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Educational Program and Its Effectiveness

[ A NOTE TO READERS: THIS IS OBVIOUSLY A DRAFT. MANY SECTIONS ARE STILL IN PROCESS. ALL ARE AMENABLE TO BEING REVISED. DATA IS BEING ORGANIZED AND PUT TOGETHER FOR SUPPORT OF THE DOCUMENT AS I WRITE. AS CHIEF WRITER OF THIS SECTION I AM INTERESTED IN YOUR RESPONSES. IF YOU FIND YOURSELF ABLE TO USE THE WIKI RESPONSE MECHANISM THOUGH THE DISCUSSION TABS FOR EACH SECTION, THAT WOULD BE MOST HELPFUL. ALTERNATIVELY PLEASE SEND ME AN E-MAIL, BUT BE SURE TO IDENTIFY WHAT SECTION YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT. I AM MOST INTERESTED IN IMPORTANT FACTUAL CORRECTIONS, AND YOUR VIEWS ABOUT WHAT ISSUES ARE MOST CRITICAL FOR US AS WE GO FORWARD. I HAVE BEGUN A LIST IN THE FINAL SECTION, I WOULD LOVE TO SEE WHAT ELSE YOU IDENTIFY. FEEL FREE TO CALL AND CHAT ABOUT THIS AS WELL. THANKS MATT SMITH ]

Evergreen is unique in American Higher Education. Evergreen identifies itself as “the nation’s leading public interdisciplinary liberal arts college.” Its commitment to interdisciplinarity, to student responsibility, to collaboration, and its vision of an inclusive, public, egalitarian liberal arts education must be understood as the product of its history.

This unique college precipitated out of tensions around the critical debate within higher education in the nineteen sixties and seventies. This debate involves two quite distinct but crucial critiques that contributed profoundly to the college pedagogical assumptions and practices. First came a critique of the multiversity, of 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, of not living up to the ideals of a democratic educational system that would empower citizens broadly. The second critique assessed the liberal arts tradition itself 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 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 failure of democratic education and the lack of moral judgment. In the case of the small liberal arts college the moral tradition and ethical questions were viewed as outdated, abstracted from the world, and hence irrelevant.

The founders of Evergreen, for the most part men and women in their thirties and early forties, envisioned a college that, above all, was relevant and 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 class aggrandizement. 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 was ethically informed. Simultaneously 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 this pool of 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, the 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 to 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 lowering 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.

By the mid 1980s the need to rearticulate the challenge to frame the college around it’s positive vision for all the world to see became an imperative. And 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 we do at Evergreen. Many of our actual activities can be understood as contributing to more than one foci.

A Central Tension: Reflexive Thinking and Mastery

Evergreen came into being at a point in American higher education where the was a explicit tension between the idea of mastery of content on the one hand and authentic learning about the process of knowing on the other. In colleges today both sense of what it means to be educated are recognized as elements of learning, but in most universities and colleges the response to the tension between the two has been organized primarily around disciplines. Learning has been understood to be mastery of a discipline or perhaps disciplines when programs have been perceived to be interdisciplinary. Evergreen has made a different choice and that choice is reflected in its principles, goals and the learning outcomes of students. Evergreen has chosen to organize itself around the process of inquiry. From before there was a student body, indeed before there was a faculty, finding a new way of organizing learning that put students’ experience of learning at the center of the education was a central issue for the college. “Learning How to Learn” and “Ways of Knowing” were the short-hand slogans. While any consensus on what specific learning experiences were meant was difficult to come by, the idea that learning and knowing were the central content of our teaching work was widely embraced. Faculty members whose disciplines ranged from Rogerian psychology to Natural History, from Organic Chemistry to English Literature, from Painting to Political Economy debated what learning meant and encouraged their students to see learning itself as a central subject matter in the process of inquiry. Disciplinary knowledge did not disappear, but it presented itself in the context of other disciplines and other epistemologies. Students were encouraged to see themselves in this process of inquiry and to learn the issues, ways of thinking about the issues, and formulate their own judgments. This sort of ferment around what learning means has died back at the college, but the tension between these two goals of education remains. (Rita Pougiales, Self Evaluation 2006-07)

These twin goals of knowing disciplines and knowing how to think and learn about the world are near the center of the work of the contemporary philosopher and educational theorist Elizabeth Minnich. She has characterized the central work of the Liberal Arts College as thinking.  %(Elizabeth Minnich, “Knowledge, Thinking, Judgment: For Good or Ill, Long Island University: TASA Award Lecture, April 27, 2006) Specifically she has argued that a combination of reflexive thinking and representational thinking are at the heart of the transformative experience that interdisciplinary Liberal Arts can provide.

Reflexive thinking begins with a question, an interrogation of the world, and an encounter with the other. As such it participates in the substantive learning of information that is the domain of mastery. 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. One can be aware of how one has learned and what one has become through the process of learning. This form of thinking makes the learner a “problem” for herself. Not only does the learner need to know the ostensible subject of the learning (a text, a geological strata, or a piece of music), but also how that subject matter is embedded in a whole array of questions about the learner’s own motives, his embeddedness in society, his desires and development. Beyond that, reflexivity brings the learner to ask questions about how the ostensible subject has come into being in a society and become embedded in a complex historical and social web of connections that underlie that discipline. Further the learner comes to see herself in the present as interacting with others through the learning she has entered into. Thinking that makes our understanding of self and society problematic makes interdisciplinarity a necessary condition of understanding one’s position. It arises as a learner comes to see each discipline as a partial account of knowing himself in relation to the world and knowing. We are problems for ourselves that must 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, of creating new knowledge 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 he/she is a part of must learn to think historically. This means that we see how the structure of ideas that define our views of others has come into being and is changed over time. It also implies that we 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 reflective and representational thinking are ultimately necessarily both very personal and political.

Mastery as a mode of learning pushes for content, coverage and deep understanding of a phenomenon. It presents as complete and complex an account as it can of a phenomenon, a text, a piece of art. It arises out of a disciplinary model and develops an experience of a phenomenon in isolation or as an instrumental portion of a larger phenomenon. Mastery as a way of knowing needs reflexivity to provide a context and meaning in public life; reflexivity needs the encounter with subject matter to begin. Mastery and reflexive thinking are two points on a spectrum of modes of knowing, Mastery without reflexivity, while perhaps not impossible, is isolated and instrumental. It can lead to action that because it is not within context does not perceive consequence. Reflexivity without content becomes solipsism. For reflexive thought to arise it must come out of interaction with the world as other than self.

The tension between the demands of disciplinary mastery 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 and the college comes into being at Evergreen.

The Five Foci of an Evergreen Education

Interdisciplinary Education

Interdisciplinary study is a 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. 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 a phenomena apart from its context in the world often simply misses the critical importance of the phenomena and its 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 phenomena. 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 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 we attend at Evergreen. 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 interdiciplinarity 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. %(Student Focus Group 2/9/08) 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 can expose students to more than one discipline and single program with two faculty members with similar backgrounds may or may not be interdisciplinary.

Personal Engagement

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 involve 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 reflected in the college’s emphasis on full-time work for 16 quarter hours 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, a doctor, a wildlife biologist, a philosopher or it could be rather unconventional, a Kayak maker, an independent film-maker, or a specialty vegetable farmer. What would distinguish this work would be 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 and, learn from and accept the work of others constitutes a challenging exercise in representational thinking.

Linking Theory and Practice

Linking theory with practice arises from the engagement of students to their work in a social context. Engaging in a dialogue between their intellectual understandings and direct engagement with the phenomena they study (texts, social behavior, scientific or artistic work) strengthens both and allows students to place their growing sense of personal work and commitment into a realistic and purposeful context. The necessity of linking theory with practice arises out of a central concern for educational relevance and the college’s commitment to providing an education that will promote effective citizenship.

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 both worlds. 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 both 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 their knowledge as a substantive description, as a personal experience, and as political and social phenomena.

Collaborative/Cooperative Work

Collaborative/cooperative work is a cornerstone of 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, 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, 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 learnings 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 within 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.

Teaching and Learning Across Significant Differences

Teaching Across 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 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 sexuality, intelligence, shyness, mental illness and the like. Differences bring within the context of the college 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 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 foci 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 world view. 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.

The Six Expectations of an Evergreen Graduate

In the 1999-2000 and 2000-2001 school years, at the urging of the commission, the college undertook a review of it’s understanding of General Education. During two years of debate, discussion, and struggle, the college produced an important document that attempted to articulate the goals of an Evergreen education from the point of view of the student. This document – The Six Goals of An Evergreen Education - has proved useful in articulating 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 to make sure that as often as it makes sense the opportunities to meet the goals are present in the curriculum. 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 goals in terms of potential outcomes for students.

