Difference between revisions of "Standard 2"

==Standard 2 - Educational Program and Its Effectiveness - Description==

Evergreen's Strategic Plan identifies the college as unique in American higher education, locating itself as “the nation’s leading public interdisciplinary liberal arts college.” Since the early years of the college, Evergreen has expected students to assume significant responsibility for their learning. They were expected to define their own work and design their own course of study from the opportunities offered by the faculty in programs (full-time learning communities) and through work designed with individual faculty members. This concept of the student differed sharply from the one presupposed by both large public universities and small private colleges. The new college in Olympia would offer a reinvigorated liberal arts teaching for all. The college’s commitment to interdisciplinarity, student engagement, and collaboration rests on this vision of an inclusive, public, egalitarian liberal arts education.  

Evergreen traces its origins to debates over higher education within higher education in the nineteen sixties and seventies. This debate involves two quite distinct but crucial critiques that contributed profoundly to the college’s pedagogical assumptions and practices. First came a critique of the multiversity, the large-scale public multi-disciplinary institution that blossomed in the post-war years. From the point of view of this critique, most forcefully embodied in the Berkeley ‘Free Speech” Movement, the multiversity existed primarily for the benefit of corporate/governmental interests. It functioned to maintain a supply of useful technicians and professionals. This critique saw the public university as serving class interests rather than living up to the ideals of a democratic educational system that would educate citizens broadly. The second critique assessed the liberal arts tradition as manifested in the small private liberal arts colleges. This critique began with the stodginess and irrelevance of the canon, and the unwillingness of liberal arts colleges to take on the issues of race, class, war, and revolution. This critique centered on the failure of the liberal arts colleges collectively to act on their own professed values as they distanced themselves from the world of action. In the face of the crisis of civil rights, the Viet Nam war, and questions of class privilege the liberal arts were stuck defending texts, traditions, and positions that did not question the status quo. The critique of the multiversity questioned the failure of democratic education and the lack of moral judgment about public policy. The critique of the small liberal arts college viewed the moral tradition and ethical questions as outdated, abstracted from the world, and hence irrelevant. These debates in the context of the turmoil of the times made it possible for such important moderates as then Governor Dan Evans and State Senator Gordon Sandison to call for a new college that would take anew and alternative approch to college education.  

The founding faculty of Evergreen, for the most part men in their thirties and early forties, envisioned a college that, above all, was engaging. They wanted a public college that could provide the best elements of the liberal arts college – a college that could acknowledge and deal with ethical issues, one which saw the world as intellectually comprehensible and one which offered students opportunities to learn and to act for the good of the community, not simply for individual or corporate aggrandizement. In the planning year the work of Alexander Meiklejohn,   Joseph Tussman, and John Dewey provided models of educational reform that took intellectual rigor and public engagement as fundamental goals. In short, they believed in public education as a public good. They hoped for an education that would support action, engagement, and collaboration with diverse others; an education within a meaningful community context. They created an education that offered opportunities and curricular structures geared to engaged learning, not passivity. They wanted students to take control of their own education, to make real value-centered coherent choices about what they learned, how they learned, and what they did with the education they received. At the heart of these desires was a passionate debate about concern for authentic learning. All of the above characterizations of the college were contested, but in the crafting of the structure, a template the college has been tinkering with and transforming ever since, these were central values.

As was argued in the opening pages of this self-study, the President and the founding faculty wanted to create a public college devoted to teaching and learning in an interdisciplinary, collaborative framework within which students must exercise autonomy and judgment. Charles McCann’s four nos: No academic departments, no faculty ranks, no academic requirements, and no grades were seen as a vehicle to liberate faculty and students. The lack of departments and ranks allowed faculty to work and collaborate across disciplinary boundaries and across differences in age and experience. The lack of requirements and grades freed students to work together to share and collectively create their learning without endangering their own class standing. Collaboration, not competition, became the fundamental vehicle for organizing teaching and learning. While within the college the breadth of the challenge to the conventions of higher education was reasonably well understood, the external world tended to know the college in its first decades primarily on the basis of the above negatives and on the basis of the inevitable conflation of long hair, protest, and defiant optimism with a hippie haven and/or radical protest.

 

It is in this context of extraordinary student and faculty autonomy that the college has developed. The individual student is responsible for the content of his or her degree. The faculty, while they exercise significant control over the work of students in programs, frames its desires for the overall outcomes of student work at the college in terms of expectation rather than requirements.  As part of the response to the last round of accreditation the college developed six expectations of an Evergreen Graduate.

* to articulate and assume responsibility for your own work,

 

* to participate collaboratively and responsibly in our diverse society,

 

* to communicate creatively and effectively,

 

* to demonstrate integrative, independent, critical thinking,

 

* to apply qualitative, quantitative and creative modes of inquiry appropriately         to practical and theoretical problems across disciplines,

 

* to demonstrate depth, breadth, and synthesis of learning and the ability to reflect on personal and social significance of learning as a culmination of your education,

 

These are clearly expectations, not requirements. The faculty when they adopted them saw them as both an appropriate response to a concern for breadth across disciplines and as an articulation of the need for students to identify and take responsibility for their work at the college.  

===Standard 2.A - General Requirements===

====2.A.1 - Institutional Support to Academics====

Academic offerings are supported by faculty, facilities, equipment, and staff support.

Facilities supporting academics includes teaching spaces and offices. Each faculty member teaching half-time or more is provided an office. Those teaching less than half-time may be allocated a shared office space. Faculty offices average 140 square feet, in accord with state standards.

Faculty are allocated computers, software, and peripherals in accordance with their teaching and professional development needs. Regular faculty are provided new computers with a turnover rate that averages four years. Visitors and adjuncts are provided reassigned computers from inventory when possible or new computers if adequate computers are not available. Faculty and academic staff computers are funded from a dedicated summer school revenues pool that provides $225,000 per year for this purpose. Due to the wide range in computing needs, faculty request and receive a variety of computers: laptops, desktops, Apple, PC, high-end processors, and more standard configurations. This also applies to software and peripherals.

In addition to individual faculty resources, space and equipment are also provided for specialized facilities including computer labs,media labs, science labs, art studios, performance spaces, galleries, research space, etc. The College has a dedicated equipment fund of approximately $250,000 per year, often supplemented by additional funds when special initiatives, such as renovations, warrant it. Each year academics, like other divisional units across the campus, identifies new and replacement equipment needs that support the curriculum. These lists are prioritized in a master list for funding. In general, roughly one-third of the equipment requested by the academic division in any given year are actually funded. This is sufficient to meet the most critical curricular needs, but not enough to provide anywhere near all of the equipment requested.

The College depends on equipment grants to partially or completely fund the most expensive equipment. Faculty collaborate with the Grants Office to pursue this funding.

Each academic program is also awarded a budget based on the number of students expected to enroll and the kind of goods and services that will be needed to deliver the curriculum.  Program faculty complete budget request that include expenses for photocopying, honoraria for guest speakers, supplies, motor-pool vans for field trips, film/video rentals, laboratory and studio expenses, etc. Programs anticipating higher-than-usual expenses, such as those with an international travel component, may include additional support in their request.

 

A number of academic support services are centralized including academic budgeting, support for travel, institutional research and grants. Professional staff provides technical support for both the arts and sciences, and these are budgeted through the Provost’s office. Again, this support is typically adequate although demand for this support varies from quarter to quarter and year to year depending on the curricular offerings. Faculty are assigned Program Secretaries that support the narrative evaluation process and provide administrative support to program activities.

====2.A.2 - Educational Goals====

In the work leading to the college’s first strategic plan and in the 1988 Self Study for Accreditation the five foci of an Evergreen education were first enunciated. They have served the college well over the years as a central articulation of its mission. The following section lays out the five foci and articulates the ways in which these foci are implicated by the work of reflexive thinking, and lead the educational practices of the college.

 

 

The five foci of an Evergreen education, interdisciplinary study, personal engagement in learning, linking theory with practice, collaborative/cooperative work, and teaching across significant differences have played a central role in creating both a curriculum and a rationale for a curriculum. They inform both the programs and our articulation of them at all levels of the institution. These foci capture much, but not all of what is done at Evergreen. Many of our actual activities contribute to more than one focus.

Interdisciplinary study is fundamental at Evergreen. At the heart of such study is the intellectual conviction that academic disciplines have limits inherent in their epistemology, their explanatory concepts and the like and that in the presence of complex phenomena the inadequacy of isolated of accounts from different disciplines is revealed. Seldom if ever are the accounts of any one discipline all that can or needs to be said about such phenomena. Further, the attempt to understand phenomena apart from their context in the world often simply misses the critical importance of the phenomena and their meaning. For us to know complexly and think reflexively demands that we see from diverse perspectives and ask our own questions of the phenomena we study. Interdisciplinarity provides students with at least three crucial intellectual understandings that help them recognize their perspectives and generate their questions. First, different disciplines can indeed hold different and valid understandings about a particular phenomenon. Interdisciplinarity pushes students beyond a disciplinary understanding and forces them to complicate and contextualize their views of what is at issue. Second, interdisciplinarity illustrates the ways in which different disciplines illuminate differing aspects of reality, thus extending and complicating student views of what a phenomenon actually is. Finally, an interdisciplinary understanding more accurately reflects the world as students encounter it in internships, volunteer service, and field research. The significance of interdisciplinary work and the ways in which it supports students as they move beyond Evergreen is echoed in alumni survey data and qualitative accounts.

There is little orthodoxy about which church of interdisciplinarity Evergreen faculty members attend. Acolytes of instrumental multi-disciplinary, thematic study, project based experience and more teach at the college, yet nearly all agree that interdisciplinary work provides the essential pattern that allows for the emergence of connections, the creation of new kinds of understandings, and ultimately the possibility for students to find their own way/work into the curriculum. Students experience interdisciplinarity in a variety of ways, but at the center is the sense that the pieces of work that they are asked to do within a program fit together in complex and surprising ways. ([[Media: student focus group_standard2_7feb08.pdf|Student Focus Group - Standard 2 - Feb7, 2008]]) Faculty as they become effective as interdisciplinary teachers retain skills and competences they brought with them to the college and expand into new competences and connections as they work and learn with colleagues and students over the years. (David Marr, Personal Comments 2/08) All that is interdisciplinary is not team teaching and vice versa. Individual faculty members often expose students to more than one discipline and single programs with two faculty members with similar backgrounds may or may not be interdisciplinary.

The founders of Evergreen were concerned to create a college where students felt deeply engaged with the process and substance of learning. At its heart personal engagement in learning was understood to be the students’ development of a capacity to know, to speak, and to act on the basis of their own self-conscious beliefs, understandings, and commitments. The reflexive capacity to think about one's own work that emerges and develops throughout a student’s engagement with the material and other people over time is central to their sense of commitment. The emphasis on participation, on reasoned evaluation and involvement in their own, their colleagues, and their faculty members’ work strengthen this engagement. Engagement then is more than interest. It involves complex reflection on the significance and meaning of what we know; it reflects a concern for the consequences, effects, and implications of understanding as a part of knowing. Such engagement is supported in the college’s emphasis on full-time study for 16 quarter hours credit per quarter. The lack of graduation requirements compels students to make personal choices about their work. Such work in the end could be something quite conventional,such as medicine or Art History or it could be rather unconventional, a Kayak maker, an independent film-maker, or a specialty vegetable farmer. What distinguishs this work is the way the work implicates the person as whole.

Work in programs, especially programs that extend across several quarters, is engagement in a full time learning community. Here the relations are to the material, but also to the persons with whom one works. This conflation of persons and materials can lead to an intensification of engagement that creates powerful, shared intellectual, social, personal, and aesthetic excitement. Students discover that personal growth and engagement in a community are often complementary realities. This complex reality in which students pursue their own goals through shared endeavor and cooperation is the center of the experience of a learning community and critical to most students' experience of Evergreen. The capacity students develop to know, learn from and accept the work of others constitutes a challenging exercise in representational thinking - thinking through the eyes of another.

Theory, central concepts, or ideas then are regularly tested in three major ways in students' experience at the college. First, students are asked to take their experience in the classroom into the world, in hands-on projects, internships, performances, presentations, case studies, and a wide variety of research work. Learning about a phenomenon is tested against the experience of it. Ideally an Evergreen student should be learning and being challenged in the classroom and theworld outside the college. Beyond this, theory and ideas are tested against the disciplinary and interdisciplinary phenomena they are purported to explain. Does the theory in fact illuminate the phenomena? If so how and to what extent? Finally, theories and ideas are tested against the context of culture and society within which they arise. How do theory and ideas inform cultural practices? How are theories and ideas explained by power relations, religious interpretation or some larger cultural/social reality? Thus the linkage of theory and practice is fundamental to the development of judgment, to the awareness of the cultural and political dimensions of knowledge, and the creation of active citizens who are capable of entering into dialogue with the world in which they live. In the learning community of the program and the broader community, students are challenged to take responsibility for their work and their judgments. By bringing the experience of the classroom into the world and vice-versa, the student is pressed to understand her knowledge as a substantive description, as a personal experience, and as a political and social phenomenon.

Collaborative/cooperative work anchors the educational experience at Evergreen. The capacity for sharing and creating work within a cooperative context of respect for individuals and their diversity of perspectives, abilities, and experiences, is a central motif of nearly all Evergreen studies. In an array of practices such as seminars, group projects, narrative evaluations, peer critique of student work in all fields and the inclusion of students from widely diverse back-grounds and experiences within programs, the fundamental assumption is that students benefit from participating in a learning community to create their own educations. This practice takes the idea of representational thinking head-on and suggests that as we come to see, understand and incorporate others understandings of experience, our own becomes deeper and more complex. Reciprocally, as we are seen and understood by others, we come to know ourselves differently and better. As students share their understandings of their learning they transform their experience and learning into meanings. Thus work in the context of a community of learners is central to the development of a capacity for risk, judgment, and responsibility.

The fundamental pedagogic assumption is that learning is both a personal and social activity. The work of the college assumes collaboration is in the long run more conducive to the creation and acquisition of complex understandings and useful knowledge than is self-centered competition. By creating collaborative learning communities the college seeks to create both a context within which quite diverse ideas and concepts can be examined, but also a context that allows students to bring to the classroom some of that array of conversation and learning that in most schools occurs informally. This inclusiveness of experiences and ideas from other portions of the program and from student lives creates learning communities that can capture and promote the experience of real dialogue about ideas, texts, art and experience that make education engaging and exciting. The college encourages cooperation because we believe, despite the rhetoric of competition in this society, that most of the work that is accomplished in the world is a product of cooperative, engaged choices. The capacity to collaborate is the most fundamental of public skills.

Teaching and learning cross significant differences reflects the fundamental recognition that as learners we do not bring to our experience of education the same array of qualities and life experiences. These differences provide the source of our capacity to learn from each other and, potentially, a barrier to that learning. These socially defined and personally experienced differences include such obvious and important categories as race, ethnicity, religion, class, sexuality and gender which underlie so much of American experience, but they also include less obvious and well defined and understood experiences as age, disability, first generation college experience, rural or urban up-bringing, or personal qualities such as intelligence, shyness, mental illness and the like. Within the context of the college, differences bring   both a potential for great learning and a possibility of great damage. They call upon us to develop qualities of respect, attentive listening, and sensitive and thoughtful speaking. They are at the heart of our capacity to communicate and to participate responsibly in a diverse seminar and community. Central to Evergreen’s experience of these differences is the practice of narrative evaluation and the desire to promote collaboration. While these practices have their own pitfalls, they suggest that a single standard and an assumed uniformity of experience is not the case and that respectful recognition and awareness of difference is an essential element in working with students to help them define and achieve the overall goals of an Evergreen liberal arts education. As with cooperation and collaboration this focus suggests that the role of representational thinking through the eyes of the other is a critical capacity in the development of a complex reflexive understanding and worldview. Learning and the reflexive thinking about the embeddedness of knowledge in history, in critical social differences, creates a context in which the exercise of freedom to promote new understandings entails a responsibility to imagine and know the impact of our acts on others.

In the 1999-2000 and 2000-2001 school years, at the urging of the Commission, the college undertook a review of its understanding of General Education. During two years of debate, discussion, and struggle, the college rejected requirements and produced an important document that articulated the goals of an Evergreen education from the point of view of the student. This document – The Six Expectations of An Evergreen Education - has proved useful in expressing for advisers, students, and prospective students some of the elements that describe an effective pathway through Evergreen. The goals are understood to be just that – goals – not subject matter requirements nor mandatory skills. Thus while students may, and often do, undertake meeting these goals, the requirement in fact falls on faculty to make sure that as often as it makes sense,  opportunities to meet the goals are present in the curriculum and their teaching. As will be more explicitly argued below, the goals map in complex and important ways onto the five foci and can be seen as a rearticulation of the foci in terms of potential outcomes for students.

