of 1990 or thereafter must earn 3 credits in an approved course that involves either "a non-European-American topic or an issue of race or gender". The number of approved courses has grown at roughly 10% per year since the requirement was introduced. This year, for instance, 17 approved courses have been added to last year's total of 157. At the outset, the available course capacity was just the minimum needed for students to meet the requirement. The total capacity now is nearly twice the minimum needed. These classes, on the whole, are popular. Students have responded by frequently taking more than one of them apiece.
Currently, almost half of the approved courses also satisfy the University's breadth requirements: 42% satisfy either an "Arts and Lettersn, a ~Social Science" or a "Science" group requirement. (See Figure 1). The current multicultural requirement does not appear to be a strong impediment to graduation, possibly because of its significant overlap with group requirements.
1993 Proposal (last year's plan)
Students will take two courses, one on contemporary race relations in the U.S. or their historical roots of contemporary race relations in the U.S., specifically linking the historical matters to contemporary issues; or it will address in depth the social, economic, political, cultural and or psychological conditions of, and or the artistic, musical, oral, or written expressions of racial ethnic minority groups in the USA. In addition, courses that examine the theoretical conceptualization of race as a biological, historical and cultural category, and that include material about racial and ethnic minority groups in the U.S. can be counted toward fulfillment of the requirements. The second course would focus on how gender, race, ethnicity and/or class shape experience or identity, relations among social groups, or the creative expressions of women, peoples of color, ethnic minorities and/or non-European cultures.
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