The Six Goals of an Evergreen Education are

• 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,

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

The work students are capable of is seen as complex, linking and engaging analysis from different disciplinary perspectives, responsible in seeing a cultural/social context, communicable, and significant both to the individual and his/her 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 or her own questions, to test their own hypothesizes, and to make new mistakes. This education is at once potentially conservative and radical. Conservative in that one’s work is tested against the society and academic disciplines broadly, radical in that it is always implicitly a challenge to our 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 reflectively chosen by the student. Central to the goals of the college is the capacity of each student to see and articulate their own work in the context of their engagement with others. Skills and capacities are seen not as simply autonomous and instrumental, but as embedded in the context of a person’s education as a whole and more broadly embedded in the social order through the participation in and reflection on that order by students. Thus the fundemental goal can be seen as the developing a capacity for reflexive thought on the part of students. This reflexive capacity demands both engagment with and inqiriry into the world and the work of the student as an active, self-concious particpant 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.

Qualities of Evergreen Teaching Practices

The foci link to the expectations through the student’s experience of the curriculum and the practices and assumptions on which it is built. Practices such as the assumption of full-time study as the preferred structure of student work or problem centered thematic programs, interdisciplinary work, seminars as central learning spaces, workshops and small group practice as regular elements of the curriculum are the mechanisms that link the theory of the foci to student experience. The most critical practice, the one that has the most powerful impact on student experience writ large is student autonomy.

At the center of the foci and expectations as two articulations of the college’s ambitions for its curriculum and its students is the individual student. The first of the expectations is to articulate and assume responsibility for your own work. Central among the foci is personal engagement with their educational experience. The student is understood in both these articulations as the central actor in their own education. The primacy of the student is most clearly and powerfully exemplified in the lack of degree requirement. 180 quarter credit hours of anything earns you a BA at TESC. On the one hand this is a terrifying recognition for faculty and administrators. Here in one simple action the whole apparatus of curriculum /requirements/majors/established disciplinary boundaries is relinquished into the hands of students. On the other hand this student autonomy is the foundation of those most prized qualities of student engagement, creative independent thinking, interdisciplinary work, work across difference, for the autonomy that students face forces them to ask their own questions. As they ask these questions and work with others to understand them, they are pushed toward deeper and more complex engagement and come to see the necessity for more complex interdisciplinary critical and creative thinking.

The end of program review data provides an extensive overview of the extraordinary array of teaching practices at the college. Four critical qualities emerge from this data. (A caveat not all programs possess all qualities, but all qualities can be found in all areas of the college.) First, teaching practices at the college are distinctly and exceptionally collaborative. At the root of this is the central notion that individual evaluation not competitive grading is the fundamental form of assessment. This root practice makes (reference to McCann No Grades, No Departments, ….) a huge difference in the classroom. Students are not penalized for sharing information and understandings and indeed the sharing of ideas and understandings is the central focus of that most Evergreen of institutions, the seminar. Collaboration is built into the structured workshops that are used to teach everything from writing and philosophy, to botany and mathematics. Small group research projects whose audience is the program as a whole are common. The idea that each person is responsible to the group to participate, to help build understandings, and to share what they know is fundamental to the life of programs as learning communities.

Second, teaching practices at TESC ask students to find ways to apply the understandings they have developed in class to the practice of that understanding both in the “real world” and in the experience of that work. (rephrase) Applications are built into field trips, into field study, into art making, into internships, into community service, into fiction writing, into laboratory research in the sciences, into the composition of music, into the creation of computer applications, qualitative and quantitative field research, into ethnographic research, into life history research, into film-making, into travel and cultural studies. The list goes on, but the point is that learning is not just talk about doing; it is an interaction of doing and talking, about learning, doing, and reflecting.

Inquiry based teaching practices are fundamental to much of what happens at Evergreen. At the level of the program nearly all programs have a set of central questions that the central animate the program. Here are a few from the 2007-8 Catalog.

“What is the structure, composition, and function of a temperate rain forest? How does this relate to the ecology of other systems, land management and the physical environment? What do Chemists do? What is life exactly? What are the physical and chemical processes of life that distinguish it from ordinary matter? Are there mathematical rules that govern the formation and growth of life? This program is an inquiry into the numinous, which Rudolph Otto, amidst the turmoil of WWI, explained as a “non-rational, non-sensory experience or feeling whose primary and immediate object is outside the self.” Have you wondered about the ways languages work? Do you think about how thoughts get translated into language?”

Within programs students are encouraged to chose questions to answer about the texts, often time they are urged to develop major questions as independent inquiry/research papers about issues developing around the program’s themes. Students are actively taught how to use library, computer resources, media production, writing resources and experimentation among other skills as vehicles for answering questions that they pose, to find answers ( or further questions) that they have a stake in.

Finally, students exercise choice. Most importantly and obviously over the whole structure and content of their education, but at the level of the program and the work undertaken in any given quarter students exercise a wide range of choice . Internships, individual contracts , research projects, supplementary classes are all major opportunities for students to fashion components of their work around their choices. Even when students only select a program their capacity to see that program as a part of a larger choice driven project makes the act of taking it somewhat different from choosing to take another course towards a major in a conventional school.

These four elements then, collaboration, application, inquiry, and choice characterize the vast array of teaching practices that translate the language of the five foci into the experiences that produces students whose educations can be characterized by the expectations and the data we have reviewed. They provide the matrix of choices and opportunities that frame the dilemma of how to put together his/her work that each student must confront.

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 implemented in the educational experience embody both complex substantive learning and the 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. While none of these elements are universally present, they most clearly and distinctively embody the practices and goals of the Evergreen educational experience.

Coordinated Study Programs

Coordinated Study Programs are the distinctive mode of study at the college. A coordinated studies 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. 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 provide full-time study of advanced topics.

By providing a structure which links ideas, questions, 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.

Full-Time Study

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 ground work for effective advising. Full time study is obviously not a necessary feature of part-time work and the college has allowed significantly more part time work in recent years. The part-time study is structured both through half-time coordinated studies and curse work.

Student Self Directed Study

While the structure of the college’s program offerings 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, find a way to build an exciting, demanding, and persuasive educational path for each individual student. Choices are not entirely unconstrained, prerequisites, finding and appropriate faculty member for an individual study or internship may limit a student’s choices, but underlying all this is the faith that students can in fact 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.

Narrative Evaluation

Evergreen’s origins as an innovative “experimental” college, the rejection of tenure and the substitution of three year renewable contracts, and a flat administrative structure imbued the college with a “culture of evaluation” at the institutional level. The decision to reject standardized grading provided an impetus for careful work on evaluation of student achievement by both faculty and students. Narrative evaluation of student work is premised on the assumption that to create a community in which cooperation is central, evaluation must be personal, not invidious. A narrative evaluation is based on the idea that attempting to place each student on one scale when each student is pursuing the work of the program for different ends with different backgrounds and capacities makes little sense.

Evaluation takes many forms at Evergreen, but at the heart of the educational process is the faculty evaluation of students. This document reflects the faculty’s authority to grant and to withhold credit, to identify the transferable content of the work, and, more importantly, attempts to identify the strengths and capabilities of the student and to locate his or her most important work within the context of the program’s themes, content and experience.

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.

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 an assessment, adjustment, and reframing. Student self-evaluations review their work and introduce their in-program portfolio. A faculty member in conferences asks students to connect their experience in the program with their work, to think about how they can come to own this experience as their own education, and provides an assessment from the faculty member’s perspective. This process of reflecting is not only on 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 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.

The evaluation process serves and important role in advising. Informal evaluations by both faculty and students focus on the students' learning, opportunities for improvement, and possible future directions. The preparation for this review by both students and faculty is a major opportunity to reflect on future directions and to develop a reflective critical assessment of the work of the student and the program.

Three major initiatives in the past 10 years have affected 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 1997-98 and the second in --------- 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 DTF in ------------- 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 equivalencies.

Undergraduate Curriculum

The Organizational Sturcture of the Undergraduate Curriculum

The undergraduate curriculum at Evergreen is organized around six major Planning Units: Scientific Inquiry; Culture, Text and Language; Expressive Arts; Environmental Studies; Society, Politics, Behavior, and Change; and Evening and Weekend Studies. 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. While the formal structure of the areas is similar, the areas vary considerably in the extent to which they organize around 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 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. Planning units are the current answer to the question of how the college should organize the faculty into coherent groups for planning curriculum. This question has been an on-going issue at the college. Finding a balance between stability and coverage in the curriculum and freedom to investigate and to explore issues that engage the faculty’s attention and concern has been continuing tension. Each unit strikes a different and distinctive balance between Mastery and Reflexive thinking. In the past few years concerns about planning units motivated considerable discussion and debate on the campus. 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 and admissions and recuritment.

Planning units are a way of organizing faculty. The typically serves as a vehicle for organizing faculty concern for disciplinary or divisional concerns about coverage, skill, and mastery. They help ensure that introductory and advanced work is present in some areas of the curriculum where such distinctions are seen to be critical. There is huge variability between planning units both in their concern for coherent coverage and in their aspirations for student mastery of the discipline(s) involved. In some Planning units there is very little open ended inquiry in the areas offerings, 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 of often time even aware of the planning unit structure. This is less true in Environmental Studies and SI where the Bachelor of Science Degree requirements help guide student choices and where grant money for tuition does the same. 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 and focus on a particular skill or project. Thus while student work typically does result in what students (but not the college) represents as a major 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, regular offerings. Advising sees planning units at 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. Advising sees pathways as important suggestions for students about potential ways to work their way through the curriculum. If advising is concerned with clarity and stability in the curriculum, Admissions is concerned with can we sell this curriculum. 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 salable programs is increased. Thus pressure for hires in health, in business have emerged in part from external pressures. Thus the work of planning units is contested and of concern to a variety of audiences. Despite these differences 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.