The six expectations of an Evergreen Graduate are

 

 

 

 

 

The work students are capable of is seen as complex. They link and engage analysis from different disciplinary perspectives. They see cultural/social contexts. They communicate understandings that are significant to themselves and their society. Such an education then neither replicates the faculty, nor simply replicates the disciplines, traditions, professions, and skills that they profess. Instead, it encourages each student to ask his own questions, to test his own hypothesizes, and to make new mistakes. This education is at once potentially conservative and radical. It's conservative in that the work is tested against the society and academic disciplines broadly, and radical in that it is always implicitly a challenge to existing conventions and knowledge. At the heart of Evergreen’s understanding of education is a belief that whatever that education is in terms of substance, it should be self consciously and thoughtfully chosen by the student. Each student should see and articulate his own work in the context of engagement with others. Skills and capacities are not autonomous and instrumental, but embedded in the context of a person’s education as a whole and more broadly embedded in the social order through participation in and reflection on that order by students. Thus the fundamental goal can be seen as developing a capacity for reflexive thought on the part of students. This reflexive capacity demands both engagement with and inquiry into the world and the work of the student as an active, self-conscious participant in the world.

The five foci and the six expectations are different articulations of very similar understandings about the central nature of Evergreen. The foci speak primarily to the content and nature of the curriculum offered. They articulate the emphasis on interdisciplinarity, cooperation, work across difference, the constant interplay of theory and practice, and student engagement. The six expectations are an expression of how the qualities of a curriculum organized around these ideas should be manifest in its graduates. Here is one version of the relationship of the foci and expectations.

Personal Engagement – Articulate and assume responsibility for your own work. Participate collaboratively and responsibly in our diverse society. Reflect on the personal and social significance of your learning.

Teaching and Learning Across Significant Difference – Participate collaboratively and effectively in our diverse society. Communicate clearly and effectively.

Collaboration - Participate collaboratively and effectively in our diverse society. Communicate clearly and effectively. Articulate and assume responsibility for your own work.

Linking Theory and Practice - Apply qualitative, quantitative, and creative modes of inquiry appropriately to practical and theoretical problems across disciplines. Demonstrate integrative, independent, critical thinking. Demonstrate depth, breadth, and synthesis of learning and the ability to reflect on the personal and social significance of that learning.

Interdisciplinary – Communicate creatively and effectively. Demonstrate integrative, independent and critical thinking. Apply qualitative, quantitative, and creative modes of inquiry appropriately to practical and theoretical problems across disciplines.

As a part of the work on reaccreditation this year the college invited Elizabeth Minnich to talk with the deans and a small group of faculty working on the self study. Her discussion of reflexive thinking captured a good deal of what Evergreen sees as distinctive and important about the education and experience that Evergreen students engage as they work in and around a the curriculum as it is structured by the five foci and the six expectations. (Elizabeth K. Minnich, Knowledge, Thinking, Judgment: For Good or For Ill,” Long Island University: TASA Award Lecture, April 27, 2006; Elizabeth K. Minnich, Teaching and Thinking: Moral and Political Considerations,” Change, September/October 2003, pp.19-24)

Reflexive thinking begins with a question, an interrogation of the world, and an encounter with the other. As such it involves the student in the whole process of substantive learning about a subjects, disciplines and methods that is the standard domain of learning. But reflexivity is the capacity that a learner has to think about the situation and conditions that underlie her own personal and collective experience of thinking and knowing. She can be aware of how she has learned and what she has become through the process of learning. Minnich following Neitzche argues this form of thinking makes the learner a “problem” for herself. Not only does the learner come to know the ostensible subject of the learning (a text, a geological strata, or a piece of music), but through that knowing new questions emerge such as; how the subject is involved in a whole array of questions about the learner’s own motives, his embeddedness in society, his desires and development. Beyond that, reflexive thinking allows the student to ask questions about how the ostensible subject has come into being in a society and become enmeshed in a complex historical and social web of connections and power that underlie that discipline. Students learn to see the accounts of disciplines as partial. Thinking that makes our understanding of self and society problematic creates inquiry that is unbound by disciplinary concerns. As a person strives to understand his situation an extraordinary range of understanding from the very personal to that of any array of disciplines can become critical lenses for seeing the situation. The student become problems for herself that can be seen as arising from multiple points of view.

As learners come to understand themselves and learning in this complex way, they exercise freedom and judgment about what they have learned about themselves, and the material, social conditions that allow this way of knowing to exist. In other words the learner starts to exercise freedom and responsibility about the knowledge he has about the society, himself. Through judgment he creates new meanings. These meanings typically do not take the given assumptions that lie behind the disciplines as settled truths; they inherently challenge established understandings. This process of creating new meanings necessarily engages the learner with others in a public process of sharing understandings. Participating in this world of reflexivity pushes the individual learner to recognize difference and diversity of views and positions. In particular it demands that the learner engage not simply in reflection but in representational thinking, thinking through the eyes of others. This extraordinarily difficult and never completely successful mode of thinking forces a learner to take seriously the understandings and ways of perceiving and knowing that exist in the world. This process of thinking though the eyes of others demands that the learner and indeed the community she is a part of must learn to think historically. This means that she sees how the structure of ideas that define our views of others has come into being and is changed over time. It also implies that she see how the social institutions that have grown up historically to define the place of others and ourselves in a society. Finally, knowing of this sort is iterative, each encounter, each attempt at restatement, each expanded understanding or more clearly defined insight opens the door to response and further learning. The fun never stops. Thus reflexive and representational thinking are ultimately necessarily both very personal and public.

 

====Degree Programs Offered (2.A.3)====

At the time of this writing Evergreen offers three graduate degrees, Masters in Teaching (MIT), Masters in Public Administration (MPA) and a Masters in Environmental Studies(MES). A fourth Masters program, the Master of Education in Curriculum and Instruction with endorsements in Mathematics and English as a Second Language (M. Ed.) is scheduled to begin enrolling students in the summer of 2008. All of three of the established Masters programs have regular structures and well-established requirements that organize their work and the award of degrees. See Standard 2. D.,2.E. and 2.F.  

 

====2.A.4 - Degree Requirements====

 

====2.A.5 - Intensive programs====

 

====2.A.6 - Program Tuition====

Evergreen expects contact hours with students and the quarter long length of its programs to be similar to those expected at other Washington Public Universities. Evergreen tuition is based on level (Bachelor or Masters), residency, and the number of credits. There is no special program specific tuition.

====2.A.7 - Curriculum Planning====

The curriculum at Evergreen is planned by the faculty, the academic deans, and the directors of off site programs. The undergraduate curriculum at Evergreen is a complex mixture of regularly repeating offerings, irregularly repeating offerings, and one-time efforts. The curriculum is revised annually. Each planning unit is responsible for defining and staffing its offerings and is expected to contribute 20% of its faculty time to Core (First-Year) programs and another 20% to inter-area (teams involving faculty from two or more planning units) work. Planning in any given year is designed to develop a catalog for two years hence. Thus in the 2008-09 school year faculty will be designing the curriculum for the 2010-11 school year. The curriculum dean(s) in collaboration with the Planning Unit Coordinators (PUCs) organize a series of all faculty meetings in early fall quarter that are designed to solicit ideas, proposals, and suggestions for inter-area work at the First Year and above level.

Usually planning units meet at the fall faculty retreat and in the latter half of the quarter to identify their on-going staffing needs and to identify planning unit members interested in working in inter-area and Core. These meetings involve looking at the curriculum of the unit over a four year period: the year being planned, the current year, the next year and usually consider the year following the year being planned for. This iterative retrospective-prospective overview helps identify the needs for prerequisites, identify the appropriate cycle year for regularly, but not annually, repeating programs, identify questions of balance in subject matter, and clarify individual contributions to the units’ work. Most of the on going repeated work and advanced disciplinary work at the college is organized by planning units.

 

Unlike the full time curriculum, the EWS curriculum is planned on a one-year cycle. This structure allows the curriculum to adapt more quickly to shifts in the student body and is an aspect of the service orientation of the EWS area. The Evening Weekend Studies Dean and the continuing faculty in the area jointly control planning for the area.

====2.A.8 - Library and Information Resources====

The tension between the demands of discipline based curriculum where programs are created to meet known (or presumed) needs with known prerequisites and outcomes on the one hand, and the demands of freely chosen inquiry based on broad skills of knowing, reasoning, and communicating about issues whose outcome remain to be discovered through experience on the other, is the context within which the curriculum comes into being at Evergreen. The college puts a premium on research work in both independent learning contracts, and group and individual research projects within programs. Library and information services at Evergreen have from the very beginning had to adapt themselves to the complex ever changing focus of the programs and faculty. This has meant that these services have had to be very broad and carefully coordinated with emerging curricular needs. Standard 5.B.2. details the complex intersection of library and information resource instruction at the college.

====2.A.9 - Structural Elements of the Evergreen Curriculum====

 

The curriculum at Evergreen is designed by the faculty to further students’ ability to develop and meet the goals of an Evergreen education. The practices and structures that make up the educational experience embody both complex substantive learning and the capacities identified in five foci. Four critical elements underlie the structure of the curriculum at Evergreen: team-taught coordinated study, full time study, student self-direction, and narrative evaluation. These elements are universally present and, they most clearly and distinctively embody the practices and goals of the Evergreen educational experience. These elements are designed to optimize student’s capacity to understand and integrate material, develop complex insight and to create schedules that facilitate program level work and interaction.  

 

Programs are the distinctive mode of study at the college. A program consists of two to four (in the deep past as many as 7) faculty who together plan and deliver, generally full time, a course of study organized around a theme or body of knowledge to 50 to 100 students. The terminology about programs has changed over this period at the beginning programs were referred to as coordinated studies. Programs can be as short as one quarter or as long as three. These programs are often centered on a specific theme or set of questions that invite exploration from two or more disciplinary points of view, or they may be linked conceptually around method or subject matter in a way that promotes more complex understanding of disciplines by being taught in a collaborative fashion. In addition to coordinated study programs Evergreen offers single faculty programs that provide full-time study of advanced topics.  

By providing a structure which links ideas, questions, and disciplinary understandings together with a specific on-going group of faculty and students, coordinated study lays the groundwork for the formation of an academic community. By having the full attention of students and extraordinary freedom to design programs, faculty members are empowered to create very different, often innovative, usually exciting, learning experiences. Programs can, and often do, require major field trips, built in research times, intensive laboratory work, opportunities for travel, productions, exhibitions, and a wide variety of smaller scale curricular innovations. Ideally faculty members help shape a multi-dimensional, multi-leveled conversation that helps students form and shape their own work and builds a knowledgeable audience for their writing and research. Within a coordinated study students and faculty can develop strong friendships, working relationships, and intense conversations that draw heavily on the shared experiences of the texts and activities of the program. Coordinated study as a concept has been usefully adapted to a wide variety of time frames, persons, and levels of work. Today it is found in some form or another in Graduate programs, off-campus programs, and throughout both the full and part-time undergraduate curriculum.

Coordinated studies, their part-time counterparts, and single faculty full-time programs are organized into the curriculum of the Graduate Programs (MPA, MAT, and MES), the Tacoma Program, and the community-based Reservation Program, as well as into the undergraduate program on the Olympia Campus. On the Olympia campus the array of offerings is organized and coordinated through five planning units (Environmental Studies; Culture, Text and Language; Scientific Inquiry; Expressive Arts; and Society, Politics, Behavior and Change) and the Native American and World Indigenous Peoples Center. These areas will be discussed fully below.

Most student work at Evergreen is carried out in one form or another of full- time study. The pedagogical rationale here arises out of the coordinated study programs, especially those with a thematic base. These complex, multi-stranded, highly integrated programs make little or no sense when significant elements are removed. Similar intensive full-time work is often expected in single faculty full-time programs. This feature of the college provides the intellectual intensity described above, but also provides the flexibility of scheduling that allows the college to offer genuinely innovative work in a number of fields where large blocks of time and travel are required. Beyond this the reality that most faculty, in most programs, have control of most of their students’ time in class, and meet with those students generally 14-20 hours per week means that they know their students needs, capacities, and desires well. This knowledge allows for strong guidance and modification of program tasks, allows complex reflective evaluations of students, and lays the groundwork for effective advising. The college has allowed significantly more part-time work in recent years in Evening and Weekend Studies. The part-time study is structured both through half-time coordinated studies and course work.

 

While the structure of the college’s curriculum provides a series of pathways that students may follow in pursuing their education, there are no requirements for graduation beyond the accumulation of 180 quarter hours credit. Many of the pathways will be described in the discussion of planning units below. This open invitation to students to design their own work at the college has been a central feature of student experience from the beginning of the college. Our assumption is that working with multiple faculty and being exposed to a variety of disciplines, questions, and practices helps each student to develop a clear pattern of interests and can, with faculty and advising help, help them build an exciting, demanding, and persuasive educational path. Choices are not entirely unconstrained. Prerequisites, finding an appropriate faculty member for an individual study or internship, and the nature of the programs offered by the faculty in a particular year, limit a student’s choices, but underlying all this is the understanding that students can use the opportunities presented to identify and pursue their own work. Clearly the decision of the college to put students in charge of the choices to create their education is a radical one. Indeed of all the founding “Nos” the most radical in many ways is the relinquishment of the faculty’s authority to determine for students what is important for the student to study. Students who take this challenge seriously create an education that necessarily implicates themselves as persons, not simply as products of an educational system or consumers of educational prescriptions. Individual contracts and internships are an important manifestation of student autonomy.

 

Student narratives offer a critical response to the educational experience and often provide the rationale that links one educational experience to the next. The capacity for students to provide their accounts in the transcript evaluation speaks to the college’s commitment to taking students and their account of their experience seriously. '''For Further reflection on the Narrative Processes Please see the Narrative Evaluation Study Group Report.

Formal evaluations, the ones that appear in the transcripts, are important, but their significance is primarily documentary and retrospective. Informal evaluations, the ones that occur within programs, have the quality of being retrospective and reflective on the one hand and prospective on the other. They situate the student and the experience in midstream and ask for and elicit an assessment, adjustment, and reframing. Student self-evaluations review their work and introduce their in-program portfolio. In individual conferences a faculty member asks students to connect their experience in the program with their work, and to think about how they can come to own this experience as their own education. The conference provides an opportunity for assessment from the the student's and faculty member’s perspective. This process of reflecting examines not only the direct content of the program, but often on the experience of learning. Students are asked how they have changed as learners, how such basic acts as reading, knowing, writing have changed for them through experience. This reflexive evaluation practice, seeing one's learning and competency develop, opens up questions and helps students see a path within the program and at the end of the program provides a key to where to go next.

Three major initiatives in the past ten years have considered transcript evaluations. All of these start from the premise that a complete and well written transcript is an asset to students as they proceed from Evergreen and from a resistance to the idea of reducing evaluation to grades or rating forms. They reflect the need to create more concise and well-voiced evaluations in a timely and coherent manner. Two major committees, the first in 1996-1997 and the second in 2003-2004, produced a set of arguments for the continuing utility of the evaluation process and support for the idea that there was no single universal process for evaluation. The latter DTF developed an important document on faculty narrative strategies and provided guidelines on the length and nature of the evaluation process. A second study group (Evaluation Processing) in 2002-2004 focused on procedures for the reorganization of the handling of evaluations and their storage and maintenance as electronic documents. This process has speeded the production of transcript evaluations. The formal faculty evaluation documents contain a program description identifying the work of the program, a formal assessment of the student’s work, and the identification of the program’s activities as equivalences.

====2.A.10 - Prior Learning from Experience====

The Prior Learning from Experience (PLE) Program faculty assesses the student's past academic experience and past life experience before recommending Evergreen's PLE program. The full time staff position was cut from the budget in spring of 2003 the program was reorganized into the Evening Weekend curriculum. The coordinator from the previous staff position moved into the adjunct faculty position. The adjunct faculty forms teams of full-time continuing faculty to assess the PLE documents. A central tenet of Evergreen's PLE program is that credit is granted for learning and not for experience. Students must document that learning by drawing on current theories in particular academic fields. They accomplish this by interviewing appropriate faculty about their documents and by completing necessary research. Because faculty members grant credit for PLE documents, they grant credit only for learning which would normally occur within regular curricular offerings.

The documentation currently required for credit through PLE at Evergreen is rigorous. Most interested students, beginning in fall of 2003, take "Writing from Life", a course taught by the adjunct faculty. Course requirements include writing an autobiography, their PLE document outline, and one learning essay or chapter of their PLE document. Students then move into PLE document writing (taught by the same adjunct faculty) the following quarter and take that course for 4, 6, or 8 credits until they have earned 16 credits. At that time their essay writing is finished and they are ready for a faculty review. All students include a resume, an autobiography, a narrative description of their learning, and appendices documenting that learning such as reports or guidelines the student developed. Faculty reviewing the PLE process found the documentation to be generally more demanding than other undergraduate credit they awarded.

Evergreen awards up to a maximum of forty-five PLE credits, but sixteen of those forty-five are earned in PLE document writing. They can be awarded additional credit above 16 to achieve the full forty-five but most are awarded less than that. Credit awards are based on documentation and students are not assured of receiving the credit that they may request at any time in this process. Credit is identified as PLE via the narrative evaluation of the student's work.