Curriculum Planning

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 in each year to Core (First-Year) programs and another 20% to inter-divisional program work. Planning in any given year is designed to develop a catalog for two years hence. Thus in the 2008-9 school year faculty will be designing the curriculum for the 2010-11 school year. The curriculum dean(s) in collaboration with the 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, help 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.

Simultaneously Core and inter-divisional planning which began early in the fall with the meeting to share ideas continues more or less informally as faculty follow up ideas with each other and attend meetings called by either the Core dean or the Curriculum dean to firm up and to identify programs. In addition to the intricate matchmaking that occurs within program teams, the PUCs and curriculum deans are involved in a complex process of informal negotiation and planning to ensure the appropriate number of first year seats (those in Core and then those seats identified for freshmen in all-level or lower-division programs) and appropriate coverage of planning unit repeated offerings. All of these decisions are made in negotiations among faculty and deans and are vetted to the planning unit meetings in winter quarter so that faculty can evaluate and respond to the area’s curriculum and its relation to other Core and inter-area offerings. This complex two-tracked process within and between the planning units culminates in a draft curriculum by the end of winter quarter. The final negotiations between Planning Units and the deans, the creation of catalog copy for programs and the identification of staffing needs is carried out by PUCs who are given release time in spring quarter to complete these duties. One important byproduct of the curriculum planning process is the identification of areas of demand in the curriculum and the need for supplementary short and long terms hiring needs.

Modes of Study

The single most important structure for offering the curriculum is the coordinated studies program described above. In addition to coordinated studies within planning units, there are Inter-area Programs where faculty from across two or more planning units come together to pursue an issue. These programs are generally substantial two and three quarter-long investigations who 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 implemented, as well. 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 thee 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 course in other areas support graduate programs and part-time studies students. Individual contracts and internships are offered. 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.

Evergreen Experience and Evergreen Graduate

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 score illustrate common experiences for students at Evergreen. Students at Evergreen regularly work with other students in class 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. (Institutional Research, NSSE Benchmarks Report 2007, http://www.evergreen.edu/institutionalresearch/pdf/surveys/nsse/NSSE2007Benchmarks%20Report.pdf )

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. (Institutional Research, 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. (http://www.evergreen.edu/institutionalresearch/pdf/Surveys/alumni/greenersatwork/GreenersatWork2003.pdf )

First Year Programs and Options

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 designed explicitly for freshman students. They are almost always interdisciplinary and frequently interdivisional offerings involving two to four faculty members and often are 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 broad base from which a student may develop her college education. These programs are usually thematically organized and provide a wide ranging often quite sophisticated inter-disciplinary perspective on contemporary and historical questions of human experience. All Core programs do work explicitly on materials that 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, field research skills of various sorts are supported as well. In recent years there has been a tendency for narrower two person programs, the difficulty that arises when the number of faculty members in a program shrinks to as few as two is that the breadth of the offerings may suffer. 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. (Catalogue 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.

All-level programs have become increasingly important in the first year curriculum. Many if not most of the inter-area programs have opened their work to first year students and some areas (notably CTL) have a long history of offering all level work. Because such programs are supposed to be attractive and available to students with quite different educational backgrounds most even when they included art or science do not have prerequisites. Inter-area programs usually provide less systematic support for freshmen students, but offer a challenge to some of the better prepared freshman students who want to work in what is sometimes a more demanding environment. All level programs, especially inter-area ones, can be an excellent beginning point for student's' work at the college.

Finally, some areas have opened up lower division programs or introductory programs to allow some (often as many as half) of the students to be freshmen. The argument for this kind of work in the first year is centered on the desire that many students have to get into the subject matter that draws them to college in the first place. Again this had significant advantages for some students in as much as they are directly challenged and engaged in material that they find important. Yet such a program may not provide the range of support for more general skills, nor does it provide the kind of inter-divisional breadth we prefer for first year students.

Historically, Core programs have been among the broadest and most thoroughgoing interdisciplinary programs on campus. In theory, but not always in practice, they are supposed to occupy a priority position in the planning process. A major tension exists in the planning process between the process of planning Core programs that tend to be ad hoc in any given year and the systematic planning of many Planning Units that attempt to stabilize and to identify curricular paths some years into the future. This tension has led to two major developments over the past ten years. First, as areas have attempted to both provide twenty percent of the seats taught by their faculty as freshman seats, Planning Units have attempted to serve both Planning Unit needs and freshman seat needs by moving introductory Planning Unit offerings into lower division work, thus opening introductory lower division offerings to large numbers of freshman students. Alternatively areas and individual faculty members have attempted to meet their collective/personal obligation to provide freshman seats by declaring their program all level and allocating 25% or more of their seats to freshmen without significant modification of their content. Both of these tendencies are supported by the switch some years ago from planning units being responsible for providing faculty to teach in Core to being responsible to provide twenty percent of the seats taught by their faculty as available to freshmen. To the extent that these programs are intra-area programs, the pool of faculty available for inter-divisional team teaching is diminished.

In recent years both recruiting faculty to teach in Core programs and creating effective social and intellectual opportunities for inter-divisional teams and plans to emerge has been a serious issue for the college. These difficulties rest in some measure on the ambiguity of whether the obligation to teach in core rests on individual faculty or on the Planning Unit. Prior to 1995 curriculum revision, the obligation rested ambiguously, but decidedly with the faculty. Faculty members were expected to teach Core one out of four years. Today the burden is often presumed to lie with the area and teaching in Core is seen in some areas a scheduled assignment. The difficulty in forming teams rests on the retirement of experienced faculty, the recruitment of newer faculty who have been impressed into service in the Planning Units, and the difficulty in developing planning and social time that underlies the possibility of making effective intellectual matches that lead to broad effective teaching teams. The ability to plan long range complex programs is exacerbated by the growing tendency to reduce teaching assignments to smaller and smaller bits thus increasing the need for immediate short term planning time and increasing the experienced workload of faculty.

Several issues arise around the First year experience.

First has to do with the perception of Core programs by incoming students. Core programs and often are demanding and academically rigorous programs. Yet they are sometimes seen by incoming freshmen as less demanding than lower division or all level programs. The attempts in Core to develop skills and to introduce the college while appreciated and useful to some, are seen as hand holding and dumbing down by others. To the extent that Core programs are not rigorous and demanding or to the extent that they are not matching a particular student’s interest, they are often described as boring.

Second, fall to fall retention is a serious issue for the college in its first year offerings. The matching of students to their choices within first year programs is surely a contributor to this problem. Ironically, as we open more choices to students the number of students getting their first choice has dropped as many of the openings in all-level, specialized, single faculty programs and small inter-area programs may be very broadly attractive, but represent very few freshman seats.

Recruiting engaged and committed faculty teams, finding enough time to develop effective teaching themes and plans, providing opportunities to reflect on those experiences, and developing both intellectual and pedagogical skills are crucial to making teaching first year students worthwhile and intellectually rewarding for faculty and for students alike. This almost of necessity requires a new recruitment and planning structure that can sustain faculty engagement with interdisciplinary issues and concerns over time.

Finally, the movement over the past ten to fifteen years towards shorter. smaller programs and pieces of work for first year students may have allowed more exploration, possibly wider exposure in student experience, and a wider array of choices. By the same token smaller, shorter programs may have cut down on the opportunity to get to the kind of depth and familiarity with issues that allows for the complexity of reflexive thinking on the part of younger students. Clearly this move has made it possible for more students to find program offerings, as opposed to dropping out in the spring quarter or taking on an individual contract. (Check with Laura/Paul on this).

Inter-Area Programs

Inter-area programs are some of the most exciting and innovative programs at the college. They draw together unique faculty teams to teach complex theme based programs that stimulate multi-dimensional, creative, and reflexive work. They are the direct lineal decedents of the programs in the first years of the college. Inter-area involve faculty from two or more planning units offering programs which deal with a theme or question, but are designed for students at upper division, sophomore and above, or all level. By design students typically bring a distinctly mixed background to these programs, not only in terms of years of college experience but also in terms of specialization and interests. Inter-area programs are a primary location for the teaching of general education skills. Inter-area programs often involve faculty with quite different skills and backgrounds. Faculty often teach some aspect of these distinct capacities in the program. Thus inter-area programs were a primary location where faculty with particular skills in quantitative reasoning, mathematics and art were able to share this information with students who typically avoided such learning. Thus between 65% and 85% of inter-area programs in the 2001-02 to 2005-6 end of program reviews reported some emphasis on mathematics. While 60-80% of the programs in the same period reported an emphasis on art. (Institutional Research, End of Program Review 2001-02 -2005-6 Art in Programs and Mathematics and Science in Programs. 2006) Inter-area programs are also place where a great deal of theme based, inqiry based teaching occurs, as such, Intter-area programs often invite students to think complexly and reflectively about issue. In recent years inter-area programs have frequently been all-level and have through this mechanism contributed a very significant number of freshman seats. According to the 1995-6 Long Range curriculum plan planning units were expected to contribute 20% of their teaching effort to both Core and Inter-area programs. That goal was seldom reached in between 1997-98 AY and 2000-01AY but has been the norm since that time, with the proportion of Core Programs shrinking consistently. (Institutional Research, Updated Curricular visions Table 2 Olympia Full time Program FTE Distribution, 2007) An on going issue for Inter-area programs is the creation of new faculty teams. There are no regularized formal mechanisms for generating Inter-area teams and new faculty often feel a strong pressure to particpate in the on-going curriculum of the planning units.

Individual Contracts and Internships

Individual Contracts and internships allow students to follow their passions, define their own work, and expand their opportunities beyond the walls of the college in very important ways. Developing and negotiating a contract with faculty and with internship field supervisors, forces a kind of reflective thinking about their work and compels students to take responsibility for their own education as they move into doing advanced work. Work with faculty though often limited is very different and more personal from working in the confines of a program. These modes of learning are the ultimate mode for students taking responsibility for their own education.

Internships provide opportunities for students to gain exposure to work experience, applications of lessons learned in class to real world applications, and chances to learn about the complexities, skills, and culture of a potential work place. Internships involve a complex three-way negotiation between a student, a field supervisor at a job site and a member of the faculty. Students work with Academic Advising and increasingly with the Center for Community Based Learning and Action to identify internships that extend their studies. The work of this Center serves students by locating activities and by providing a more systematic conduit for student volunteers into community work. The Center has helped facilitate volunteer and internship activity for work within programs. In the past two years the Center has helped 20 programs set up service learning projects within their programs and has supported over 140 individual students set up community based learning opportunities. (Annual Report for CCBLA) Negotiations between the student, faculty, and the field supervisor are supported by Academic Advising to identify the goals of the internship experience, the amount of credit earned, the academic work that accompanies the internship, the work undertaken, the reporting lines, and codifies the role of the field supervisor, faculty member and student in evaluation of the student’s work. Students undertake internships at different points in their education. The longer more substantial internships such as legislative internships or work within a social service agency are usually undertaken in the junior or senior year. Shorter internships are often directed toward community service work. Students undertook 506 internships in the 2006-7 school year with 26% in fall, 36% in winter, and 38% in spring. In most instances Internship work constituted a portion of the student’s work as the 401 FTE generated by these internships attests. Internships have proven to be valuable as a way of linking the college into the broader community, helpful in locating work experience that supports student transition into the workplace after graduation, and opportunities for students to prepare and to design important components of their education.

Individual contracts are critical elements in the education of many students at the college. They allow for advanced work, they accommodate idiosyncratic life situations, and they provide opportunities for student initiative. Consultation with the Academic Deans who read and approve all contracts and internships reveals that contracts serve two very different functions. The first and most important function is as a location for students to undertake significant, usually advanced, independent research or inquiry. The second is as a stopgap measure that accommodates a student’s schedule, life circumstance, or inability to get into programs that they want or need. Typically, but not always the former are more effective, more carefully thought through, and provide more demonstration of learning than the latter. Students can write individual contracts for 2 to 16 quarter hours credit. Usually smaller contracts supplement work in a part-time program, support language learning, or are useful in providing a small piece of prerequisite learning for admission to a future program or graduate school.

In 2006-7 Students and faculty wrote a total of 1279 Individual Learning Contracts 300 in fall, 454 in winter, and 525 in spring. These contracts generated approximately 922 FTE. Contracts and internships together generated some 1322.8 FTE during the year.

In good contracts students need to define what they want to learn, they need to demonstrate a background that allows them to deal with the project, they need to define the activities that will help them learn, and they need to be able to demonstrate that learning. Coherence between the learning objectives of the contract and the activities they undertake is the central issue. The deans report that a significant majority of contracts are reasonably well developed and define substantial individual work that coherently defines learning objectives and the work undertaken.

Prior Learning from Experience

The Prior Learning from Experience 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 and the program was reorganized into the Evening Weekend curriculum. The coordinator from the previous staff position was 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 any additional credit above 16 to achieve the full forty-five but most are awarded less than that. Students are not assured of receiving the credit that they may expect 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 any credit requested 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.

Planning Units

Culture, Text, and Language Description

Theme and Mission:

The central work of the Culture, Text and Language planning unit is organized 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 as means of communication and as carriers of the beauty and power of words. 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 concentrate 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 world view through its language and culture programs and its attention to lager 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 and Programs:

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 offer several interdisciplinary, theme based programs that include many inter-area programs working 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. Within the area, interdisciplinary studies dealing with the American experience and identity, gender, ethnic, and sexual identity, and an array of community and historical studies are typically offered. In this context community studies and service work often provides a context for interpretive social sciences. Many of the programs offered are area studies understood as the interdisciplinary study of topics framed by geography, language, culture, and history. Most language and culture studies provide an opportunity for spending all or most of a spring quarter abroad as a regular part of their offerings. The planning unit is committed to offering regular programs in American Studies, French language and the Francophone world, Japan, Middle East Studies, Russian Language and Eastern Europe, Spanish and the Hispanic world. While mastery of languages is one goal of these programs they, like all of the Planning Units programs emphasize the development of complex multi-level reflexive inquiry and thinking on the part of students. The of contact with other cultures provides a crucial opportunity for students to come to see the world from the view points of other persons and cultures.

Introductory Programs:

Language based Area programs are available to students in their sophomore year and typically serve to introduce work in languages and often to offer opportunity for more advanced work within them. CTL as a whole does not have a single introductory offering, but builds introductory work in library and qualitative field research, critical thinking, essay writing, and issues of interpretation 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 of these capacities directly support meeting the expectation 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. Over the period from 1997- to 2007 the Planning unit regularly contributed from 39 to 46 percent of its teaching effort to Core and Inter-area programs. Like most areas the proportion of inter-area teaching rose and the proportion of teaching effort put into Core programs shrank over the time period. %(Curricular Visons-selected trends-97-07-update.doc- Institutional Research and Assessment-lkc-10/28/07)

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. [#_msocom_1 [TC1]]

Pathways:

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.

As a planning unit the Culture, Text and Language area emphasizes inquiry and the repetition of themes rather than coverage and mastery in its offerings. Areas other than languages 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 core 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.

Student Response to the curriculum.

The area has contributed the single largest share of FTE to the curriculum over the past 10 years although that share has declined from a high of 836 FTE in 1997-98 to 660 seats in the 2006-07 school year as the area has shrunk in size. The area has contributed approximately 300 seats to Core and inter-area programs and has in recent years been a location of a great number of all level programs.%(Curricular visions Selected Trends_97-07_update.doc-Institutional Research and Assessment-lkc-10/28/07) In some measure these tendencies reflect the propensity of the area to take on broad issues and to develop thematic programs that pull into conversation a variety of disciplines rather than attention to what most schools see as survey courses. Further, the relative lack of 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 teaching in the humanities occurs widely across the curriculum and is not restricted exclusively to the programs of CTL. The End of Program Review data for 2001-2 to 2005-6 show that between 81 to 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. While 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.

Alumni data from the 2002 study of the 2001 graduating CTL demonstrated broad satisfaction with their experience in the area. When students were asked to rank Evergreen's contribution to their academic and personal growth, three values learning independently, understanding different philosophies and cultures and working cooperatively in a groups were the top three selections with over with mean scores of 4.56, 4.42, and 4.29 on a five point scale. These results like those of other areas demonstrate the relationship of individual work, group work, and understanding others that typifies Evergreen student's strong combination of personal and collective action. Students also ranked understanding appreciation of the arts, critical analysis of written information, understanding the interaction of society and the environment, effective writing, speaking and problem soling high. They were less confident in their readiness for advanced education, a career, and surprisingly their capacity to recognize their responsibilities as a citizen. These humanities focused students ranked understanding quantitative principles, and understanding scientific principles as the areas in which they were least satisfied. 100% of the students interviewed said that they had participated in interdisciplinary instruction, narrative faculty evaluations, intellectual discussions with other students, exposure to different viewpoints, and had received advice from faculty. All but one completed a self evaluation. Most students had participated in either internships or contracts, did advanced work , while 27% reported that they had done some study abroad. Student were asked to rank these activities on a four point scale and all but one, opportunities for advanced work, had a mean value ranging from 3.8 to 3.04. Participation in advanced work scored a mean of 2.97 out of 4.