The Prior Learning adjunct faculty ensures that requested credit does not duplicate credit already on the student's transcript. After the faculty team awards credit, the student receives a formal evaluation, is billed for the credit awarded, and the credit is entered on his transcript.  '''(www.evergreen.edu/priorlearning)'''

====Program additions or deletions (2.A.11/12)====

Evergreen has added relatively few new programs during the past five years

1. A new concentration track in Tribal Governance and Administration within the existing Master of Public Administration (MPA) program

2. The Extended Education program  

3. A new pathway for students seeking to earn a dual Master of Public Administration and Master of Environmental Studies degree.

4. One additional site for the Tribal: Reservation-based/Community-determined Program (RBP)

5. The Master of Education (M.Ed.) program

New academic programs are vetted through the deans, planning unit coordinators, Agenda Committee, and ultimately the faculty. If approved, the Provost requests Board of Trustee approval.  

The new Tribal MPA concentration and Extended Education were approved in this manner. The additional RBP site consisted of an expansion of an already approved academic program and was approved by the Board of Trustees. 

The M.Ed. had been included in the [[Media: ENROLLMENT_GROWTH_FINAL_REPORT_2005.doc|Enrollment Growth DTF Final Report 2005]] as one of three graduate programs that ought to be studied further for feasibility of implementation.  

Normally, approval of the M.Ed. program would have been vetted through the channels described above culminating in a faculty meeting discussion and vote. Given the unusual circumstances in which the college received funding for the M. Ed. program, this process was transposed. Essentially, the governor’s office informed Evergreen during winter break that they intended to include additional high demand enrollment growth funds for Evergreen in the state budget (funds that Evergreen did not include in its biennial budget request). This forced Evergreen’s academic administration to determine, within a very brief window of time, that the M.Ed. program was the most feasible to implement in the subsequent 07-09 biennium. This decision was immediately taken to the first faculty meeting in winter quarter for discussion. The faculty was justifiably upset that the normal a priori faculty vetting and approval process occurred after the fact but did not actively oppose the decision to accept the funds and to initiate the new M.Ed. program. This incident illustrates the tension between the pace of internal processes and external demands on the institution and faculty governance processes.

===Standard 2.B - Educational Program Planning and Assessment===

Evergreen has a multi-leveled, multi-faceted, and reflective culture of planning and assessment. Ongoing assessment and planning activities are regular and continuous, and each year specific issues which arise from the ongoing processes are identified for in-depth investigation. Assessment takes place at the level of each curricular offering, at the planning unit level and during the ongoing annual processes of curriculum design, at the level of institutional research and assessment, in governance activities and work groups tasked with investigating specific issues and problems, and by individuals who want to look deeply into particular areas of interest.

 

 

 

The Office of Institutional Research and Assessment supports the assessment and planning of educational programs through a series of regular surveys and administrative data analyses. In addition, the Office convenes assessment workshops, provides exisiting data and collects specialized data for college work groups and task forces, responds to state-level accountability requirements, coordinates inter-institutional data-sharing and assessment activities, and supports faculty-initiated research about teaching and learning. Institutional Research and Assessment continuously refines its data-collection strategies and reporting techniques to improve the usefulness of collected data for assessment and planning purposes. All of the data-collection practices present in the 1998 accreditation self-study have been refined to some extent over the past decade. The overall effect of the changes in practice is that the results represent a wider range of students, research approaches and presentations are better aligned to evolving needs and goals of the college and external reporting requirements, and engagement in the results by stakeholders has improved.

 

Evergreen administered the Cooperative Institutional Research Project (CIRP) freshmen survey for the last time in 2001. Students found many of the survey questions to be offensive and excessively personal. The incentive of paying each participant to complete the survey had become less effective with the response rate dropping from 38% in 1999 to only 19% in 2001. Furthermore, Institutional Research staff concurred with the recommendation of the Commission in 1998 that assessment processes should include transfer students given that they make up an even greater proportion of the incoming class than freshmen do. The CIRP excluded this important part of Evergreen's student body.

The Institutional Research Staff developed the Evergreen New Student Survey in collaboration with staff, faculty, and students. The entering class of 2003 were the first participants. The collaborative design resulted in a survey which reflects the concerns and understandings of Evergreen respondents and audience. Subsequent revisions have been made based on feedback from faculty, staff, and students who have used the results. New first-years and transfer students are surveyed every two years, which allows time to analyze and share results. The survey has a strong response rate. In 2005, 57% of all new transfer students and 69% of all new first-years participated in the survey. Survey results have been distributed widely and many audiences have engaged in dialogue and consideration of the results. The questions collect information about the goals, expectations, confidence, demographics, intended fields of study, and college selection process specific to Evergreen. The ability to ask Evergreen-specific questions, control over question refinement, improved response rates, and inclusion of the previously omitted transfer population, including new Tacoma and Tribal: Reservation-based students has been worth the trade-off of losing the national comparison which the CIRP provided. 

 

In 2004, Evergreen participated in the pilot of the national Beginning College Student Survey (BCSS). Response rates were very low, which did not allow for strong comparison potential with its partner survey, the National Survey of Student Engagement.  Given the strong response rates of the locally developed Evergreen New Student Survey and the stronger buy-in of college stakeholders, the college has not chosen to participate again in the BCSS.

A second survey, the Evergreen Student Experience Survey, was developed as a companion survey to the Evergreen New Student Survey. The Evergreen Experience survey is administered every other spring to collect feedback from students about their learning growth, fields of study, satisfaction with experiences, use of campus resources, and other varibles of interest to particular committees and interest groups at Evergreen. The survey is administered to random sample of undergraduates, stratified by class standing, and to a targeted oversample that includes all remaining respondents to the New Student Survey and all Tribal: Reservation-based program students. Students are assigned a common sample identification number to allow for longitudinal analysis of the relationship between incoming goals and characteristics from the New Student Survey and subsequent experiences collected through the Evergreen Experience Survey and Alumni Surveys. Over the three administrations of the survey, questions have been added to survey to respond to the needs of newer work groups, such as the Sustainability Task Force and Curricular Visions Disappearing Task Force.

 

 

Evergreen has participated annually in the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) since 2000.  This survey collects a set of data from first-year students and seniors related to student engagement and satisfaction with learning growth.  For a national survey, it has a surprising relevance, in that many of the teaching and learning experiences addressed by the survey are common, mission-related practices at Evergreen.  In addition, NSSE provides the opportunity to understand our students' feedback relative to three comparison groups each year.  This context is especially important, since our local new student, student experience, and alumni surveys do not provide external reference. NSSE data are used for accountability measures with the Higher Education Coordinating Board and as supplemental indicators of learning for our general education assessment; both of these purposes make the external comparisons especially useful.  ([[Media: Trends%2C_Highlights%2C_and_NSSE_Accountability_Performance_Indicators_2001-2007.pdf|NSSE Trends, Highlights, and Accountability Performance Indicators 2001-2007]])  Evergreen had been locally administering the learning growth index of the College Student Experience Questionnaire (CSEQ) on an annual basis and using selected results for an earlier iteration of Washington performance accountability.  Evergreen administered that survey for a final time in 2003 ([[Media:CSEQ_2003_Learning Index.pdf|CSEQ 2003 Learning Index]]).  By that time, the College had sufficient experience with NSSE to understand its effectiveness in engaging college stakeholders in assessment, and the Office of Institutional Research implemented the Evergreen Student Experience Survey in spring 2004.

In Spring 2005, all Evergreen faculty who taught undergraduates during academic year 2004-05 were asked to participate in the NSSE’s companion survey, the Faculty Survey of Student Engagement (FSSE).

The results of the student NSSE survey and the faculty FSSE provided the opportunity to explore the relationship between faculty and student perceptions of Evergreen. Faculty self-identified on the survey as to whether they primarily taught lower-division, upper-division, or "other" students. The most useful analysis of Evergreen's results was a comparison of the 21 lower-division faculty members to the results for first-year students.  ([[Media: Evergreen_Faculty_and_Student_Responses_to_Surveys_of_Student_Engagement_-_Lower-division_Comparison.pdf|Evergreen Faculty and Student Responses to Surveys of Student Engagement - Lower-division Comparison 2005]])

The regular series of Evergreen undergraduate alumni surveys are the least changed since the last ten-year self-study. Washington State's Higher Education Coordinating Board (HECB) no longer requires its public baccalaureate institutions to conduct biannual alumni surveys, but external incentives are not necessary to recognize the importance to the College of seeking alumni feedback. Institutional Research and Assessment continues to administer the following:

*Biannual Alumni Surveys, one-year after graduation

*Greeners at Work, every four years which surveys alumni three years after graduation and their current employers

 

*Five-year and Ten-year Alumni Survey, once per accreditation cycle

 

Alumni surveys are now administered via the web with paper survey follow-up for non-respondents. Response rates with these methods continue to be about 30% of the locatable members of the graduating class, despite discontinuing the telephone completion option.  The list of self-reported learning outcomes have been updated and aligned with the Expectations of an Evergreen Graduate and Evergreen's other longitudinal surveys.  Employment data collection has been refined to allow for the complexity of alumni employment activities and to allow categorization and comparison in terms of the Bureau of Labor Statistics Standard Occupational Classification codes.  Since 2002, the survey is requested from the entire graduating class and is no longer limited to graduates of the Olympia campus.  Volunteer activities of alumni are now captured by the survey.  Graduate school acceptance, as opposed to simply attendance, is collected and is a new legislatively mandated performance measure.  Results are disaggregated by the alumni-reported primary planning unit of their studies at Evergreen and for off-campus sites as possible given staffing and sample size constraints.  An unfortunate side-effect of the removal of alumni surveys from the HECB Accountability agenda is that the "14 common items" that were previously shared by our public baccalaureate peers are no longer collected and shared between institutions.  Each institution exercised the freedom to update the series of alumni learning growth items to better align with their own educational objectives. Thus, each institution has more mission-specific learning outcome data from alumni, but they lost a peer context through which to explore their results. 

New techniques were developed by the Assessment Study Group in academic year 2001-02 to assess the implementation of the new general education initiatives. The End-of-Program Review instrument collects information from all programs as to whether they included work in Art, Humanities, Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, quantitative reasoning, writing, critical thinking, and information technology literacy. Advising practices were collected during the first few years. Based on the evolving emphases of the Evergreen community several new data collection elements have been added to include oppression, privilege, and difference; opportunities for advanced work; community-based learning/service learning; and most recently sustainability. Results of the annual End-of-Program Review are presented in 2.C.3 as evidence of the teaching of general education.

 

 

Administrative data analysis is an integral aspect of the overall assessment strategy. Annual analyses of the curriculum; student retention and graduation rates; and demographics of students, faculty, and staff are shared through the website, targeted presentations, and with various external audiences. Institutional Research has been a key participant in providing data for the college's development of new dashboard indicator metrics for senior staff and the governing board.'''(Include Indicators)'''  Periodic in-depth analysis of faculty-student load is undertaken. These regular processes are continually expanded to include new programs and areas of interest. Most recently new processes have been developed to track data about the Extended Education program, revised demographic definitions for low-income and first-generation students, and specific analyses for each of the graduate programs. Survey results are often linked to administrative variables in order to explore potential differences in student and alumni experiences. In-depth analysis is also conducted to understand the impact of new initiatives and major changes in policy, (for example, raising the credit limit or implementing a new graduate degree pathway).  

 

External data resources have been incorporated into research and analysis approaches. The National Student Clearinghouse is used annually to explore the enrollment of prospective students who were offered admission to Evergreen but chose not to attend. These data help identify institutions with applicant overlap for different student market groups. This resource has also been used to explore the subsequent enrollment of former Evergreen students, such as non-retained students and alumni. The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) peer analysis database, the Council of Public Liberal Arts Colleges (COPLAC) annual data-sharing process ([[Media: COPLAC DataProfile AY05-06.pdf|COPLAC DataProfile AY05-06]]), and annual participation in the Consortium for Student Retention Data Exchange, [[Media: CSRDE Freshman Graduation Rates.pdf|Consortium for Student Retention Data Exchange: First-time, First-year Cohort Graduation Rates]]) provide sources to explore Evergreen’s demographics and performance indicators. These sources are used to set accountability targets, research potential peer groups, and benchmark Evergreen performance. Graduate Record Examination (GRE) and Law School Admission (LSAT) scores of Evergreen alumni were obtained in response to prospective student inquiries ([[Media: GRE Results 2002-2006.pdf|GRE Results 2002-2006]], [[Media: LSAT scores 2001-2006.pdf|LSAT Scores 2001-2006]]).

 

 

Each year as new committees and task forces are charged by college administrators, Institutional Research and Assessment connects relevant data to the workgroups. Excerpts are drawn from the rich collection of existing data generated through regular institutional assessment activities and often conducting or supporting additional specialized research in support of the work. Recent examples of workgroups that used Institutional Research data in their work include the Diversity taskforce, First-year Experience taskforce, Beginning the Journey, Sustainability workgroup, Campus Spaces Assessment, Enrollment Growth taskforce, and Curricular Visions. (For example, see [[Media: Curricular Visions Data_Exhibits.pdf|Curricular Visions Data Exhibits]]). In addition, the Office provides grant-related research for National Science Foundation scholarship grants, TRIO Student Support Services, and the Lumina Foundation grant supporting new Tribal Program activities. As staff time and resources allow, the office supports other specialized queries and research initiated by deans, faculty, staff, and students.

The Culture, Text and Language planning unit organizes itself around the study of culture as webs of meaning that individuals and groups create to make sense of their experience in the world, around a diverse range of texts as embodiments of these meanings, and around languages both as means of communication and as carriers of transformative potential. The faculty and students design work together to create living links between their past and their present, in order to become, in the words of Charles McCann, Evergreen’s first president, “undogmatic citizens and uncomplacently confident individuals in a changing world.”  

The area provides four direct and distinctive contributions to the college. It directly supports student engagement with the five foci and the achievement of the six expectations through the provision of skills and capacities for critical thinking, reading, writing, and interpretation. It offers students an opportunity to do focused work in humanities and interpretive social science. It provides strong support for general education through its support for Core and all level programs. And it provides an orientation to a global worldview through its language and culture programs and its attention to larger questions of ethics and action. The planning unit organizes nearly all of the advanced humanities, and much of the interpretive social sciences at Evergreen.

Faculty in the area cover a wide range of humanities and interpretive social science disciplines including: literature, history, women’s studies, philosophy, religion, classics, art history, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, politics, folklore, creative writing, French, Spanish, Russian and Japanese.

Typically the faculty offers several interdisciplinary, theme-based programs, inclusive inter-area programs offered in teams with a diverse range of faculty from other planning units. Themes in these programs explore the social origins and meanings of a broad array of questions in the arts, social sciences, and environmental studies. CTL offers a curriculum based in diverse cultures and languages so that students have opportunity to learn about shared legacies and significant differences across issues of race, class, sexuality, and gender. The area offers interdisciplinary studies dealing with these issues in the context of community and historical studies that include service work or research that draws upon interpretive social science. The Planning Unit also provides opportunity for studies in philosophy, European history, British and American Literature, and other literature in translation. Many of the programs are area studies understood as the interdisciplinary study of topics framed by geography, language, culture, and history. These programs usually provide opportunity for study abroad, and a complex combination of language and culture studies. The planning unit is committed to offering regular language and culture programs in American Studies, French language and the Francophone world, Japan, Middle East Studies, Russian Language and Eastern Europe, Spanish and the Hispanic world.  

Language based programs are available to students in their sophomore year and typically offer both introductory and advanced language study. CTL as a whole does not have a single repeating introductory offering, but builds introductory work in library and qualitative field research, critical thinking, essay writing, and issues of complex and layered reading into all-level programs which admit freshman through senior students, and sophomore level programs that emphasize similar skills. Sophomore entry and all-level programs in the area support the development of distinct skills in such areas as languages, historical method, and literary interpretation. They also provide broad support for and help students see the importance of interpretation and the creation of cultural meaning as a social process. Creative expression of complex social and personal experience and effective communication of these experiences is fostered in most programs.   All CTL programs report an emphasis on critical thinking and 93% report a major emphasis. Critical thinking in CTL focuses particularly around issues of analysis of texts and synthesis of ideas   s as well as critiques and argument and diverse perspectives ([[Media: EPR_2006-07_-_Critical_Thinking_by_Planning_Unit.pdf|EPR 2006-07 - Critical Thinking by Planning Unit]]). All of these capacities directly support meeting the Expectations of an Evergreen Graduate.

While the exact percentages vary from year to year, CTL faculty members are consistently among the most committed to inter-area teaching both in Core and in inter-area programs. During the review period CTL provided nearly 40% or more of its faculty to teaching in either core or inter-area programs ([[Media: curricular visions_selected trends_97to07_update.pdf|Curricular Visions_Selected Trends_97to07_update]]). The widespread involvement of area faculty in inter-area and Core programs helps to support General Education expectations of exposure and engagement of students across the curriculum with issues of writing, interpretation, and expression.  