At the time of the survey 89% of students had found employment with 65% of those students saying that was at least somewhat related to their primary study at Evergreen. Students were finding work in teaching and education (20%), Social service/community organizing 16%, sales/service/restaurant work 12% and business support and business administration accounted for 22$ the remainder were scattered over a wide variety of jobs. 20% of graduates were attending or had been admitted to graduate school, and 82% of those not attending intended to apply for graduate school in the future. In general it is clear that alumni found their experience within the area quite positive. Even in the least positive of these responses well over half of the students reported growth and satisfaction with their Evergreen experience and with the most positive experiences and contributions, interdisciplinary approch to education, narrative faculty evaluations, independent learning, understanding other cultures, and cooperative work the satisfaction hovered very close to maximum values. Continued concern to make links to science and mathematics and continued concern for advanced work are important issues to be worked on by the area.

Issues:

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 2006-7 the loss is 46 to 30. (Data from Catalogs for 98-99, 2006/7,2007/8 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 the Comments of Tom Grissom during the Emeritus Faculty Ceremony June 13, 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. While some faculty have been replaced with younger faculty members, especially in languages, the ability of the area to help anchor the college's curriculum in broadly inquiry based liberal arts has slipped. The second tendency develops from this 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 difficulty 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. Even with the 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.

Related to this set of issues is the development and continuity of teaching in languages, which 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 to address the complex questions about how to support languages that are less frequently 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 and engagement with the fundamental questions of 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 making of reflexive and engaged thinkers about themselves and the world that they inhabit. This sensibility is characteristic of Evergreen students and graduates. As 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 take a leading role 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 to 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 in terms of general education and in terms of depth and complexity of experience to students within the area and from across the college.

Environmental Studies

Theme and Mission:

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.

Environmental Studies utilizes Evergreen’s full-time modes of study to provide a curriculum that emphasizes hands-on, experiential learning in field and community studies. The area is deeply committed to the engagement of students with active efforts to find scientific, social, and personal understanding of and responses to ecological destruction.

Faculty and Programs:

The Environmental Studies faculty include 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 1998-9 school year there were 26 full time regular faculty actively teaching in the area. In 2006-7 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 both 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.

Introductory Program:

The area teaches two sophomore or all level, two quarter 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 on social science and one science faculty member and fifty students) in order to accommodate field trips, 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 of more generally as citizens. In addition to these programs the Introduction to Natural Sciences program offered by SI provides an very useful alternative entry point. Environmental Studies is a major contributor to the fulfillment of general education goals at the college. The 2006-7 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 and often mathematical terms.

Pathways:

The area groups its offerings under three major headings. These headings include both repeating programs and ad hoc programs and often times 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. 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 Rainforests and Tropical Rainforests.

Enrollment and Student Response to the Area:

Environmental Studies is one of the primary fields 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 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.

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 2002-3 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 high level of demand for more advanced work in the area.

The last major survey of Alumni was the 2002 review of 2000-01 graduates. This report demonstrated a very high level of satisfaction with the evergreen experience on the part of students who identified Environmental Studies as one primary area of studies. On a four point scale from 4 as very satisfied to 1 as very dissatisfied, alumni satisfaction ranged from a high of 3.85 for interdisciplinary studies and study abroad to a low of 3.03 for opportunities for advanced work. 70% of respondents had participated in internships and 83% had participated in Contracts and Individual research work with faculty, these experience were very highly valued by students. 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 were 3.48 or better on a 5 point scale. Ironically the lowest score was of “readiness for a career.” as 96 % of graduates indicated they were employed and 70% of these said that their work was somewhat in or in their primary field of study at Evergreen. These figures were among the highest of the planning units. While only 3 were currently in graduate school 87% of the remainder planned to attend grad school. (Institutional Research, Evergreen State College: Excerpt form the 2002 Alumni Survey of the class of 2000-01 Olympia Environmental Studies Subset,2004)

Issues:

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. 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 nearly disappeared from 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 one 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. A final note, 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. In addition to the building of this facility, better coordination planning and repair/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 find a way to have instructional technicians, 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 very weakly represented in the curriculum at the Core level may well discourage students from the college, and in particular discourage out of state first time first year students some 30% of those who identify a field of study come here specifically to do work in environmental studies.

Expressive Arts

Themes and Mission

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 area works hard to

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 have worked hard to include some experience with arts in their programs. (End of Program Review 2006-7 and EPR Review Summary and supplement August 2006 Institutional Research)

Faculty and Programs

Expressive Arts planning unit is divided into sub-units that not only plan somewhat independently but also provide a distinct curriculum 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-unit 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 contract work and supports senior thesis work in the arts both with personnel and funds. Currently there are 24 full time actively teaching faculty 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, not to open new initiatives. Data from 1998/9 Catalog 2007-8 Catalog and Master List of Faculty)

The Moving Image Group (MIG) sees media production as a fundamentally interdisciplinary activity. The pedagogy and that develops from this perspective links theoretical understanding and critical analysis of images with the practice of working together to create images of their own. 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 a continually and rapidly evolving technological setting. The constant revisions of formats, equipment, and access have challenged the area’s faculty and staff. The recent remodel the media facilities in the library will be a significant achievement in support of the area when it is finished in the fall of 2009. However, it has caused significant current disruption. Five faculty members are associated with this sub-group

The Visual and Environmental Arts sub-area is organized 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. Our facilities support academic work in 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 are versatile in teaching skills in multiple areas. Currently we have 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 joint longer-term planning for the full-time and part-time curriculum.

Performing Arts offers work in theater, dance. The sub-unit 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.

Introductory Programs and Pathways

The area 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.

The area’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.

Student Response to the Curriculum

Expressive arts is popular area 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. (2005 New Student Survey Question 11) On The Evergreen State College 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. (Inst Research, 2006 Student Experience survey Question 4 by Planning Units 2007) Enrollment in the area’s offerings has remained essentially stable between 1998-99 and 2005-6 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. (Curricular Visions Select Curriculum Trends 1997/8-2005/6)

According to a 2002 survey of 2000-01 graduates those who indicated a primary interest in Expressive Arts had been able to take advantage of many of the specific elements that EA built into its curriculum. 83% had done Independent contracts or other individual work with faculty, 59% had done explicitly advanced work, 50% had undertaken a culminating senior experience. 41% had participated in an internship. And 33% had studied abroad. Most satisfaction rating with these pieces of work and a wide range of other class experience were in the somewhat to very satisfied range. Only in studies abroad and opportunities for advanced work did the ratings slip below this mark. Alumni felt that Evergreen had contributed significantly to their academic and personal growth. Learning independently followed by understanding and appreciating the arts, critically analyze written information, and work cooperatively in a group were the top three contributions, only on readiness for a career , understand/apply scientific principles, and understand apply quantitative principles did mean ratings slip below the midpoint of the scale. 94% of alumni were employed and 60% of those were in a field that was somewhat related to their primary study at Evergreen. Only 3 of the 46 were currently attending graduate school , but some 77% of the remainder saw graduate work in their plans. In their informal comments students stressed time and again their ability to work independently, to trust their own abilities and judgments, and to respect others and advance their won understandings. (Institutional Research, TESC Excerpts from the 2002 Alumni survey of the class of 2000-01, Olympia Arts Subset)

Issues

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 of the necessary pieces of equipment than there are students in the class. This either means students do not get to do all of the work or that faculty are pushed toward repeating 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 strong 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 relative weakness of students in comparison to years past lead to more academic and also more psychological difficulty. The high student faculty ratio means it is extremely difficult and/or time consuming for faculty to meet the needs of challenged students. Finally, there are safty issues in areas such as dance and metal and wood shop work.

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 by staff displaced by the major remodel of the library has and the continuing remodeling of this major facility has inconvenienced faculty as they try to allocate scarce space resources and deminished the opportuieties for students in this period.

The area identified issues dealing with replacing retiring faculty and the replacement of support to the unit when faculty members go on leave without pay. They argue strongly for more permanent lines to facilitate planning.

Scientific Inquiry

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, the use of appropriate instruments, theory, and models to arrive at sound conclusions about the hypothesis. The area understands thinking as a scientist as a valuable piece of a liberal arts education in its own right. Scientific thinking is also 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 and Programs:

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 its hands on qualities its collaborative effort, its attention to integration across disciplines, and the way in which each discipline contextualizes the other. Access at the undergraduate level to sophisticated analytic equipment including mass spectrometry, NMR, scanning electron microscopy, and infrared spectrometry allow students to do advanced work.

Introductory Programs and Pathways:

The SI area systematically provides introductory programs to the five major pathways it identifies in its curriculum. Programs such as Introduction 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, 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 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 opposed to independent work. In addition, the area does provide significant opportunities to work with faculty on faculty research projects as another vehicle for advanced work. Works on these projects has frequently led to professional presentation and publication by Evergreen science students. In terms of General education, as we might expect, 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. (2006/7 EPR Mathematics in Programs Institutional Research) 88% of SI programs reported Natural or Physical sciences with 81% of these reporting extensive use of Science. Clearly area faculty are instrumental in teaching both mathematics and sciences in first-year and inter-area programs.

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 1997/8 and 2005/6 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%. 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 Core and Inter-area has been difficult. The hiring of faculty in health sciences is designed 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 ability of the college to encourage students with strong quantitative aversion to participate and the ability to find and recruit faculty from social sciences with an interest in medical institutions to participate. The area has done some quite effective work with creating innovate short-term collaborative efforts with the visual arts area.

Student Participation and satisfaction

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 lesser interest in computer science and physical sciences. (Institutional Research,2005 New Student Survey, Question 12) On the Evergreen Experience survey 14.6% of the 75% of student 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.

More Student Satisfaction data here

Issues:

A major issue confronting the area is the creation of a large enough faculty and a small enough core curriculum that a sufficient number of faculty are available for work outside of the regular offerings of the curriculum. While some important number of 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 to create 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 in to a non-science constituency.

The area self-study notes that although there is considerable talk about what science for “non-majors” should look like at Evergreen, there is not a well developed agreement, similarly there is not a clear idea about 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 hard to create anything beyond ad hoc materials in support of a context for thinking about broader scientific issues. Indeed one of the challenges for SI is to develop ways to bring inter-area work into the curriculum effectively.

The area also identifies the difficulties that accompany the decision to offer major disciplines in programmatic 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.

Society, Politics, Behavior and Change

Theme and Mission

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 after the 1995 Long Range curriculum DTF report 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 are affiliated 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, in Environmental Studies, and in the Masters in Environmental Studies areas.

Faculty and Programs

The disciplines of anthropology, 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 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 of 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 is large, 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 significantly in the past decade. With a significant 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 1997-8 and 2006-7 catalogues)

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. Business is an area where the college has made new hires 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 issues of counseling. Five faculty members currently have some connection in psychology. There is a pathway in psychology beginning with Human Health and Development or another inter-divisional coordinated study program that incorporates introductory psychology. 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. Other individual contracts and internships support work in counseling.

Planning in the area tends to occur within sub-groups. The lines between groups are not hard and fast and there are a number of faculty members in the area who work in more than one group as well as a number of faculty members each year who rotate either into or out of graduate programs.

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 use, 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, into the offerings of the planning unit.

There is a strong consensus that students should develop skills in general liberal arts, understandings of disciplinary perspectives, and be effective personally and in groups to engage in efforts to bring about change. They should have the opportunity to develop necessary disciplinary skills for graduate work. The area emphasizes resisting inequality and a striving for equity, re-conceptualizing the self in the face of a critical analysis of power and privilege, and moving towards creating and generating change at different levels of social systems. There is a consistent and serious concern with issue of diversity throughout the area’s curriculum.

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, time to work on planning and attention to issues of teaching. Nevertheless, attendance at meetings and unit wide attempts to generate interaction among the sub-areas has not been able to create a sense of mission for the planning unit as a whole.

Student Response to the Area:

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. (Parenthetically, about 5% of those identified education, but as we do not an undergraduate education curriculum, presumably their studies would be in other areas). 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.

SPBC contributed over 425 FTE to the undergraduate curriculum per year over the 1997-8 to 2005-6 school years. The area’s contribution increased significantly in the last 4 years of the period to nearly 500 FTE. (Inst. Research, Curricular Visions Packet, Olympia Undergraduate Distribution of FTE by Planning Unit, 2006) The area overall has contributed approximately 10% of its teaching effort to Core programs over the same period. The area has made a consistent and significant contribution to the teaching of Inter-Area programs. (Inst. Research, Curricular Visions Packet, Proportion of FTE by Program Type, 2006)

A good deal of insight into the area’s work can be gleaned by looking at Alumni Satisfaction data for the students who identify themselves as working primarily in the area while they attended Evergreen. (This data from 2002, from the class of 2000-1 Soon to be up dated with 2006 data) is indicative of student’s appreciation of the learning they did while working in the area. When asked to rate their satisfaction with 14 items ranging from “learning independently” to “understand/apply quantitative principles” mean satisfaction ranged from 4.6 to 3.26, indeed for the first 10 items mean satisfaction ranked above 4. Interestingly Learning independently, critical analysis of written information, understanding different philosophies and cultures, understanding the interaction of and environment, working cooperatively in a group, and recognizing responsibilities as a citizen all ranked above 4.28. This array of qualities is what one would expect and hope for given the description of the meaning and implications of a Public, interdisciplinary, Liberal Arts, College in the first section of this Chapter. All of the alumni who indicated a concentration in Social Science or Education indicated they had participated in i8nterdiciplinary education, received narrative evaluations from faculty, and ha intellectual discussions with other students. Nearly all of these alumni (99%) reported exposure to different or opposing view points and participated in self-evaluations. 97% reported receiving advice from faculty.

➢ 81% participated in contracts or other individual work with faculty ➢ 65% participated in advanced work at Evergreen ➢ 61% participated in community service or volunteer work ➢ 52% participated in a culminating senior experience ➢ 52% participated in internships ➢ 17% participated in study abroad

Student satisfaction for all of these activities ranged between 3.79 sand 3.13 on a four point scale on all of these items. Students were most satisfied with the interdisciplinary approach to education the evaluation process, contracts and individual work and the quality of instruction. They were lease satisfied with advice from faculty, intellectual discussions with other students, their culminating senior experience, and the opportunity to do advanced work. Overall students students reported finding employment (88%) mostly within their area of primary study 81% of those who found employment, and 75% reported that Evergreen had prepared them Very well or adequately for their current employment. One year out of college 19% were attending or accepted in graduate school, and eighty –one percent of those who had not yet attended anticipated applying for graduate work in the future. Overall, the areas graduate were both pleased with their education and felt that it had helped prepare them for work. Even more important in terms of a congruence between the mission of the college and the experience of graduates was the close link from the mission statement, to the experiences of students, to their satisfaction with their education.

Issues:

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 direction. The inclusion of two major Masters Programs (soon to be three with the addition of a Masters in Education) within the unit means that many faculty members, nominally in the planning unit, actually have little call to participate in the unit’s work. The appearance of these 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. While working collaboratively to develop a more complex social/political description of the human condition as a focus for an introductory social science program and rubric for an area wide dialogue might appear to be a possible source of dialogue and consensus around function, the disparate origins of these emphases and their quite different world views has seemed to seems to preclude such collaboration. Clearly there is a need for serious reflection on the teaching and place of the social sciences at Evergreen and the relationship of professional training to the undergraduate curriculum. The different missions of the groups in this area and the significant work done by social scientists in other areas need to be discussed and rethought, not necessarily to create more and better training in social sciences, but most importantly to find ways to integrate rigorous work in social sciences with a social, political and engaged policy dimension in the work of all areas of the college.

The area is arguably understaffed, yet until there is some clearer vision of what the area is attempting to accomplish, it is difficult to make convincing cases for additional hires. It is notable that the hiring that has been done in the area has developed in some large measure from administrative need to grow and solidify curriculum in graduate programs and business rather from a broad area wide consensus. Finally, though there are senior faculty members throughout the area, many of the people associated with the Political Economy track are in their last years of teaching and the prospect for a continued strong emphasis on this important dimension of social sciences is dim unless there is a concerted effort to hire in this area.

Evening and Weekend Studies

Themes and Mission

Evening and Weekend Studies (EWS) has become over the past 10 years since the last accreditation report a significantly larger and more integral piece of the college’s curriculum. Its mission has expanded significantly and its role in the undergraduate curriculum has taken on added significance. The role of the EWS area has two primary functions. First it offers a comprehensive liberal arts curriculum that covers the range of subject matter found in other Planning Units. This subject matter is presented in a combination of part-time (8 quarter hour) interdisciplinary programs and 2-6 unit courses. This curriculum was originally designed to support continuing study towards a degree by part-time students at the college. Yet over the past ten years the role of the area has expanded as the number of full-time students who are studying at any given time in the EWS has grown. 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 see themselves as 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. IN 2001-02 school year the college moved from allowing a maximum of 16 quarter hours per quarter to allowing as many as 20 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 language and other prerequisite programs. And lead to the increase of faculty lines dedicated to the growth of EWS. Today part-time course work offered by EWS provides an important location for students who want to sample work in art/music/media and languages or who wish to acquire prerequisites in mathematics chemistry and other disciplines. In sum today EWS serves three basic missions 1.) a place for part-time students, often place bound, to work toward completion of a BA degree. 2). a place for undergraduate students to undertake full-time study by combining course work and half time programs, and 3). a support for the full time program through the provision of languages, and various prerequisites for admission to ongoing full time offerings. The area also supports a part-time program in conjunction with Grays Harbor College in Aberdeen.