Pathways in CTL exist primarily within those sections of the curriculum dealing with language and culture. The existence of introductory language classes in the Evening and Weekend program, the use of area studies programs especially in French and Spanish and the provision of some support for advanced work through one-faculty programs and contract work constitute a pathway that has been effective for many students. The difficulty of providing more than two years of language training has been a serious issue for the development of language and culture pathways.  

Other areas in the curriculum are less systematically organized, but there is the capacity to do both work that supplements and broadens original entry-level work, and opportunities to do more advanced work in small one-person programs. Often groups of students who have formed particular attachments to subject matter and each other form a cohort of students in a series of programs leading to advanced work. Individual students can and often do find advanced contract work either individual work or small student originated study groups engaged in contracts with a single faculty member.  

Over the past five years CTL has carried an average of 400 FTE per year in programs within the Planning Unit and has contributed an average 305 additional FTE in Core and Inter-area programs. ([[Media: curricular visions_selected trends_97to07_update.pdf|Curricular Visions_Selected Trends_97to07_update]]) The area has typically been among the most consistent contributors of faculty to core and inter-area programs and has in recent years been a location of a great number of all level programs. In some measure these tendencies reflect the propensity of the area to take on broad issues and develop thematic programs that pull into conversation a variety of disciplines rather than attention to what at most schools would be seen as survey courses. Further the relative lack of curricular hierarchy within the area and the willingness of faculty to work with younger students to include them in the conversation has allowed for an expansion of all level programs in the area.  

Clearly humanities teaching occurs widely across the curriculum and is not restricted exclusively to the programs of CTL. The EPR data for 2001-02 to 2005-06 show that between 81% and 86% of all programs included elements of Humanities and that a significant majority of those programs 55-67% had a major substantive interest in the humanities. Major elements of humanities are embedded in CTL, EA, Evening/Weekend, Inter-Area, and often Core Programs. More minor elements of humanities show up in SI, ES, and SPBC where humanities content was much more often illustrative of issues rather than the subject of direct inquiry.   To further confuse issues, the fact that there are both humanities faculty and social science faculty within the area means that often times programs within the CTL may not necessarily be humanities porgrams.

A critical mode of assessing the work of the area is satisfaction of area graduates with their experience. All data in this discussion are drawn from the 2006 Alumni survey of the class of 2004-05 --  the latest set of data on Alumni Satisfaction. Alumni are self identified as having done their primary work in CTL. ([[Media: Alumni_Survey_2006_-_Culture%2C_Text%2C_and_Language.pdf|Alumni Survey 2006: Culture, Text, and Language]])

Overall students report very high rates of satisfaction with Evergreen’s contribution to their academic and personal growth. In 21 of 24 aspects of their Evergreen work over 80% of CTL alumni were somewhat to very satisfied with their experience. Students were most satisfied with their capacity to work independently, followed by participation in class discussions, understanding different philosophies and cultures, knowledge of a broad range of subjects, capacity for critical analysis, and working cooperatively in groups. Indeed for 15 of 24 categories mean satisfaction was 4 or better on a five-point scale. Students gave low marks for their perceived readiness for a career and for their capacity to use mathematical and scientific principles.  

When alumni were directly asked their satisfaction with Evergreen experiences over 90% reported being somewhat or very satisfied with interdisciplinary education, faculty narrative evaluation, quality of instruction, the education they were able to construct, self evaluation process, independent contracts, community service, culminating projects, internships and study abroad. Students were most dissatisfied with opportunities for advanced undergraduate work, tolerance for different or opposing views, and advice from faculty.

In terms of ten work related skills, a plurality of CTL alumni rated themselves as good in four categories and excellent in six more. Evergreen was seen as contributing to some extent or a great deal in all skill areas with particular help in the development of skills in creative thinking, independence and initiative, and willingness and aptitude to learn new skills. They saw themselves a learners with an ability and willingness to take on new tasks.  

In terms of employment   78.5% of the CTL concentration alumni were employed one year after graduation compared with 84% of all Alumni. Of those employed 69.3% of CTL were employed in an area that was at least somewhat related to their area of primary study at Evergreen. 75.8% of employed CTL alumni felt that their Evergreen experience had prepared the adequately or very well for their current positions.  

In terms of graduate or professional school, 32% of CTL Alumni applied to graduate/professional school within one year of graduation. Of 24 alumni who applied 21 had been offered admission (87.5%) and three applications were pending. Of 79 CTL alumni, 19 attended or are currently attending graduate or professional school within one year of graduation. The 19 alumni were continuing their work in Washington (11), other states (6), and internationally (2). Two had enrolled in graduate studies at Evergreen in this time frame. The rate of 25% of alumni going directly to graduate school was slightly higher than the 21% of all Evergreen alumni respondents who entered graduate school in this period.

The most pressing issue in the area is number of faculty. The number of faculty members affiliated with the area has declined from a high of 49 active full time teaching members in 97-98 school year to 28 active full time teaching members in the 2007-8 school year. If we restrict the range from 98-99 to 2006-07 the loss is 46 to 30. (Data from Catalogues for 98-99, 2006-07, 2007-08 and faculty retention master list) Obviously, the area has suffered significant attrition during the past ten years. This attrition affected two broad tendencies in the area. First, the planning unit in its formation in 1995 drew heavily on a pool of older experienced faculty who saw this area as the most open and creative location for “traditional” coordinated study work. This group of faculty formed the creative heart of the early years of the college. Many of these people were not obviously humanities hires in terms of training, but all addressed themselves and pushed the college to address issues from a deeply humanist perspective. (For a clear sense of the loss that this transition has signified for the area and the college please read [[Media: Grissom_Humanities at Evergreen_emeritus2007.pdf|Tom Grissom on Humanities at Evergreen – Emeritus Ceremony 2007]]). Over the past ten years nearly all of these people have retired. This has meant that these positions have reverted to the faculty wide pool of positions. Once the area is competing faculty-wide a second tendency develops from the propensity of the area to see its curriculum as addressing broad themes and issues and the consequent refusal of the area to define its curriculum in ordered hierarchical patterns (with the partial exception of language programs). This has meant that the area has had a difficult time asserting the need for any particular position in order to meet the demands of a particular field of study.  Thus until very recently the area has not been particularly effective in obtaining positions from the faculty-wide pool.  Even with the institution wide recognition of a need for more humanities hires in the last two years, the area has serious issues in terms of hiring in support of Spanish, American History, Religion, American Literature, art history, creative writing, and philosophy. The efforts of the curriculum deans during the 2007-8 school year to reorganize the roles of planning units by diversifying the locations for the identification of possible hires and by creating inter-divisional positions has begun to make some inroads on this problem.  In addition the area has entered into conversation that have explicitly addressed CTL's role, its rationale, and the implications of that role for hew hires.  

Related to this set of issues is the development and continuity of teaching in languages. This issue is connected to the choice of languages to be taught, the support of these languages within the full time faculty, and the relation of full-time teaching to part-time language offerings. Recently the college has moved to support the teaching of Russian by adding a second faculty member in Russian History and is moving to hire a second classics hire to support the teaching of Latin and Ancient Greek. Yet there is clearly a need to hire additional support in Spanish and there are complex questions about how to support languages that are occasionally included within repeating language and culture programs, e.g. Arabic, Chinese, or Gaelic.

But the call for more faculty members in the area is only part of the issue. While it is indeed the case that we “need” more faculty members in a wide range of subject areas, we also need more people who have the capacity to bring to programs a broad sense of inquiry about fundamental questions such as what it means to be human and to engage in the making of culture and social life. While such a formulation is vague and very broad, it points at the central issue of liberal arts education; the development of reflexive and engaged thinkers. This sensibility is characteristic Evergreen students and graduates.  It is a way of being that asks students not just to know a particular skills, or a specific piece of information, but to synthesize, reflect, critically analyze, and engage knowledge as it affects students as individuals and as members of groups and the political universe. If the area is going to continue to lead in the creation of such students across the campus, it needs faculty members who can inspire such broad views not simply those who posses specific disciplinary skills and knowledge.  

Finally the area needs to clarify and advocate for its central mission. The essential nature of the questions of cultural and personal meaning, the critical nature of language and interpretation, and the central responsibility to engage the world in a way that speaks to values and choices that lie at the heart of humanistic studies need to be seen as essential to all of the work at the college. The area needs colleagues in other planning units to see the importance of these questions and potential students to see the value in these studies. This will require us to articulate what the planning unit can do and what it can offer  both in terms of general education and in terms of breadth and complexity of experience within the area and across the college.

The Environmental Studies planning unit is organized around the study the interactions between human systems and the natural world in order support and sustain them both. Environmental Studies includes both natural and social sciences and provides students with the opportunity to

1) Qualitatively and quantitatively investigate the chemical, physical and biological elements that define terrestrial and marine ecosystems;

 

2) Understand the physical systems that underlie life on Earth;

 

3) Understand the nature, development and interactions of human societies with

 

the environment;

 

4) Examine the richness and limits of environmental and social resources

 

available to sustain both human and natural systems; and

 

5) Engage in applied research and work to develop skills that support this

 

effort.

The Environmental Studies faculty have a wide range of training in environmental chemistry, geology, hydrology, botany, marine science, sustainability, ecology, vertebrate biology, land use and environmental planning, forest and plant ecology, cultural/ecological anthropology, geography, zoology, evolutionary biology, entomology, environmental health, law and policy, environmental economics, forest ecology, community studies, agriculture, ornithology, conservation, ecological agriculture. Faculty members in the Environmental Studies area are shared with the Masters in Environmental Studies Program and provide a wide range of resources for students at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. In the 1998-99 school year there were 26 full time regular faculty actively teaching in the area. In 2006-07 school year the number was 27. While the numbers are stable, the personnel of the area has changed significantly with 11 new hires over the period. It is important to note that 4-6 faculty each year teach in the Masters in Environmental Studies Program.

Environmental Studies offers introductory work at the freshman and sophomore level and more advanced work in three major areas: Human Communities and the Environment, Natural History, and Environmental Science. Environmental Studies is the one planning where interdivisional work is the central core of the unit. Thus while three major areas are identified, teaching in the area very often deliberately and necessarily integrates natural science and social science (particularly policy) issues into its offerings at all levels. In addition to the work directly identified in the area the campus wide initiatives in sustainability (see the President’s Sustainability task force and the faculty initiative on sustainability and social justice) have significant implications for work that is broadly environmental across the curriculum.

The area teaches two sophomore or all level two-quarter programs that serve as useful introductions to major concepts, techniques and foci of study within the area. In addition the area often teaches a Core program that provides a strong introduction to the unit’s work. These programs are deliberate kept relatively small (usually one social science and one science faculty member and fifty students) in order to accommodate field trips and the use of laboratory facilities, and to provide somewhat different foci for students entering the area with differing concerns. The central issue in introductory programs is to help students develop a complex multi-disciplinary understanding of environmental issues and to begin to acquire the scientific and tools and social scientific understandings that will allow them to work effectively as practitioners or more generally as citizens. In addition to these programs the Introduction to Natural Sciences program offered by SI provides a very useful alternative entry point. Environmental Studies is a major contributor to the fulfillment of general education goals at the college. The 2006-07 EPR data shows 100% of area programs included some mathematics in their work with nearly 45% reporting extensive to moderate uses of mathematics. Even more clearly 100% of the programs in Environmental Studies reported extensive scientific work. The strong scientific and social scientific base of the area helps push students who arrive with simply “a love of nature” into thinking precisely in scientific, often mathematical terms and in terms of a sophisticated political economy of environmental issues. ([[Media: EPR_2006-07_-_Math_by_Planning_Unit.pdf|EPR 2006-07 - Math by Planning Unit]], [[Media: EPR_2006-07_-_Natural_and_Physical_Sciences_Overview.pdf|EPR 2006-07 - Natural and Physical Sciences Overview]], and [[Media: EPR_2006-07_-_Social_Sciences_by_Planning_Unit.pdf|EPR 2006-07 - Social Sciences by Planning Unit]])

The area groups its offerings under three major headings. These headings include both repeating programs and annual programs and often involve students in inter-area work that supports their understandings of major issues. The first deals with Human Communities and the Environment. These programs have a strong emphasis on issues involving environmental, policy, economics, history, geography and law, multi-cultural perspectives, planning, design and ecological agriculture. Programs in these areas often involve community study and advanced work in group projects. Second, natural history, the focus on observation, identification and interpretation of flora and fauna using scientific field methods as a primary approach is one of the unique strengths of Environmental Studies at Evergreen. Full time studies provide the opportunity to do introductory and advanced fieldwork at sites throughout the United States as well as in Central America. Studies in botany, ecology, entomology, geography, invertebrate zoology, vertebrate evolution, mammalogy, herpetology, mycology and ornithology are undertaken in support of understanding ecology and biodiversity. Finally, Environmental Sciences engages students in study of the underlying mechanism and the structure of natural systems both living and non-living. Students are involved in a wide array laboratory and field studies including biology, geology, chemistry climatology, evolutionary biology, forest ecology, hydrology, marine biology and oceanography. Students who intend to focus in the environmental sciences are encouraged to participate, in such programs in SI as Introduction to Natural Sciences, Molecule to Organism, and Environmental Analysis. Regularly offered programs beyond the introductory level include, Practice of Sustainable Agriculture, Animal Behavior, Ecological Agriculture, Hydrology, Marine Life, Plant Ecology and Taxonomy, Temperate Rain Forests and Tropical Rain Forests. Students in this concentration often work toward a B.S. or combined B.A./B.S. degree.

Environmental Studies is one of the primary fields of interest identified by both new first year and transfer students who made a choice. In the 2006 New Student Survey fully 16.4 % of all first year students identified Natural Resources and Conservation as their primary interest, making it the second most popular field of study at the college. Among out-of-state students Natural Resources and conservation was the most popular option with over 30% of students identifying this choice. Given the significance of out-of-state enrollment to the college budget, having broad environmentally appealing first year programs makes both pedagogical and fiscal sense. Among transfer students both in-and-out of state, Natural Resources and Conservation was the third most popular choice of fields of study. On the most recent Evergreen Experience survey 8.3% of respondents who identified one planning unit as an area of focus chose Environmental Studies. Another 5.7 percent of students had Environmental studies as one of multiple choices. ([[Media: Evergreen_New_Student_Survey_2005_-_Field_of_Study_Detail_First-time%2C_First-years.pdf|Evergreen New Student 2005 – Field of Study Detail First-time, First-years]],  

[[Media: Evergreen_New_Student_Survey_2005_-_Field_of_Study_Detail_Transfer_Students.pdf|Evergreen New Student Survey 2005 – Field of Study Detail Transfer Students]])

 

The area has generated between 300 and 400 FTE per year since the 1998-99 school year. The contribution to Core programs has varied widely over the time with a high of 100 FTE in 2002-03 and a low of 27 FTE two years later. The area’s contribution to inter-area programs has hovered between 30 and 60 FTE with a high of 80 FTE in the 05-06 school year. In only 1 of the years from 1998-99 did the area contribute at least 40 percent to Core and Inter-area programs. In part the relatively weak showing in these segments of the curriculum reflects a choice to demand for advanced work in the area. ([[Media: curricular visions_selected trends_97to07_update.pdf|Curricular Visions_Selected Trends_97to07_update]])

The last major survey of Alumni was the 2006 review of 2004-05 graduates. The data cited in this section comes from this survey.  ([[Media: Alumni_Survey_2006_-_Environmental_Studies.pdf|Alumni Survey 2006: Environmental Studies]])

The survey demonstrated a very high level of satisfaction with the Evergreen experience on the part of alumni who identified Environmental Studies as one primary area of studies. On a four-point scale "very satisfied," the highest category, was the modal score on all but one of 14 categories. Overall, the quality of instruction and the interdisciplinary approach to instruction were ranked highest. The 60% of respondents who had participated in internships and 75% who had participated in Contracts and Individual research work with faculty ranked these experiences very highly. The 40% who had studied abroad were also very satisfied with their learning from these experiences. Students were less satisfied with senior culminating experiences, academic advice from faculty, learning interactions with other students, and the tolerance shown for opposing viewpoints.

When asked about Evergreen’s contribution to their own growth, “learning independently” followed immediately by “working cooperatively in a group” occupied the first two positions. All of the rankings had a mean of 3.33 or better on a 5 point scale. The lowest score was of “readiness for a career” that is ironic since 90% of graduates indicated they were employed and 65.7% of these said that their work was "somewhat in" or "in" their primary field of study at Evergreen. 77.8% of employed Environmental Studies alumni felt that their Evergreen experience had prepared the adequately or very well for their current positions.

In terms of ten work-related skills, a plurality of Environmental Studies alumni rated themselves as good in six categories and excellent in four more. Evergreen was seen as contributing to some extent or a great deal in all skill areas with particular help in the development of skills in effective communications, independence and initiative, and research skills.