The growth in EWS has been an important component in the college’s overall growth in the past 10 years. Growth in the 8 quarter-hour programs has been modest up merely 4% over the period, but growth in course work has been 29.9% from 320.9 to 416.8 FTE in this period. (Institutional Research, Enrollment Trends Annual Average FTE by modes of Study 1997-8 -2006-7 2007) EWS has managed by systematically looking at demand and creatively thinking about how limited resources can be combined into attractive, programs that offer substantial support for applied work while simultaneously teaching intellectually demanding and rigorous programs. The area supports pathways 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. The area has become much more stable and consistent over the past several years. It has 12 (soon to be 13) part-time continuing faculty positions, a substantial pool of about 15 regular adjunct faculty who frequently teach in part-time programs, and a pool of about 80 faculty, some of whom are regular Evergreen staff, who teach 2 and 4 unit courses usually covering the same series of courses on a regular basis. Continuing faculty members have expertise in American Studies/Literature, environmental studies, labor studies, art history, political/ international studies, management, mathematics, computer studies/community studies, Environmental Science/Biology, psychology/Organizational development, Theater, and Computer studies/physics. Currently 2 part time continuing faculty are serving as deans and another continuing faculty retires in December 07.

Administratively, the area has had a dean whose primary responsibility has been the staffing and curriculum of the area since 1998 (?) . With the growth of a body of continuing faculty the area has worked hard to establish a internal faculty governance structure with an area convener as well. More than most other Planning Units the EWS pays explicit attention to the needs of potential and continuing students in the area. While this is particularly true for the development of programs for part-time students, it is a crucial factor in the development and selection for course work as well. In the former case the potential audience is seen as local residents wishing to continue their education toward a BA, in the latter the audience is seen as arising out of the demands for prerequisites and options for full-time students.

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. Because the core faculty of the area is small and these faculty members carry considerable responsibility for the teaching of particular subjects the faculty takes a great deal of effort to make sure that each programmatic offering works hard to support the development of a coherent educational plan for its students.

Unlike the full time curriculum, the EWS curriculum is planned on a one year cycle rather than the two year cycle for the full time program. This structure allows the curriculum to adapt more quickly to shifts in the student body and is an aspect of the service to student orientation of the EWS area. While this cuts down the long term predictability of the area, the attention to provision of specific pathways tends to get around this difficulty.

Scheduling and Coordination with Full time curriculum As issue.

Off-Campus and Continuing Education

Tacoma Program

Coming soon

Reservation Based Program

Coming Soon

Extended Education

Extended Education is one of the College’s responses to declining State support for higher education. In 2003 a committee was charged with examining the feasibility of Extended Education as an additional source of revenue for Evergreen. The committee recommended moving ahead with Extended Education after an additional planning year (2003-04). After considerable discussion Extended Education was approved as a pilot project by a vote of the faculty on November 17, 2004. The faculty approved a $600,000.00 investment for this pilot stipulating that a review for quality of programs and financial viability would occur in years three and five of the program. (Exhibit 1 – Minutes of Faculty Meeting – November 17, 2004)

Extended Education officially began at The Evergreen State College on July 1, 2005 with the appointment of a Dean for Extended Education and Summer School. The mission of Extended Education is to excel in serving the professional development and life long learning needs of our community. This mission and Extended Education’s programs reflect the mission of the College in its offerings and community served. Extended Education’s goals and activities align with the College’s strategic plan and contribute to the achievement of the goals outlined therein.

Extended Education has completed its first two years as a pilot program. During this time the scope and number of course offerings and training have increased. Student and participant evaluation of courses, workshops and training indicate a consistently high degree of quality in EE’s offerings. Enrollment in EE courses went from 594 in 205-06 to1191 in 2006-07. As it begins its third year, Extended Education holds solid promise for financial viability, (Exhibit 2 – Annual Reports 2005-06 and 2006-07)

Extended Education’s course offerings and programs are compatible with the College’s mission in providing opportunities for students to excel in meeting their intellectual, creative, professional and/or community service goals. Extended Education serves students at Evergreen as well as members of the larger community in Thurston, Mason, Lewis, and Pierce counties. (Exhibit 3 – copy of catalogues winter -06 through spring 07)

Extended Education’s offerings are administered under established institutional procedures in that Extended Education is managed by an Academic Dean selected by the usual institutional procedures for the appointment of deans who rotate to academic administration from the faculty. The responsibility for the administration of Extended Education is clearly defined and its administration is an integral component of the institution’s organization as evidenced by the appointment of a Dean for Extended Education who reports directly to the Provost and through him to the President and Board of Trustees. (See organization chart).

Extended Education is guided in program development by the Provost, the Deans’ Group and the Extended Education Advisory Committee. Members on the Advisory Committee represent the faculty, the academic division and all other major divisions at The Evergreen State College. (Exhibit 4 – current membership on EE AC). Full-time faculty as well as part-time faculty are represented on the Extended Education Advisory Committee and as such are involved in the planning and evaluation of Extended Education offerings. Given that Extended Education is a pilot program voted in by the faculty at The Evergreen State College, provisions were made for periodic evaluation over a period of three and five years. Extended Education is scheduled for its first review in late spring 2008.

Extended Education offerings focus on three areas:

1. Courses offered for academic credit that are also open on a limited basis to community participants not seeking academic credit (blended courses) 2. Workshops and contracted on line courses not offered for academic credit 3. Custom training for professional skill development.

Academic Credit Courses

The granting of credit for Extended Education courses is based on institutional policy. Ten contact hours are required for each academic credit. Students are expected to meet the learning objectives and course requirements in order to earn academic credit. Students’ work is evaluated by the faculty and a narrative evaluation specifying number of credits awarded is submitted to the registrar upon completion of the course. Extended Education courses offered for academic credit are approved by the Dean of Extended Education in consultation with the EE Advisory Committee and the curriculum Deans. Faculty teaching academic credit bearing courses through Extended Education are reviewed and evaluated according to standard institutional procedures for adjunct faculty.

Academic credit bearing courses offered through Extended Education are subject to the same tuition, fees, registration procedures and refund policies established for the College as a whole. Extended Education does not offer academic credit bearing courses through electronically-mediated or other delivery systems.

The Evergreen State College is solely responsible for the academic and fiscal elements of all programs offered through Extended Education. Extended Education does not contract or partner with non-accredited organizations to offer courses for academic credit.

Non-Credit Programs and Courses

Extended Education non-credit programs and courses are subject to and administered under relevant institutional policies, regulations and procedures. Faculty is involved in planning and evaluating non-credit programs through their representation on the Extended Education Advisory Committee. The faculty as a whole will also be involved in a third and fifth year review of the financial viability and quality of Extended Education programs.

Extended Education maintains the following records for all non-credit courses:

1. Course/workshop enrollment records that include name, address, Social Security or Evergreen ID number and telephone and e-mail contact information. 2. Course descriptions, fees and faculty resumes. 3. Fee collection and deposit Records. 4. Workshop instructors’ files containing contact information, current resume, course/workshop proposals, and participant evaluations of courses offered by instructor. 5. Detailed and summary evaluations of all custom training.

Extended Education contracts with Education To Go (a division of Thompson Learning, Inc.) for all of its on-line non-academic bearing courses. Continuing Education Units (CEU’s) are currently offered in partnership with St. Peter Hospital for CME and CNE units and with the National Association of Social Workers, Washington Chapter for CEU’s. These limited offerings meet all administrative requirements and provide ten hours of instruction per CEU awarded. (Exhibit 5 copy of Contract with Thompson Learning)

Custom Training

Extended Education currently provides custom training for professional skill development in management and in human resources. It contracts with the Washington State Department of Personnel to provide training in these areas for state employees. (Exhibit 6 copy of Contracts with DOP)

Issues

• Obtain faculty approval of a policy permitting continuing faculty to teach courses and/or workshops through Extended Education. • Examine current enrollment patterns in the Olympia day and Evening Weekend curriculum to determine potential for expansion of Extended Education’s revenue base by meeting additional needs of adult and part-time learners. • Expand custom training to meet the needs of local businesses, non profit organizations and government agencies. • Develop an on-line registration system for not for academic credit offerings. • Obtain dedicated administrative and classroom space. • Establish a market based compensation system for faculty and instructors in Extended Education.

Summer School

Evergreen has had a “self-supporting” summer school since 1981. Evergreen’s Summer School is critical to augmenting declining funding from the State and also provides opportunities for faculty to augment their income during the summer. Over the past ten years an average of 1577 students per year have enrolled in summer school. Enrollment has declined in the last two years but revenue’s have remained steady due to tuition increases and reductions in expenditures.

One thousand four hundred and twenty-four students enrolled in Summer School 2007. Of these students 86.5% were continuing degree seeking Evergreen students, 4.6% were new Summer School students who continued to Fall 2007 and 8.5% were students new to Evergreen who did not continue to Fall 2007. Total revenue for Summer School 2007 was $2,311,757.

Almost all summer offerings are free standing courses ranging from two to eight credits per session. Most of the courses are taught by a single faculty member and are more reflective of traditional disciplinary studies than are the interdisciplinary, team taught programs offered during the regular academic year.

The process for developing the Summer School Curriculum has remained fairly consistent over the past ten years. The first step is to analyze enrollment data from the previous summer and to review the academic calendar for the forthcoming year to help determine market demand and prerequisite requirements. This information is sent to the faculty along with a letter asking them to submit course proposals for Summer School. Proposals submitted are reviewed by the planning unit coordinators, curriculum deans, and graduate program directors who advise the Summer School dean regarding curricular needs.