In terms of graduate or professional school, 18.4% of ES Alumni applied to graduate/professional school within one year of graduation. Of seven alumni who applied five had been offered admission (71.4%) and two had been denied.   Of 41 ES alumni, 4 attended or are currently attending graduate or professional school within one year of graduation. The 4 alumni were continuing their work in Washington (3), and internationally (1). Two had enrolled in graduate studies at Evergreen in this time frame. The rate of 10.5% of alumni going directly to graduate school was lower than the 21% of all Evergreen alumni respondents who entered graduate school in this period.

Environmental Studies confronts two significant issues as it moves forward. The first is simply to replace retiring faculty and expand the hiring of new faculty who can support the present offerings of the area and their growth. In particular the college’s commitment to carbon neutrality by 2020, the sustainability initiative, and the faculty sustainability and social justice curriculum initiative create the need for a revived commitment to community organization, architectural design, land use planning, environmental economics, and policy. These areas, which were major elements of the first years of the college, have diminished within the curriculum. A hiring effort that sustains the social science side of the area is crucial as the area takes on policy initiatives as a part of the undergraduate program. Finding a way to engage, support, and guide the sustainability initiatives is a major task that is made a bit more difficult by the necessity to include a significant number of the area’s social science faculty in the MES program. Finally, the disproportionate number of Environmental Studies faculty members who have taken on administrative duties at the college over the past 20 years has meant that there have been and continue to be significant impacts on the ability of the area to offer its curriculum. Replacement hiring for long term (3-8 year) administrative appointments should be a matter of course.

A second major issue is teaching, logistics, and facilitates support. The area needs better and more consistent maintenance and support for teaching facilities. Current requests from the area are for a greenhouse facility to support botany, agriculture, and organismal biology. Other projects on going include planning for an aquarium and a forest canopy walkway. In addition to the building of these facilities, better coordination, planning, repair and maintenance of such facilities as the Organic Farm and teaching gardens is a high priority.

Beyond this, current faculty student ratios make it very difficult to do significant fieldwork without support of knowledgeable teaching partners. This reality has been a major force in pushing upper division work into smaller and more specific one person, one-quarter programs. To create a more interdisciplinary upper division program and in particular to allow collaboration between faculty who have very different backgrounds and knowledge (field science and social science) it is important to make upper division or graduate assistants available to help with both the logistics and the instruction in the field. This issue is shared (as indeed the facilities and technicians are shared ) with Scientific Inquiry.

Finally, the area needs to provide a consistent presence in the first year curriculum. The college has a strong reputation in Environmental studies, particularly though not exclusively in natural history and field studies. The fact that in many years Environmental studies was weakly represented in the curriculum at the Core level may well discourage students from the college.   In particular the lack of first year options may discourage first-time, first year students from out of state 30% of who identify ES as their first choice field.

Expressive Arts provides an opportunity for students to undertake significant rigorous work in Visual, Performing, and Media arts within the context of a liberal arts education. The work of the area is designed to provide an opportunity for students to gain skills and experiences in the arts that both encourage collaborative work and the application of theoretical questions to the practice of making art. Programs emphasize the development of hands-on skills in the arts within the context of theme-based programs. The planning unit sees creative work as a central element in a broad, liberal arts education. Thus students in the arts are often required to do work outside the arts for admission to arts programs and interdisciplinary work is incorporated into arts programs. The area has high student demand and controls access to many arts programs quite rigorously through portfolios and prerequisites. In the years since the last review the area has made significant and successful efforts to develop programs that more widely integrate arts across the curriculum. The unit has made significant efforts to provide increased opportunity for building writing and quantitative reasoning skills into their programs while continuing to emphasize the provision of visual media and performance literacies. The emphasis on projects that involve hands-on work helps students develop a sense of their own work and their own engagement with the techniques and skills that area programs provide. The planning unit emphasizes the development of learning communities within the programs that help students develop responsible and useful critical responses to each others work. These aspects of the area’s work help connect it directly to the expectations.

The Expressive Arts planning unit, supplemented by the courses in Evening and Weekend studies, provides nearly all of the advanced teaching in the arts with the exception of creative writing. Yet significant amounts of work in the arts occurs across the college with 66% of all programs reporting at least some work in the arts and CTL and Inter-area programs reporting well over 80% of their programs reporting work in the arts. There is incredible variety of use of the arts in the college’s programs and faculty across the college have worked hard to include some experience with arts in their programs. ( [[Media: EPR_2006-07_-_Art_by_Planning_Unit.pdf|EPR 2006-07 - Art by Planning Unit]], [[Media: Art_Across_the_Curriculum.pdf|Art Across the Curriculum]], and [[Media: Art%2C_A_Supplement.pdf|Art, A Supplement]])

Expressive Arts planning unit is divided into sub-areas that not only plan somewhat independently but also provide distinct curricula in visual arts, media, and performance. The Expressive Arts area, like the Scientific Inquiry area, has worked very had over the years to develop and systematically staff its offerings. Each sub-area offers a year-long introductory program, and both individual and group opportunities for more advanced work. The planning unit as a whole systematically supports individual contracts and senior thesis work in the arts with personnel and funds. Currently there are 24 full-time faculty actively teaching associated with the area. At the time of the last review there were 23. While there have been seven new hires over the period nearly all of these faculty have hired to replace retired faculty, rather than to open new initiatives. Data from 1998-99 Catalog 2007-08 Catalog and Master List of Faculty)

The Moving Image Group (MIG) sub-area sees media production as a fundamentally interdisciplinary activity. Five faculty members are associated with this sub-area. The pedagogy that develops from this interdisciplinary perspective links theoretical understanding and critical analysis of images with the practice of working together to create new images. The group focuses its work on non-fiction film and video and supports work in animation, multi-media, performance, and installation. The sub-area is confronted by continually and rapidly evolving technology. The constant revisions of formats, equipment, and access have challenged the area’s faculty and staff. The remodel the media facilities in the library has caused considerable disruption. However, it will be a significant support of the area when it is finished in the fall of 2009.  

The Visual and Environmental Arts sub-area organizes around the recognition that in an increasingly complex and visually oriented society, the visual arts and environmental design have a vital role in all aspects of culture. Curricular offerings address critical analysis of visual culture, strategies for visual thinking and communication, and the role of creative expression in addressing social and environmental problems. The sub-area provides full-time interdisciplinary, theme-based programs as well as specifically focused studio work for beginning, intermediate and advanced students. Facilities support drawing, art history, painting, printmaking, photography (analog and digital), sculpture (wood and metal), sustainable design, fine metals, fibers, ceramics, installation and performance art. Many faculty teaching in the sub-area teach skills in multiple areas. Currently there are ten full-time faculty, four full-time staff (to manage facilities in wood and metal, printmaking, and photography), one half-time staff (for ceramics) and six to eight adjunct faculty teaching in Evening-Weekend Studies and Extended Education. Most part-time studies are are skill-oriented. The area has recently completed a redesign of its curricular pathways and looks forward to collaborative longer-term planning for the full-time and part-time curriculum with arts faculty in Evening and Weekend Studies.

Performing Arts offers work in theater, music, and dance. The sub-area currently has nine faculty members (4 Music, 2 Dance, 3 Theater)and is supported in its efforts by four theater staff and two full time building staff. The area supports interdisciplinary performance work, inter-arts work, and disciplinary work. Faculty emphasize commonalities between the performance disciplines and collaborative project work. Programs stress the role and function of the performing arts in human culture and history; they also investigate social and political situations. In recent years there has been significant reevaluation of the sub-area’s offerings. The introductory-level program in the area has undergone changes in the way it is staffed to better prepare students for advanced work. The upcoming hire in modern dance and kinesiology (to begin in fall of 2008) will bring dance faculty numbers into balance with the other performing arts faculty, and is expected to ease the burden of the dance faculty from having to fully staff their own programs as well as part-time offerings.

EA focuses attention in first- and second-year programs in developing skills in inquiry, critical thinking, and arts literacies. In addition, Visual Arts is experimenting with studio skills at the CORE level to improve the general skills of lower division students and prepare them more effectively for advanced work. Faculty across the Expressive Arts have consistently offered introductory programs, which have experienced increasingly strong enrollments. In the case of Visual Arts, a portfolio is required for entry to the program. In the case of Mediaworks, faculty members request a written application for consideration. The programs have required significant time in out-of-area study for entry and have been aimed at advanced sophomores, juniors or seniors. These programs have served as prerequisites for advanced work, in small Student Originated Study (SOS) group projects, in Senior Thesis projects, and in admission to upper-level programs. Performance Works (the new title of the introductory program in the Performing Arts) is offered annually. There is variation among the Performing Arts faculty about pedagogical priorities in the area. The sub-area’s changes are yielding better enrollments.

EA's introductory programs have helped to define some clear basic competencies, and have encouraged not simply the acquisition of skills, but the development of a broader perspective on the role and place of arts in society. Faculty have taken on a series of strong collaborative efforts with colleagues in other areas; specifically, Scientific Inquiry, Culture, Text and Language, and Environmental Studies. Overall the area has worked to provide sufficient support to interdivisional and core programs. Expressive Arts is the only planning unit that systematically provides not only financial, but faculty and staff support for Senior Thesis projects. The area also provides support for students to do advanced work in all three areas.

Expressive arts is popular with students. Among students brand new to the college 16.5% of transfers and 27.7% of freshmen indicate that they want to pursue work in the visual and performing arts. ([[Media: Evergreen_New_Student_Survey_2005_-_Field_of_Study_Detail_First-time%2C_First-years.pdf|Evergreen New Student 2005 – Field of Study Detail First-time, First-years]] and  

[[Media: Evergreen_New_Student_Survey_2005_-_Field_of_Study_Detail_Transfer_Students.pdf|Evergreen New Student Survey 2005 – Field of Study Detail Transfer Students]]) On the Evergreen Student Experience Survey, 22% of students who identified only one Planning Unit (75.2% of respondents) indicate that Expressive Arts is their primary field of study or concentration. Another 12.4 % of respondents identified EA as one of multiple areas they were studying ([[Media: Evergreen_Student_Experience_Survey_2006_-_Primary_field_of_study_-_Planning_Unit_Analysis_-_Olympia_Campus_Students.pdf|Evergreen Student Experience Survey 2006 – Primary Field of Study – Planning Unit Analysis – Olympia Campus Students]]). Enrollment in the area’s offerings has remained essentially stable between 1998-99 and 2005-06 at approximately 440 FTE per year. The area has made significant efforts to contribute to core and inter-area teaching over the period contributing between 35% and 52% of its teaching effort to work in these two modes. ( [[Media: curricular visions_selected trends_97to07_update.pdf|Curricular Visions_Selected Trends_97to07_update]])

A critical mode of assessing the work of the area is satisfaction of area graduates with their experience. The 2006 Alumni survey of the class of 2004-5 is the latest set of data on Alumni Satisfaction. All data in this discussion is drawn from this data set. ([[Media: Alumni_Survey_2006_-_Expressive_Arts.pdf|Alumni Survey 2006: Expressive Arts]])

Overall, alumni who concentrated their studies in Expressive Arts report very high rates of satisfaction with Evergreen’s contribution to their academic and personal growth. In 21 of 24 aspects of their Evergreen work, over 80% of Expressive Arts students were "somewhat" to "very satisfied" with their experience. Students were most satisfied with capacity to express themselves in a creative or artistic way, their understanding and appreciation of the arts, their capacity to work independently, their capacity to work in groups, their functioning as a responsible member of a diverse community, and their knowledge of a broad range of subjects. Indeed for 10 of 24 categories mean satisfaction was 4 or better on a five-point scale. All but three means were greater than 3.5.   Students gave lower marks to their perceived readiness for a career and further education and to their capacity to use mathematical and scientific principles.  

When alumni were directly asked their satisfaction with Evergreen experiences over 90% reported being somewhat or very satisfied with Interdisciplinary education, faculty narrative evaluation, quality of instruction, the education they were able to construct, advice from faculty, self evaluation process, independent contracts, culminating projects, internships and study abroad. Students were most dissatisfied with opportunities for advanced undergraduate work and tolerance for different or opposing views.

In terms of 10 work related skills, Expressive Arts students scored a modal score of excellent on a four-point scale. Evergreen was seen as contributing to some extent or a great deal in all skill areas with particular help in the development of skills in creative thinking, effective communications, independence and initiative, and willingness and aptitude to learn new skills. They saw themselves a learners with an ability and willingness to take on new tasks.  

In terms of employment,   84.3% of the Expressive Arts concentration alumni were employed one year after graduation compared with 84% of all Alumni. Of those employed, 55% of Expressive Arts alumni were employed in an area that was at least somewhat related to their area of primary study at Evergreen. 66.7% of employed Expressive Arts alumni felt that their Evergreen experience had prepared the adequately or very well for their current positions.  

In terms of graduate or professional school, 24.5% of Expressive Arts Alumni applied to graduate/professional school within one year of graduation. Of 12 alumni who applied 8 had been offered admission (67.5%), two applications were pending, and two had been denied. Of 51 Expressive Arts alumni, 8 attended or are currently attending graduate or professional school within one year of graduation. The 8 alumni were continuing their work in Washington (3), other states (4), and internationally (1). Two had enrolled in graduate studies at Evergreen in this time frame. The rate of 16.3% of alumni going directly to graduate school was slightly lower than the 21% of all Evergreen alumni respondents who entered graduate school in this period.

The most persistent issue voiced by faculty in the area is faculty/student ratio. Faculty have several concerns that emerge from this question. First, in some spaces there are fewer pieces of necessary equipment than there are students in the class. This either means students do not get to do all of the work or that faculty or staff repeat workshops. Several faculty members noted that they regularly carry thirty or more contact hours in studio per week. Second, the ratio of 25/1 is seen to be too high for effective critical support of student work. Many noted that simply speaking effectively to each student’s work was difficult and that the need to add important skills development and written work beyond that made finding time to do a good job very problematic. Finally, several faculty members noted that students coming to the college were younger and often in need of quite basic skills. This presumed relative weakness of students in comparison to years past lead to a perception of more academic and psychological difficulties by faculty. The high student faculty ratio means it is extremely difficult and time consuming for faculty to meet the needs of challenged students. Finally, higher student-faculty ratios make it harder to maintain safety in such areas as dance and in the wood and metal-shops.

The relationship of the planning unit to Evening and Weekend Studies, and especially to Extended Education initiatives by the college raises considerable concern about whether these activities are supplementing or supplanting the areas offerings. There have also been concerns raised about hiring processes and decisions in these areas.

The current presumably temporary usurpation of teaching areas in Seminar II by staff displaced by the major remodel of the library has and the continuing remodeling of this major facility that houses important Media facilities has inconvenienced faculty as they try to allocate scarce space resources and diminished the opportunities for students in this period.

The central concern of the Scientific Inquiry planning unit is the scientific understanding of nature. Its goals are to engage students in a community within which ways of scientific thinking about the natural world are developed and utilized to create an understanding of natural phenomena. Scientific thinking is understood to involve the identification of hypotheses and the use of appropriate instruments, theory, and models to arrive at sound conclusions about the hypothesis. The SI area understands scientific thinking as a valuable piece of a liberal arts education in its own right. Scientific thinking is seen as a necessary part of a general education for a democratic society within which science and technology play a major role. Reciprocally scientists are understood to need a broader social, historical and ethical context within which to consider the consequences of their work. The area sees its responsibility to both provide depth for students who hope to become members of the scientific community and to provide breadth for students who will be citizens within a democratic society. SI is the primary location for instruction in chemistry, mathematics, computer science, biology, and physics in the college curriculum.

Faculty in the SI area are trained and provide instruction in a wide variety of scientific disciplines including: chemistry, biology, computer science, mathematics, physics, and history of science and technology. In the period from 1998-99 school year to end of the 2006-7 school year the SI area grew from 20 to 25 active regular faculty. 14 of this 25 are new to the faculty since 98-99.

Faculty in SI have developed and organized a set of repeating programs that provide increasingly sophisticated instruction in five major areas, Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science, Mathematics, and Physics. These programs emphasize laboratory work, engagement with real world phenomena, and collaborative work. Students are taught to formulate questions and devise means for solving problems, collecting data, and analyzing data in light of underlying theory. Evergreen’s teaching of the sciences is notable for hands on work, collaborative effort, attention to integration across disciplines, and the ways in which each discipline contextualizes others. Undergraduate Access to sophisticated analytic equipment including mass spectrometry, NMR, scanning electron microscopy, and infrared spectrometry allow students to do advanced work.

{| cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="1"

| Foundation of Health Science

Computer Science

 

Foundations

The SI area systematically provides introductory programs to the five major pathways in its curriculum. Programs such as Introduction to Health Sciences and Introduction to Natural Science provide alternative vehicles for entering work in the Biology and Chemistry paths. The former emphasizes allied health science while the latter is a more general college level introduction to science. Similarly, Models of Motion and Computer Science Foundations are shared between Mathematics and Computer Science. Together they provide a strong introduction to Mathematics, computer science and physics. Advanced work in the area is s reflected in End of Program review data where SI faculty were far more likely than faculty from other areas to identify advanced work in their area as doing upper division work in upper division programs as instead of doing independent work. In addition, the area provides significant opportunities to work with faculty on faculty research projects as another vehicle for advanced work. These projects have frequently led to professional presentation and publication by Evergreen science students. SI makes a major contribution to the teaching of both mathematic and science to students who undertake some work in the sciences during their time at Evergreen and to students who participate in Core and Inter-Area programs where SI faculty teach. 100% of area programs report using mathematics and quantitative reasoning in their programs and 75% of those report this as a major emphasis. ([[Media: EPR_2006-07_-_Math_by_Planning_Unit.pdf|EPR 2006-07 - Math by Planning Unit]]) 88% of SI programs reported Natural or Physical sciences with 81% of these reporting extensive use of Science. Clearly SI faculty members are instrumental in teaching both mathematics and sciences in first-year and inter-area programs. ([[Media: EPR_2006-07_-_Natural_and_Physical_Sciences_by_Planning_Unit.pdf|EPR 2006-07 - Natural and Physical Sciences by Planning Unit]])

The significant and continuing effort to provide systematic and coherent pathways for science students has been a major effort on the part of SI faculty. This effort has lead historically to a relatively low participation of science faculty in Core. Between 1997-08 and 2005-06 the area’s participation in Core has ranged from a high of 14.4% of the FTE generated in the area to a low of 1.6%. The participation of SI faculty in inter-area programs has been much more substantial, ranging from a low of 13.2% of FTE generated to a high of 28.4% ([[Media: curricular visions_selected trends_97to07_update.pdf|Curricular Visions_Selected Trends_97to07_update]]). The area has made significant efforts in the past few years to increase their participation in Core and has opened up a considerable number of freshman seats to students in Foundation of Health Science, Introduction to Natural Science and other programs by treating them as all level or lower division programs. This has meant that finding consistent faculty support for the teaching of quantitative and scientific concepts in a general education setting in Core and Inter-area has been difficult. Hiring faculty in health sciences is meant to lead to a new integration around issues of health between social science and science faculty. The success of these efforts depends heavily on the recuritment of science students and to involvement of social science faculty interested in working on health issues. SI has collaborated effectively with visual arts in recent years to create some exciting inter-area programs.

In the time since the last accreditation faculty in SI area have accounted for between 16 and 20 percent of the total FTE generated in undergraduate full-time programs or between 370 and 461 FTE. There is no distinct trend in the data although the numbers seem to have stabilized around 17%. Students who are attracted to the area have strong interests in biology and in health related fields as well as a smaller number with interests in computer science and physical sciences. ([[Media: Evergreen_New_Student_Survey_2005_-_Field_of_Study_Detail_First-time%2C_First-years.pdf|Evergreen New Student 2005 – Field of Study Detail First-time, First-years]] and  

[[Media: Evergreen_New_Student_Survey_2005_-_Field_of_Study_Detail_Transfer_Students.pdf|Evergreen New Student Survey 2005 – Field of Study Detail Transfer Students]]

) On the Evergreen Experience survey 14.6% of the 75% of students who indicated a single area of focus identified themselves as studying in Scientific Inquiry. Another 9% of students listed SI as among the areas in which they were working ([[Media: Evergreen_Student_Experience_Survey_2006_-_Primary_field_of_study_-_Planning_Unit_Analysis_-_Olympia_Campus_Students.pdf|Evergreen Student Experience Survey 2006 – Primary Field of Study – Planning Unit Analysis – Olympia Campus Students]]).  

A critical mode of assessing the work of the area is satisfaction of area graduates with their experience. The 2006 Alumni survey of the class of 2004-5 is the latest set of data on Alumni Satisfaction. All data in this discussion is drawn from this data set. ([[Media: Alumni_Survey_2006_-_Scientific_Inquiry.pdf|Alumni Survey 2006: Scientific Inquiry]])

 

Overall, alumni who reported that Scientific Inquiry was a primary focus of study at Evergreen report very high rates of satisfaction with Evergreen’s contribution to their academic and personal growth. In 22 of 24 aspects of their Evergreen work over 80% of Scientific Inquiry students were somewhat to very satisfied with their experience. Alumni were most satisfied with learning independently, understanding and applying scientific principles, working cooperatively in groups, defining and understanding problems, participating in class discussions, and critically analyzing information. Indeed for 15 of 24 categories mean satisfaction was 4 or better on a five-point scale. All but one mean were greater than 3.5.   Students gave lower marks to their perceived readiness for a career and understanding different philosophies and cultures.  

When alumni were directly asked their satisfaction with Evergreen experiences over 90% reported being somewhat or very satisfied with Interdisciplinary education, faculty narrative evaluation, quality of instruction, the education they were able to construct, independent contracts, community service, culminating projects, internships and study abroad. Students were most dissatisfied with quality of learning interactions with other students and the self-evaluation process.

In terms of ten work-related skills, a plurality of Scientific Inquiry alumni rated themselves as excellent on five skills and good on five more on a four-point scale. Evergreen was seen as contributing to some extent or a great deal in all skill areas with particular help in the development of skills in independence and initiative and research skills. SI graduates saw themselves as well organized, capable of taking initiative, communicating, making decisions, and willing and able to learn new skills.  

In terms of employment, 91.5% of the Scientific Inquiry concentration alumni were employed one year after graduation compared with 84% of all Alumni. Of those employed 65.1% of Scientific Inquiry alumni were employed in an area that was at least somewhat related to their area of primary study at Evergreen. 67.4% of employed Scientific Inquiry alumni felt that their Evergreen experience had prepared the adequately or very well for their current positions.  

In terms of graduate or professional school, 41.3% of Scientific Inquiry alumni applied to graduate/professional school within one year of graduation. Of 19 alumni who applied 12 had been offered admission (63.2%), 4 applications were pending, and three had been denied. Of 49 Scientific Inquiry alumni, 12 attended or are currently attending graduate or professional school within one year of graduation. The 12 alumni were continuing their work in Washington (5) and other states (7). No one had enrolled in graduate studies at Evergreen in this time frame. The rate of 26.1% of alumni going directly to graduate school was slightly higher than the 21% of all Evergreen alumni respondents who entered graduate school in this period.

A major issue confronting the area is the creation of a large enough faculty and a small enough central curriculum that a sufficient number of faculty are available for work outside of the regular offerings of the curriculum. While many students do gain significant exposure to scientific and mathematical ideas through SI’s introductory programs and another significant group gain some exposure to scientific concepts through the participation of some SI faculty in Core and inter-area programs, concern with coherent and legitimate paths that allow Evergreen students access to graduate work have made engagement with more general science education difficult. In the past three years the area has worked to restructure the planning process to put a higher priority on creating more freshman seats by opening some programs as all-level and allowing freshman registration, by converting programs from sophomore level programs to lower division programs, and by staffing Core and Inter-area programs. This highlighting of the necessity of providing instruction for freshmen has lead to more all-level teaching, the development of some lower division programs, and greater participation of area faculty in Core programs. While this solution works well to increase the number of science based seats available to freshmen, it does little to expand the teaching of science to a non-science constituency.

The SI self-study notes that although there is considerably more talk about what science for “non-majors” should look like at Evergreen, there is no well developed agreement, concomitantly there is no clear idea of what the non-science portions of the major scientific introductory and mid-level programs should be. This difficulty when combined with quite different levels of integration of program concepts from year to year makes it difficult to create a consistent set of concepts to frame a context for thinking about broader scientific and social issues.

SI also identifies the difficulties that accompany the decision to offer major disciplines in coordinated studies structures. Primary among these is difficulty supplementing math skills and other prerequisites for transfer students or students who avoided mathematics early in their college careers. The tension between the desire for integration and full time coordinated study work and the need for particular pieces of content is a continuing tension, one which will necessarily engage a conversation with Evening and Weekend Studies and the QuaSR Center.

The SPBC planning unit provides the overall umbrella for most of the formal teaching in the social sciences and also includes most faculty members who rotate in and out of the Masters in Teaching (MIT) and the Masters in Public Administration (MPA) programs. The Planning Unit was drawn together from five quite different specialty areas. To this day the planning unit represents the very different understandings of the social sciences that were embodied in these earlier planning groups. The overall goal of the area is to use a variety of social science disciplines to provide students with a better understanding of society as it operates at a local, regional, and international level. Within the generally shared concern with an analysis of issues of diversity, the area also helps students understand how to use different levels of analysis from the individual through the global level to develop an understanding of social issues. Student work is seen as requiring the development of a variety of writing, research skills, practices and theoretical perspectives. Five major sub-units organize the area’s work. Masters of Public Administration (MPA), Masters in Teaching (MIT), Political Economy, Psychology, and Business/Management. In addition several other faculty members trained in social sciences affiliate with the unit. Finally, although the area is the primary place where social sciences are taught, it is far from being the only place. Important elements of social sciences are taught in Culture, Text and Language, Environmental Studies, and the Masters in Environmental Studies areas.

The disciplines of anthropology, law, economics, history, public policy, public administration, labor studies, management, political science, international affairs, philosophy, sociology, health sciences, business, teaching and learning, and psychology are represented in the area. The Masters of Teaching program and the newly approved Masters in Education program provide advanced work in public K-12 education and the Masters of Public Administration Program offers work in public, non-profit, and tribal administration. The presence of graduate programs in the area simultaneously enlarges the range of capacities and the numbers of faculty available to teach in the area and imposes significant demands on those resources. The work of the graduate programs is discussed in section 3 of this chapter. Thus while the list of faculty affiliated with the area is large (34 plus 8 visitors in 2006-07), the actual number of faculty regularly participating in the undergraduate curriculum varies between 25 and 30 per year. The disciplinary concentration of the area has shifted in the past decade, with a growth of six faculty in business and MPA, two in psychology, and two in MIT and the loss of six faculty in general social sciences. (Comparison of faculty lists in 1997-08 and 2006-07 catalogs)

The area offers thee major undergraduate foci. Political Economy, which focuses on the intersection of politics and economics and emphasizes global political economy and its impact on issues of gender, race, and class within the United States. In past years an introductory Political Economy program with faculty trained in economics, political science and a variety of other disciplines has been offered along with a variety of more advanced offerings. More recently finding staffing for the introductory program has been difficult. Approximately eight faculty members are associated with this group.

A second focus is the undergraduate level curriculum in administration and business. The college has made new hires in business in recent years and currently an introductory business program is offered and a second year program is anticipated. Six faculty members have some affiliation with management and business at the undergraduate level.

The third focus is on psychology with a particular emphasis on counseling. Five faculty members currently teach psychology. There is a pathway in psychology beginning with some variant of Human Health and Development. An alternative introduction is taught regularly in the one quarter “So You want to be a Psychologist" program. The pathway culminates with a unique Multi-cultural Counseling Program that incorporates both academic and experiential work in counseling. There are also opportunities for psychological research and social psychology with the area’s faculty. Individual contracts and internships support work in counseling.

Although pathways exist in parts of SPBC (Political Economy, Psychology, and Business and Management), creating a more general pathway into the social sciences has proved to be a difficult, because of the range of disciplines in the area, because there is no broadly shared paradigm, and because the area is understaffed. Nevertheless there is a substantial consensus that skills in reading, library research, critical thinking, and writing are essential. In addition in the past several years significant efforts have been made to incorporate more quantitative reasoning, primarily in statistics and research methods, into the offerings of the planning unit.

The Planning unit is the site of some excellent teaching about a wide range of subjects, including, global political economy, counseling psychology, anti-oppression work at a variety of levels, organization, business, and management. The area has made a series of attempts to strengthen its internal organization and participation including time to share work, to work on planning and to address pedagogy.  

The SPBC Planning Unit is the most popular on campus according to the 2006 Evergreen Student Experience survey. Some 26.7% of students who identified a single area of focus found a home in SPBC. Another 16.6% of students interested in more than one area identify SPBC as a choice. Students in the area are roughly evenly split among those who identify business and management, education, psychology, and social sciences, as their primary choices with a smattering of law and public service professions rounding out the list.  ([[Media: Evergreen_Student_Experience_Survey_2006_-_What_is_your_primary_field_of_study_or_concentration_at_Evergreen_-_Olympia_Campus_Students.pdf|Evergreen Student Experience Survey 2006 - primary field of study – Olympia Students]])

SPBC contributed an average of 425 FTE to the undergraduate curriculum per year over the 1997-08 to 2005-06 school years. The area’s contribution increased significantly in the last 4 years of the period to nearly 500 FTE. The area overall has contributed am annual average of 15.3% of its teaching effort to Core programs over the same period. The area has made a consistent and significant contribution of just over 30% of its teaching effort to the teaching of Inter-Area programs. ([[Media: curricular visions_selected trends_97to07_update.pdf|Curricular Visions_Selected Trends_97to07_update]])

A critical mode of assessing the work of the area is satisfaction of area graduates with their experience. The 2006 Alumni survey of the class of 2004-05 is the latest set of data on Alumni Satisfaction. The following data is based on a subset of Olympia alumni from the 2006 Alumni Survey of the class of 2004-05 who identified that Education, Business, or other SPBC fields were a primary area of study while at Evergreen. ([[Media: Alumni_Survey_2006_-_Society%2C_Politics%2C_Behavior%2C_and_Change.pdf|Alumni Survey 2006: Society, Politics, Behavior and Change]])

Overall, alumni report very high rates of satisfaction with Evergreen’s contribution to their academic and personal growth. SPBC alumni were most satisfied with learning independently, participating in class discussions , synthesizing information and ideas, and critically analyzing information. Indeed for 18 of 24 categories mean satisfaction was between mostly and very satisfied (4) or better on a five-point scale. All of the mean ratings were above “somewhat satisfied” (3) on the rating scale. Alumni gave lower marks to their perceived readiness for a career, depth in a particular field, and understanding and applying quantitative and scientific principles.  

When alumni were directly asked their satisfaction with Evergreen experiences over 90% reported being somewhat or very satisfied with Interdisciplinary education, quality of instruction, the education they were able to construct, faculty narrative evaluation, and study abroad. Alumni were most dissatisfied tolerance for different or opposing views and culminating senior experiences.

In terms of ten work related skills, a plurality of SPBC alumni rated themselves as excellent on eight skills and good on the other two skills on a four-point scale. Evergreen was seen as contributing to some extent or a great deal in all skill areas with particular help in the development of skills in creative thinking, communication, independence and initiative, research skills, and willingness and aptitude to learn new skills. SPBC graduates saw themselves as strong thinkers and communicators who are able to work effectively in culturally diverse environments, take initiative, learn new skills.  

In terms of employment, 85.6% of the Society, Politics, Behavior, and Change concentration alumni were employed one year after graduation compared with 84% of all Alumni. Of those employed, 71.7% were employed in an area that was at least somewhat related to their area of primary study at Evergreen. 79.8% of employed SPBC alumni felt that their Evergreen experience had prepared the adequately or very well for their current positions.  

In terms of graduate or professional school, 30.4% of SPBC alumni applied to graduate/professional school within one year of graduation. Of 35 alumni who applied 27 had been offered admission (77.1%), 6 applications were pending, and two had been denied. Of 122 SPBC alumni, 22 attended or are currently attending graduate or professional school within one year of graduation. The 22 alumni were continuing their work in Washington (15), other states (3), and internationally (4). Six had enrolled in graduate studies at Evergreen in this time frame. The rate of 19.1% of alumni going directly to graduate school was slightly lower than the 21% of all Evergreen alumni respondents who entered graduate school in this period.

The primary issues facing the planning unit are its function and staffing. While most other planning units have a quite well defined sense of their central work and effort, SPBC is drawn in several quite different directions. The appearance of Master’s level faculty and several emeritus faculty on the roles of the Planning unit make it appear that there is an appropriate number of faculty to staff the area’s diverse offerings. In actuality the area has around twenty-five faculty members at the undergraduate level. Yet within even this limited range of faculty whose efforts are directed at undergraduates, a significant number individual faculty members operate somewhat autonomously, and the three major sub-areas have little substantial necessity to interact in order to plan curriculum. The SPBC faculty have decided not to pursue an area wide introductory program, but to allow the three major tracks to operate somewhat independently.

 

 

The area is arguably understaffed. It can strengthen its programs through the development of a broad rationale connecting its work to the liberal arts core of the college. Such a case should help the SPBC's representatives make convincing cases for additional hires. It is notable that the recent hiring in the area has developed in some large measure from administrative interest in developing curriculum in graduate programs and business rather than from a broad area wide consensus.

This unit is described in Section 2.G. as a part of the larger discussion of the College's engagement with Native Communities in Washington State.

Whereas other planning units have typically been organized around a collection of various fields of study, the Evening and Weekend Studies (EWS) planning unit is centered on providing specific schedules and modes of study to students while covering all fields of study. The students served by EWS fall into two categories. There is one set of students who are taking all of their coursework for that quarter in EWS, and there is another set of students who are taking two or four credits in EWS on top of the program or contract work they are doing in other planning units. These two sets of students provide the two primary functions for the EWS curriculum. For the former set of students, EWS offers  a comprehensive liberal arts curriculum that covers much of the range of subject matter found in other planning units. This subject matter is presented in a combination of part-time interdisciplinary programs (8 or 12 credits per quarter) and more focused courses (2 or 4 credits per quarter). For the latter set of students, EWS offers focused courses (2 or 4 credits per quarter) which allow the students to explore new fields of study, deepen their understanding of a particular academic field, or pursue prerequisites for specific undergraduate and graduate programs. The evening and weekend curriculum provides a way for students to explore visual arts, music, and dance courses; to acquire prerequisites in mathematics, social and natural sciences, and other disciplines; and to take foreign language sequences. Part-time programs and courses in EWS support pathways for students in American studies; arts and culture; body, mind and health; computers and society; environmental studies; government, justice and citizenship; international studies; literature and writing; management, markets and entrepreneurship; work, workers and social change; and math and science. Each year, the area also supports a part-time program in conjunction with Grays Harbor College in Aberdeen.

There has been major growth in EWS since the last accreditation report, and the role of EWS in the college has changed as its contribution to the undergraduate curriculum has grown. Originally, EWS was designed to support continuing study towards a degree by part-time students at the college. The evening and weekend schedule was seen as a way to support place-bound and schedule-bound students who were working or supporting a family and were unable to commit to the full-time programs offered during the day. The evening and weekend schedule continues to support these students, but they have not turned out to be part-time students. Today EWS enrollments comprise sixteen percent of the total student FTE at the college and most of the students enrolled in EWS programs and course work are full time students at the college. Thus the mission has moved to incorporate both part-time students and full time students undertaking either supplementary work or taking full time work within the EWS offerings.

One of the major factors contributing to the growth of EWS and the change in its role in the undergraduate curriculum was the decision in the 2001-02 school year to allow students to attempt as many as 20 hours per quarter. Students had previously been restricted to a maximum of 16 quarter hours per quarter. This change was undertaken to allow students access to broader array of courses that might supplement their general education. This development helped spur the growth of the use of EWS by full time students particularly in languages. At the same time, the number of faculty lines dedicated to staffing the evening and weekend curriculum was increased. The growth in EWS has been an important component in the college’s overall growth in the past 10 years. Growth in the part-time programs has been modest, up merely 4% over the period. But enrollment in courses work has risen 30% from 320.9 to 416.8 FTE in this period. ([[Media: curricular visions_selected trends_97to07_update.pdf|Curricular Visions_Selected Trends_97to07_update]])

Since 1996, the college has had a dean whose primary responsibility has been organizing and staffing the evening and weekend curriculum. Currently, the EWS planning unit is staffed by 12 half-time, continuing faculty, a pool of about 15 adjunct faculty who frequently teach in part-time programs, and an additional pool of about 80 adjunct faculty, some of whom are regular Evergreen staff, who teach 2 and 4 unit courses. Continuing faculty members have expertise in American studies, art history, literature, theater, labor studies, political and international studies, management, psychology, organizational development, social informatics / information sciences, environmental studies, environmental science, biology, mathematics, computer studies, and physics. Currently, two half-time-continuing faculty are serving as deans.

The program offerings of the area are consistently interdisciplinary and often inter-divisional in their focus. They are designed explicitly to incorporate elements of the five foci within them and to help students move toward fulfilling the six expectations. Courses offered typically include several offerings each quarter in each of the following areas: foreign language, writing, mathematics, sciences, business, psychology, and the visual arts. In addition, there are usually offerings in history, literature, dance, music, education, and sociology. Evening and Weekend Studies faculty also offer an upper-division program at Grays Harbor College. The content of the program often focuses on organizations and management, and a recent focus on health and service have been added. Although enrollment in the Grays Harbor program dropped in the 2004-05 and 2005-06 academic years, changes to the structure and content of the program have produced a clear increase in enrollment in the past two academic years ([[Media: Grays_Harbor_Program_Enrollment_History_1997-2007.pdf|Enrollment History for Grays Harbor Program]] amd

[[Media: Grays_Harbor_Self-Study_2004.pdf|Grays Harbor Program Self-Study 2004]]).

End of Program Review (EPR) data demonstrates that the program component of the Planning Unit has focused most of its subject matter work on Social Sciences, Humanities, and to a lesser degree arts. [Data for this and the following paragraphs is take from the EPR 2000-2005 Summaries of EPR Data] Data for Evening and Weekend Studies deals only with the half-time programs offered by the planning unit. The EPR data does not cover the significant growth in course offerings in this period. As pointed out above, the number of part-time programs and the number of seats in such programs has remained quite steady over the period. In the 2000-01 to 2005-06 period area programs reported between 67% and 93% of programs taught humanities, and over half of those programs made extensive use of Humanities in their subject matter ([[Media: EPR_2001-2005_-_Humanities.pdf|EPR 2001-2005 - Humanities]] ). In 2006-07, 94% reported some use of humanities, and 61% reported extensive humanities work ([[Media: EPR_2006-07_-_Humanities_by_Planning_Unit.pdf|EPR 2006-07 - Humanities by Planning Unit]]). Similarly in social science 2006-07 data 89% of programs reported using social sciences compared to 77% of all programs, and 55% of all programs made extensive use of social sciences ([[Media: EPR_2006-07_-_Social_Sciences_by_Planning_Unit.pdf|EPR 2006-07 - Social Sciences by Planning Unit]]).  The role of arts in programs has varied of 56% in the 2006-07 data to as high as 75% for several years previous. However, intensive use of arts was present in only 22% of programs ([[Media: EPR_2006-07_-_Art_by_Planning_Unit.pdf|EPR 2006-07 - Art by Planning Unit]]).  2000-01 to 2005-06 EPR data combine science and mathematics while the number of programs reporting the use of science and math fluctuated from a high of 64% to a low of 19% for the most part programs reported a minor emphasis on mathematics and science. The 2006-07 data show only 28% of programs had mathematics and 44% had science components and only 6% of programs reported a extensive use of math and 16% reported extensive use of sciences. ([[Media: EPR_2006-07_-_Math_by_Planning_Unit.pdf|EPR 2006-07 - Math by Planning Unit]] and [[Media: EPR_2006-07_-_Natural_and_Physical_Sciences_Overview.pdf|EPR 2006-07 - Natural and Physical Sciences Overview]])

In terms of skills in writing, Information Technology Literacy (ITL), and Critical Thinking the planning unit has like most other areas active in supporting general education goals. Both in writing and critical thinking 100% of programs report working on these areas in significant ways. Writing was not simply expected but actively taught in most EWS programs. A particular emphasis was placed on response writing and critical essay writing.  Work on critical thinking focused on the recognition of diverse perspectives (including analysis of one’s own perspective) on materials covered and analysis of the content of texts, images and data. ITL 2006-07 data show that ITL was a component in over 80% of programs. Like most program areas the primary uses of ITL were for information acquisition, presentation, and online communication and social software.  83.% of EWS programs as opposed to 70% of all programs reported work on ITL. ([[Media: EPR_2006-07_-_Writing_Overview.pdf|EPR 2006-07 - Writing Overview]], [[Media: EPR_2006-07_-_Critical_Thinking_Overview.pdf|EPR 2006-07 - Critical Thinking Overview]], and [[Media: EPR_2006-07_-_Information_Technology_Literacy_Overview.pdf|EPR 2006-07 - Information Technology Literacy Overview]])

Data on Students experience and satisfaction with EWS programs and courses requires the difficult task of disaggregating these students from the student body in general. A subgroup of 2006 Alumni survey respondents from the class of 2004-05 who took 50% or more of their curricular offerings through EWS formed the subgroup described in this analysis.  ([[Media: Alumni_Survey_2006_-_Evening_Weekend_Studies.pdf|Alumni Survey 2006: Evening Weekend Studies]]) While students use EWS at all levels of their college experience, it is notable that transfer students entering as Juniors constitute nearly half of those reporting extensive use of EWS offerings. EWS alumni were also significantly older than other alumni with a mean age of 31.2.   However, EWS Alumni are indistinguishable from alumni in other Planning Units when asked about Evergreen’s contribution to their education. Learning independently, participation in class discussion, critically analyzing information, and working cooperatively cluster at the top in terms of satisfaction and readiness for a career, quantitative principle and understanding scientific principles cluster at the lower end (although the mean is still 3.29 or better on a five point scale).   Similarly students were satisfied with the interdisciplinary approach, the education they could construct at Evergreen, the quality of instruction, and narrative evaluations. Dissatisfactions were a bit different with academic advice from faculty and opportunities for advanced work as areas where students could see room for improvement.  In some measure this may reflect the smaller amount of contact with faculty in courses and part-time programs, the difficulty of providing a full range of advanced work within the confines of a limited faculty pool, and the dispersion of students in classes and half-time programs.

 

Once again the most compelling data in terms of EWS alumni is their similarity in terms of their experience, satisfactions, and results with alumni who identified as members of the other concentration area subgroups.  

There are several curricular concerns which are unique to the Evening and Weekend curriculum or which involve the coordination of Evening and Weekend curriculum with the rest of the undergraduate curriculum. The evening and weekend curriculum is planned on a one-year cycle rather than the two-year cycle followed by the daytime curriculum. This structure allows the curriculum to adapt more quickly to shifts in the student body and other demands on the curriculum. This flexibility is enhanced by the fact that adjunct faculty staffs much of the evening and weekend curriculum. However, both of these characteristics have associated problems. The planning cycle makes it difficulty to collaborate with rather than just react to the curriculum offerings in the daytime. And the high number of adjunct faculty raises issues of faculty status just as it does in other institutions. The result is a sense of separation between the EWS faculty and the rest of the faculty. The faculty status issue is compounded by a lower pay rate for adjunct faculty. Even the status of continuing, half-time faculty can be questioned in terms of the equity of governance assignments and the ability to rotate into different areas of the curriculum.

The policy change in the 2001-02 academic year to allow students to take a total of 20 credits a quarter has risen as an issue for evening and weekend faculty in recent years. There are questions about whether students are generally successful when they attempt this increased credit load, and there is evidence that this issue disproportionately affects evening and weekend faculty. ([[Media: Analysis_of_Over_16_Credit_Load.pdf|Analysis of Over 16 Credit Load]])

There are also specific issues of separation between the daytime and the evening and weekend curriculum in terms of service to students. Over the past ten years, many improvements have been made in the services provided to evening and weekend students and faculty, everything from access to media services to access to food services. There are still areas where further improvements are needed.

Finally, there is a question about the role of two and four-credit courses in relation to the 8, 12, and 16-credit programs offered at the college. Courses are generally offered on an evening and weekend schedule. Housed in a separate planning unit and taught on a separate schedule, they become easy to ignore during the overall curriculum planning efforts which center on the development of programs. At the same time, they become attractive to students because of their accessible schedule as well as their more familiar, narrow content. As mentioned in other sections of this document, there has been consistent growth in courses over the past ten years. The college needs to develop a more intentional approach to the development and delivery of courses. More advanced offerings need to be provided to match the upper-division standing of the majority of the students who enroll in the evening and weekend curriculum. And faculty need to become more involved in setting goals for both the number and content of courses offered throughout the curriculum. At the same time, more attention needs to be paid to the development of programs that allow students to take a two or four credit course without overloading themselves by taking a total of 18 or 20 credits. In other words, to meet the needs of students and advance the mission of the college, there needs to be greater coordination of program and course offerings.

 

In response to a recommendation from the NWCCU to address issues of general education, the Evergreen faculty adopted six Expectations of an Evergreen Graduate in spring 2001. By approving expectations of graduates, rather than requirements to graduate, the faculty acted on a central principle of education at Evergreen – that students are responsible for their own work. The Expectations tell the students what they are generally expected to learn, but the choices of exactly what and how to learn are the responsibility of each student.

In addition to adopting the Expectations, the faculty also approved an expanded advising plan and other support structures for implementation of the new general education initiatives. New curriculum models were developed to promote breadth and depth opportunities for students. The Quantitative and Symbolic Reasoning Center, the Writing Center, faculty development funds, and faculty hiring priorities were also enhanced. At the end of their senior year, students are now encouraged to create a new summative student self-evaluation that addresses the Expectations and is submitted to their official transcript.   An Assessment Study Group of faculty, staff, and students was charged in 2002 to develop an assessment plan for the new general education initiatives. Collaboration in the development of the assessment plan (and its subsequent revisions) were essential in promoting ownership and responsibility for the both the process and use of the results. The Assessment Study Group developed two new assessment tools, the End-of-program Review and the Transcript Review. ([[Media:Teaching and Learning at Evergreen_Final Assessment Study Group Report 12-17-0.pdf|Teaching and Learning at Evergreen 2002]])

The assessment of the general educational program at Evergreen is framed as two related parts: teaching and learning. Teaching assessment focuses on how the curriculum provides students with “a substantial, coherent, and articulated exposure to the broad domains of knowledge” (as set out in Standard 2.C NWCCU and detailed in 2.C.3). Learning assessment focuses on evidence that students are meeting the Expectations of an Evergreen Graduate; this is the part of the institutional assessment plan detailed here. Evergreen’s approach to learning assessment is guided by the standards of regional accreditation, including, but not limited to the following:  

Evergreen has a rich method of assessing student achievements at the level of particular study:  narrative evaluations, comprising both the faculty evaluation of student achievement (the faculty evaluation) and the student's own evaluation of achievement (the self-evaluation). The student transcript, consisting of records of transfer credits, program descriptions, as well as both student self-evaluations and faculty evaluations of students, serve as the primary basis for assessing student learning. The Transcript Review is a meta-assessment of a collection of authentic evaluation data that was documented at the time of the students’ work by the individuals who knew that work the best – students and their immediate faculty.

 

The undergraduate learning assessment strategies include all undergraduates at Evergreen, including those studying at off-site programs and students taking Extended Education courses for academic credit. While student Transcript Review is the primary tool for assessing learning at Evergreen, the assessment is costly and time-intensive, so it can only be repeated every three to four years. Other complementary assessment activities focus on other areas of interest during intervening years. A further consideration is to allow sufficient time between transcript reviews to allow new initiatives and program changes to be evidenced in graduating student records. Thus, the transcript assessment results are supplemented by selected indicators of student self-reported learning using the results of other more regularly occurring surveys. Survey items that correspond to each of the Evergreen Expectations have been selected from the annually-administered National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE); biannual Alumni Surveys of recent Evergreen graduates; and every four years the Greeners at Work Survey of alumni three years after completion and their current employers.

Evergreen is also engaged in a variety of other educational assessment activities and projects that focus on critical learning outcomes in accordance with our mission. Following are a few examples.

In 2006, the Tribal: Reservation-based/Community-determined programs launched an e-portfolio program. Students in the program build and maintain portfolios in which they select examples of their work that they feel best demonstrate their progress in meeting the Expectations of an Evergreen Graduate (and their program-specific goal of indigenous knowledge). The students provide a reflective narrative to explain how their selection addresses the goals of the program. Their portfolio websites are open to review and comment by their faculty and fellow students. The portfolio is primarily a learning approach, but also provides a rich resource for developmental assessment.

A group of library faculty, staff, library interns, and students conducted two process assessments to explore student learning in information technology literacy. These assessments involved student participants as co-researchers who helped the college understand how students frame research questions, determine and implement research strategies, and make decisions about the value and meaning of information while conducting genuine research projects. The students attended a two-day workshop in the library while working on authentic research projects from their academic programs. They worked individually and in peer-review teams; all research activities were documented and debriefed, and all keystrokes were collected from Camtasia software loaded onto their laptops. The project was first conducted in 2003 with graduating seniors, and it was found to be very valuable for identifying strengths and weaknesses in our approaches to teaching information technology literacy. The assessment was then repeated with first-year participants in 2004 to gain a clearer picture of the skills which first-year students bring with them to college. ([[Media:The_Activity_of_Information_Literacy.pdf|The Activity of Information Literacy: A Process Assessment of Student Research Skills]])

The college supports a mini-grant award program for faculty members who are willing to document evidence of the relationship of teaching practices and student learning. The faculty must describe how their research proposals connect to the mission and goals of the college. A growing collection of evidence-based learning assessment projects is now available to other faculty at Evergreen and the public ([[Media: Faculty_Assessment_Web_Page.pdf|Faculty Assessment Web Page]]). Institutional Research and Assessment is sponsoring two faculty assessment projects this year. One faculty has developed an innovative, multi-faceted assessment of student diversity learning, and another faculty is working to develop a model of student flow into and out of Evergreen to assist with future curriculum planning. A team of Evergreen faculty is also working with the Washington Center for Undergraduate Education in a national multi-institution evidence-based interdisciplinary learning assessment project.

A group of faculty and staff members are engaged in an ethnographic research project to better understand the nature and conditions of interdisciplinary teaching and learning. During the 2006-07 academic year, faculty members from several full-time, team-taught academic programs were interviewed regularly about their teaching and learning experiences and insights throughout the school year. As the multi-term programs came to a close, students from the programs participated in focus groups in which they articulated their learning and help us better understand how students perceive interdisciplinarity. The ethnographic faculty interview data, observation of student work, and students’ focus group reflections are supporting the college’s ongoing dialogue about how well we are achieving our mission as a public, interdisciplinary liberal arts college. The experiential data and reflections of faculty and students evidence the shared teaching and learning experiences that occur in interdisciplinary learning community programs. A subsequent exploration of evidence of integrative learning and transformative educational experiences from NSSE data demonstrates that the experiences of the individual participants in the project are characteristic of many students at Evergreen ([[Media: NSSE_transformative education_aacu08.pdf|NSSE Transformative Education AACU presentation Jan08, Washington DC]]).

The Directors of the Quantitative and Symbolic Reasoning Center and the Writing Center each developed and piloted skills assessments for incoming first-year students who enrolled in the latest iteration of the Beginning the Journey program in Fall 2007. The assessments were designed to help new students understand their own abilities in writing and quantitative reasoning and to facilitate conversations about student learning with tutors and faculty members.

In the recent past, Evergreen participated with our Washington public baccalaureate peers in the statewide learning assessment projects related to writing, critical thinking, quantitative reasoning, and information technology literacy. All of these projects brought together faculty from across institutions and disciplines to study student work, reflect on their own practices and values, learn about effective practices that lead to student learning, explore strengths and challenges, and improve their own teaching strategies. We continue to participate in strategy conversations about how to reinstitute this valuable work with our statewide colleagues, including pursuit of external funding to support developmental portfolio-based writing assessment, and other methods of sustaining the statewide collaborative conversation about common learning outcomes for students.

Feedback from students and alumni about their experiences provides evidence of how well Evergreen is achieving its goals of providing engaging and relevant liberal arts education. One important source of such evidence is the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), in which Evergreen first-years and senior-class students participate annually. Evergreen students’ 2007 Level of Academic Challenge benchmark score was significantly higher (p<.001) than those for each of our three comparison populations: Council of Public Liberal Arts Colleges (COPLAC), other Masters-Smaller Program schools who share our Carnegie classification, and all participating institutions. First-years and seniors score so highly in this area because they spend more time preparing for class and their coursework has a greater emphasis on high level mental activities such as synthesis and organization, making judgments about the value of information, and analysis than other seniors. The NSSE also reveals that Evergreen students spend significantly more time on assignments that require integration of information from different sources and that they more frequently put together ideas from different courses in their work. These elements combined characterize Evergreen’s educational practices as those which regularly engage students in activities which contribute to deep learning.  Evergreen’s performance on NSSE’s Active and Collaborative Learning benchmark distinguishes us even further from our peer context.  Again, both first-year and senior scores are significantly higher (p<.001) than all three comparison groups, and as with Academic Challenge our students are as engaged as students in the top 10% (high-performing) NSSE institutions.  In 2007, none of the survey items which make up this benchmark score had significantly lower scores than any of the peer groups.  The intellectual activities captured by this benchmark illustrate common experiences for students at Evergreen.  Students at Evergreen regularly work with other students in and outside of class to complete their work.  They are expected to be active participants in class discussions, and they are encouraged to pose their own questions.  They more frequently teach each other and participate in community-based projects than students at most other institutions.  Finally, they regularly carry ideas from class with them into discussions with others outside of class.  The evidence of Active and Collaborative Learning gleaned from the NSSE supports the college’s efforts to provide educational programs that encourage students to be personally engaged in their learning and active participants in community.

The NSSE also asks a series of questions which collect students’ perceptions of how their institution has contributed to their growth and development in a series of knowledge and skill areas.   These data provide a sense of the relative strength of various learning domains present in Evergreen’s undergraduate program.  In 2007, Evergreen first-year students perceived higher growth than students at all three comparison groups in five of the sixteen learning domains: thinking critically and analytically, learning effectively on your own, understanding yourself, understanding people of other racial and ethnic backgrounds, and solving complex real-world problems. Additionally, they reported higher growth than other students in at least one of the comparison groups in another six areas: speaking clearly and effectively, working effectively with others, voting in elections, developing a personal code of values and ethics, contributing to the welfare of your community, and developing a deepened sense of spirituality. Seniors attribute significantly more growth to their Evergreen experiences than all three comparison groups in eight of the sixteen learning domains.  As with first-years, thinking critically and analytically, learning effectively on your own, understanding yourself, understanding people of other racial and ethnic backgrounds, and solving complex real-world problems are again among the areas which differentiate Evergreen students’ experiences. In addition, seniors reported higher growth than all three comparison groups in acquiring a broad general education, working effectively with others, and contributing to the welfare of your community. Beyond those eight areas, in another five domains, Evergreen seniors perceive significantly higher growth than seniors in at least one of the comparison groups: writing clearly and effectively, speaking clearly and effectively, voting in elections, developing a personal code of values and ethics, and developing a deepened sense of spirituality. They are neither higher nor lower than any comparison group in analyzing quantitative problems. ([[Media: NSSE_2007_ Benchmarks_Report.pdf|NSSE 2007 Benchmarks Report]])

A similar set of strengths rise to the top of the list of learning growth areas which Alumni rate in biannually administered surveys of baccalaureate degree recipients. Alumni from the class of 2005 were surveyed in summer and fall 2006.  Participants are asked to rate their satisfaction with Evergreen’s contribution to their growth in 24 areas.  It is notable that 17 of the 24 learning areas received an average rating above 4.0 on a 5-point scale, which placed the average satisfaction in these areas between “mostly” and “very” satisfied. Further none of the items had an average satisfaction rating below the midpoint “somewhat satisfied” on the scale. The highest rated learning areas provide additional evidence of Evergreen’s concurrent emphases on personal autonomy and responsibility for your own work, collaborative and responsible participation, and complex thinking. The top five highest average rating were attributed to growth in learning independently, participation in discussions, working cooperatively in a group, critically analyzing information, and synthesizing information and ideas from many sources. (Alumni Survey 2006).

Every four years, Institutional Research and Assessment administers the “Greeners at Work” survey which first collects information from alumni three years after graduation, and then asks the alum’s current supervisor to provide information about the abilities and expectations of the graduate in the workplace. Two Greeners at Work surveys have been completed during this 10-year accreditation cycle in 1999 and 2003, and data collection just wrapped up from the 2007 administration. The survey affirms the ability of Evergreen graduates to self-assess their relative strengths in terms of work-related skill areas, since in most skills areas there is strong correspondence between alumni and employer ratings. Of the 17 work-related skills rated, alumni and employers assigned the highest average skill levels to the same five areas, (although in a slightly different order.)  Employers rated Evergreen alumni highest in their willingness and aptitude to learn new skills and their ability to work in a culturally diverse environment; alumni average ratings of their own skills simply switched the order of these top two skill areas. The next three highest areas in order of employer average ratings were ability to work cooperatively on team efforts, creative thinking skills, and independence and initiative. Again the areas of collaborative participation, independence and willingness to engage in personal challenge, and thinking skills rise to the top from another view of the outcomes of an Evergreen education.  ([[Media: Greeners_at_Work_2003_-_Alumni_and_Employers_Three_Years_After_Graduation.pdf|Greeners at Work 2003 - Alumni and Employers Three Years After Graduation]])

Each graduate program has its own set of expected learning outcomes for its students. The programs provide information about their ongoing assessment practices in Standard 2.D.

====2.B.3 - Engagement and Reflection====

The participatory assessment approach at Evergreen draws upon some of same pedagogies of engagement found in our educational programs. At its heart, assessment at Evergreen is about bringing people together to collaboratively engage with collected data to make meaning.  Assessment is collaborative work which necessarily involves faculty, staff, and students.  Members of the college often work in small groups to dig into questions, explore their own values and practices, share ideas, and report back to the broader community with recommendations based on their research.  Individuals who engage directly in constructing meaning from various kinds of data are more likely to own the implications gleaned from that work.

Multiple modes of inquiry are employed in initial research methodology and subsequent assessment activities. Research methodologies include surveys, administrative data analysis, focus groups, experiential data, ethnography, participatory research, qualitative, quantitative, and creative modes of inquiry. Reporting methods include publishing materials on the website and conducting staff development workshops to raise awareness of the availability and contents of this resource.  Email announcements of new research, printed reports, appearances at regular committee meetings, planning retreats, activities for new faculty and staff, other presentations, intensive assessment workshops, and posters are also used.

 

 

===Standard 2.C - Undergraduate Curriculum===

In a college without departments, majors, or requirements the issue of how to organize the faculty to deliver a curriculum that has an appropriate distribution of beginning, intermediate, and advanced work, that provides disciplinary and interdisciplinary work, and supports general education while allowing both students and faculty broad autonomy is clearly central. Historically the answers have included no formal organization in the early years and multiple small groups interest groups (Specialty Areas) in the 1980’s and early 1990’s. The current the structure first developed in 1995 is organized around six planning units, first year (Core) programs, inter-area programs, and individual contract and internship work.

Planning in the undergraduate curriculum is organized around six major Planning Units: Scientific Inquiry (SI); Culture, Text and Language (CTL); Expressive Arts (EA); Environmental Studies (ES); Society, Politics, Behavior, and Change (SPBC); and Evening and Weekend Studies (EWS). As seen in 2.B.1, the planning units correspond roughly to traditional divisions, but retain one explicitly inter-divisional planning unit ES and one based on a different schedule EWS. (In this section we will discuss the nature and functions of Planning Units in the curriculum. A more detailed discussion of the current planning units’ work was presented in section 2.B.1.). The Native American, World Indigenous peoples center also offers programs each year and houses the Reservation Based/Community Determined Program that offers programs in Native communities in the western half of the state. In addition the Tacoma Program serves upper division students in Tacoma and is discussed separately. Each planning unit is responsible for developing an entry point(s) into the program of study in the area and for providing a variety of more or less formally organized advanced work. In addition each area is expected to contribute twenty percent of its teaching to Core (First year) programs and an additional twenty percent inter-area programs each year.  

 

Each faculty member is affiliated with one planning unit. This affiliation usually, but not always, reflects their professional training. Faculty members can and occasionally do change their affiliation as their interests and capacities change. Planning units themselves occasionally change their focus or reorganize. Planning Units select a Coordinator (PUC) from among their ranks to organize and conduct meetings and coordinate with other units and with the Curriculum Dean. Planning units can be distinguished from departments by their lack of budget, lack of permanent assigned faculty lines, and their lack of control over the hiring of new faculty. They are based on a strange amalgam of faculty autonomy and collective suasion.  

 

While the formal structure of the areas is similar, the areas vary considerably in the extent to which they organize repeated offerings, the degree of demand they put on their members to teach within the area’s offerings, and the degree to which advanced work is formally identified. Each unit strikes a different and distinctive balance between disciplinary coverage and open-ended inquiry for both faculty and students. In the past few years, concerns about the role of Planning Units have motivated considerable discussion and debate on the campus. Questions have arisen not only about the curricular role of Planning Units, but their influence over hiring and their responsibility for providing seats to Core and Inter-area programs.  (Rita’s Self Eval 2007, Also [[Media: Deans_Governance_Group_W06_summary.doc|Curricular Visions Summary of Winter 2006 Discussions]])

 

The tension about what planning units should do and mean for the college exists not only within and between planning units, but as planning units are seen to serve the needs of faculty, students, advising staff recruitment and admissions.

Planning units typically, though not always, serve as a vehicle for organizing faculty for disciplinary or divisional commitments about coverage, skill, and mastery. They help ensure that introductory, intermediate, and advanced work is present in areas of the curriculum where such distinctions are seen to be critical. There is considerable variability between planning units both in their focus on coverage and in their aspirations for student mastery of the discipline(s) involved. In some Planning Units open-ended inquiry in the area’s offerings comes after considerable disciplinary work, in others such inquiry is the predominant structure of their work. Despite faculty's sense of delineated paths through the curriculum, data from student transcripts and conversations with students indicate that few students are actively aware of pathways or even the planning unit structure. This is less true in Environmental Studies and Scientific Inquiry where the Bachelor of Science Degree requirements help guide student choices.Similarly, some student aid recipients must take care to remain on track for the BS in order to maintain eligibility for scholarships or grants they have received(including federal SMART grants). In some areas (SPBC and CTL) students would be hard pressed to name the area. To the extent students do use pathways their diversion from them often represents the development of and focus on a particular skill or project. Thus while student work typically does result in what students (but not the college) represent as a majors these are often either somewhat narrower than area-defined pathways. Advising sees the planning units as the source of stability in the curriculum. They value the idea of repeating programs and regular offerings. Advising uses planning units as the locus for disciplinary work in the curriculum. As major translators of the work of programs, Advising urges faculty to define areas and programs in easily accessible disciplinary language. Pathways are seen by Advising as important suggestions for students about potential ways to work their way through the curriculum. As Advising is concerned with clarity and stability in the curriculum, Admissions is concerned with the question of how to sell this curriculum to incoming students and their parents. This creates a pressure on Planning Units not simply to produce curriculum that is stable and transparent, but also to hire in such a way that the likelihood of marketable programs is increased. Thus pressure for hires in health and in business have emerged in part from external pressures. Despite these tensions Planning Units have served since 1995 as the primary intermediate structure between the individual faculty member and the college curriculum as a whole. They are central to the process of planning both the 60% of the curriculum they directly organize and the 40% of the curriculum taught in Core and Inter-Area programs. An alternative approach to making the curriculum transparent and attractive has been the Fields of Study approch arising out of the Curricular Visions process. This approch is designed to allow groups of faculty to more clearly identify on going opportunities for study in the curriculum.

The single most important structure for offering the curriculum is the coordinated studies program described above (2.A.9). In addition to coordinated studies within Planning Units, there are Inter-area Programs where faculty members from across two or more planning units come together to pursue an issue. These programs are generally substantial two and three quarter-long investigations whose audience is often open to students from a wide variety of backgrounds. Core Programs are inter-area programs designed for first-year students. They typically are broad two to three quarter offerings centered on a theme or inquiry with specific support for the development of college level skills in reading, writing, and seminar work. Several other modes of study are used to deliver the curriculum. The single faculty member program offers a specific piece of full-time study for one to three quarters. This format is usually offered for advanced disciplinary work. Half-time coordinated studies programs are the foundation of the evening and weekend program. Like full time programs they can be offered for one to three quarters. The evening and weekend program also offers a range of courses designed to stand on their own or to be supplementary to other offerings. Courses in such areas as languages, mathematics, art and writing both offer alternative vehicles for meeting program prerequisites and are used to support teaching in both arts and language programs. In addition, courses in other areas support graduate programs and part-time studies students. Individual contracts and internships round out the curriculum. Such contracts are most frequently for advanced work. Internship Learning contracts are agreements between the student, an internship field supervisor, the school, and a faculty member. They are most frequently undertaken as an individual study, but may be required as a part of the work within a coordinated study or group contract. Both internship learning contracts and Individual Contracts are reviewed and signed off on by the Academic Deans.

 

Freshman students at Evergreen may enter a diverse array of programs. The three most important choices available to them are Core programs designed explicitly for freshmen and All-Level programs in which a percentage, usually twenty-five percent of the seats, are reserved for freshmen, and introductory/lower division programs where as many as 50 percent of the seats are reserved for first year students. All-level programs that cater to the largest numbers are often, though not always inter-area programs that involve faculty form two or more planning units.

Core programs are almost always interdisciplinary and frequently interdivisional offerings involving two to four faculty members and often taught for two quarters or a full year. They are distinguished by slightly smaller faculty student ratio (1/23), a strong collaborative relationship with Academic Advising, and extensive support from the Writing and Quantitative Reasoning center as appropriate. The primary virtue of the broadly interdivisional core programs is the provision of a base from which a student may develop her college education. These programs are usually thematically organized and inquiry based.  They provide a wide ranging, often quite sophisticated, inter-disciplinary perspective on contemporary and historical questions of human experience. All Core programs work to support general education and the development of skills in writing, reading, seminar participation, collaborative work more generally, and critical thinking. In many programs quantitative reasoning, library research, creative expression, and field research skills of various sorts are supported as well.  

In recent years Core has shown, along with th rest of the curriculum, a tendency for narrower two person programs. The difficulty which arises is that the breadth of the offerings usually suffer. Further, in the first years of this review period 1997-98 and 1998-99 many and often most Core programs lasted through three full quarters. Today most programs are one or two quarters long. (Catalog 1997-98,1998-99, 2005-6, 2006-7) For many years Core programs were the preponderant first year experience, today, fewer than half of all first year students get this sort of support. Indeed there has been a marked shift in terms of where first-year slots are located in the full-time curriculum. Over this period, a growing proportion of first-years enrolled in All-level program seats (programs which enroll freshmen through seniors) compared to Core programs (targeted at freshmen and new first-time, first-year students). In AY 1997-98, 71% of first-year program FTE was generated in Core programs, but by AY 2006-07, only 40% was generated in Core. Lower-division programs (which enroll freshmen and sophomores) began to appear in AY 2004-05. By AY 2006-07, lower-division programs represented 14% of all first-year program FTE.