In 2006 the College initiated a market study to assess interest in Extended Education and to identify new markets for Summer School. This study was useful in informing the summer curriculum and course scheduling for 2007 and together with previous summer school enrollment data provided a basis for the Summer School Dean to solicit proposals to meet market demand.

During 2006 considerable effort went into developing a new format for our summer school course listings for 2007. The course listing catalogue mirrored that of Extended Education. The new format made it easier to locate course descriptions by disciplinary area and the catalogue was more attractive and easier to navigate than the course listing used in prior years.

Issues:

• Survey students in the spring to determine their needs and interests in courses for summer school. • Create flexibility in the curriculum development process to permit addressing needs/interests identified by student survey. • Analyze regular academic year enrollment patterns to determine predictive value for summer enrollment. • Utilize analysis to “size” and “shape” the curriculum to market demand.

Graduate Programs:

Evergreen currently offers three graduate programs: a Master of Environmental Studies (MES), a Master in Teaching (MIT), and a Master of Public Administration (MPA). In addition the college offers a joint MES/MPA degree. Within the MPA program the college supports a Public Policy, a Non-Profit and Public Administration, and Tribal Governance track. The MIT program supports certification at the elementary, middle and high school levels in a wide variety of disciplines. The MES program offers a year long core sequence that includes work in both natural and social sciences, a variety of elective courses and a thesis. The college currently has permission and is in the process of establishing a Master in Education (M. Ed) program for currently certificated teachers. Evergreen is not authorized to offer a Ph.D. program.

All of these programs actively support Evergreen’s Mission as a public, interdisciplinary, liberal arts college. In the approaches to the professional areas the programs cover, faculty in these areas have created an interdisciplinary pedagogy that stresses theoretical and applied work, teaching across significant differences, and individual and collaborative effort. Each of the programs has found creative ways to include both coverage of important disciplinary and professional subject matter while incorporating important innovations in pedagogy. The Graduate programs have been developed to respond to the clear need for public school teachers, environmental specialists, and professional administrators in Washington generally and in the Olympia area in particular.

The three programs are described in their annual reports, self-studies, or certification documents. The mission statement and/or catalogue of each describes the programs educational objectives and the expectations of students. All of the graduate programs report to the Provost.

Evergreen does not have a separate graduate faculty. Although some faculty are hired specifically for masters-level teaching, all faculty rotate into the undergraduate curriculum as well, and faculty who teach in the undergraduate curriculum have an opportunity to teach in appropriate graduate programs. In addition to their teaching, faculty members in the graduate programs are expected to undertake significant research or community service work. This work is designed to provide a way for faculty to keep pace with developing issues and methods in their fields. Each masters program provides appropriate support for faculty and students.

All three graduate programs are located on campus. Each programs has published its admissions polices and guidelines, and admissions are based on formal applications. Graduate faculty have designed admissions policies, applications procedure and separate graduate catalogues.

We need: Catalogues,

Self Studies

Admissions Standards/form

Masters in Public Administration

Overview.' The MPA program at Evergreen was founded in 1980 to meet the needs of the many government workers residing and working in Olympia, Washington. Twenty years later, the program needed to change in order to meet the increasingly diversified needs of a student population that had expanded significantly to include state government, local/regional governments, tribal governments and non-profits. In 2002, the program implemented a major redesign, the first since the program was founded.

This re-visioning of the program suggested students needed more choice and flexibility in their studies. The redesign included significant curriculum changes that make it easier for students to pursue the program at their own pace and established three concentrations: public and nonprofit administration , public policy; and tribal governance (a separate cohort of students). Our tribal governance MPA (TMPA) is the first of its kind in the country. In 2006, we partnered with the Master of Environmental Study (MES) program to matriculate the first joint MES/MPA degree students.

The course of study in all fields requires 60 quarter hours work. All students participate in a 26 quarter-hour Core taught over two years covering….(fill-in) Core programs are team-taught in inter-disciplinary or inter-field teams, in learning communities). Students complete the program by developing a four quarter-hour demonstration project that integrates course work with applications.

The Public and Non-Profit Administration students select 30 credits of elective coursework that covers the critical elements of administration—budgeting, strategic planning, human resources and information systems, public law, leadership and ethics, multicultural competencies, and more—as well as the unique nature and needs of nonprofit and government organizations.

The Public Policy concentration prepare for, or advance in, positions as policy analysts, budget analysts, or evaluators. Students in this concentration complete two Public Policy Concentration courses (Foundations of Public Policy and Advanced Research Methods), plus elective work in specific policy areas. Students complete 22 credits work in electives.

The goal of the Tribal Governance concentration is to develop administrators who can assist both tribal governments and the public agencies with which the tribes interact. In order to facilitate participation from tribal students and practitioners from around the state, students in the tribal concentration go through the entire program as a cohort and finish in two years. Courses are taught in an intensive format, meeting four weekend sessions each quarter. In addition to Core and capstone, students undertake 20 hours of specifically tribal concentration and 10 credits in electives.

The Mission of the MPA program at TESC is: Our students, faculty and staff create learning communities to explore and implement socially just, democratic public service. We: think critically and creatively; communicate effectively; work collaboratively; embrace diversity; value fairness and equity; advocate powerfully on behalf of the public; and imagine new possibilities and accomplish positive change in our workplaces and in our communities.

The MPA program reflects and practices TESC’s Six Goals of an Evergreen Education and the Five Foci of an Evergreen Education. Critical thinking and collaboration are encouraged at all levels of the program; students are both personally and professionally engaged in their learning and in the learning community; theory to practice (and vice versa) is at the heart of our work together and many assignments are focused on applied action in communities, agencies and organizations; we teach and learn across significant differences. We’ve adopted Mahatma Gandhi’s statement as our motto: “you must be the change you wish to see in the world,” and faculty and students (as measured by classroom performance and through assessment) agree that we do seek to create an educational environment that encourages students to work, with passion, toward the public good.

The MPA program at Evergreen is staffed by a half-time Director (who also teaches ½ time) and two full-time Assistant Directors (MPA Assistant Director and TMPA Assistant Director). Faculty members include regular continuing faculty members at Evergreen, who rotate in and out of the program, visitors and practitioner adjuncts. The program is governed by the MPA faculty/staff team, who meet regularly to address issues of strategy and policy.

Are we meeting our goals? The MPA program is serving more students than ever before in our history. In AY2000-2001, we served, on average, 56.7 FTEs (target = 55); in AY2006-2007, we served, on average, 95.5 FTEs (target = 80). In addition, the MPA program has been successively serving more students (matriculated MPA students, Graduate Special Students, other graduate students and undergraduates) since Fall, 2002. In Fall, 2006, we served 133 students, compared to 66 students served in the Fall of 2002.

The redesigned MPA program meets the needs of students by giving them greater choice not only in the concentration areas, but also in the length of time to complete the program. Some students choose to complete the program within two years, while others may choose three to four years. To meet the needs of working students, classes meet in the evening, on Saturdays and in intensive weekend formats.

Students are satisfied with their educational experiences. 94% of student respondents in a Spring, 2007 survey indicated they were either very satisfied (42%) or satisfied (52%) with their overall experiences in the MPA program. Most students indicated that their capabilities in mission-related areas have been enhanced to a great or moderate extent. Consistent with past patterns, program strengths seem to be in delivering in the following mission areas (as measured by 85% or more responding either “great” or “moderate”): thinking critically; communicating effectively; working collaboratively; thinking creatively; and, advocating for the public.

There is some room for improvement in the following mission areas (81% or below “great” or “moderate”): Imagining new possibilities; accomplishing positive change; valuing fairness and equity; and, embracing diversity.

Alumni data are consistent with student evaluation data indicating that the program is teaching teamwork/collaboration, critical thinking, communication and analytical skills.

Alumni are also satisfied with their experiences, with a statistically significant difference in satisfaction between those who graduated before the redesign and those who graduated after. Those who graduated after the redesign are slightly more satisfied and are more likely to recommend the program to others.

What’s next? Now that we have a structure that seems to work for students, the faculty agreed it is time to turn our attention to ensuring the curriculum meets our mission and that we are teaching, with room for variance, a curriculum that reflects national and regional expectations of an MPA degree. To this end, much of AY2007-2008 MPA faculty governance will be focused on this. We also need to address the variability in curricular consistencies that can result from a program that is staffed by a faculty that rotates in and out of the program. In addition, as we continue to grow (we serve twice as many students today as we did 5 years ago), we need to ask ourselves about the limits to our growth – at what point will we become too large to sustain a cohort-based, interdisciplinary, team-taught MPA? Finally, we need to continue to ask the question staff and administrators have been working on for a few years: “what does it take, irrespective of FTEs, to staff (faculty and administration) a quality MPA program?”

Master in Teaching

Program Description

MIT is a two-year cohort-based program that enters 45 candidates each fall. Year one of each cohort is devoted to coursework on the essential knowledge and skills for teaching including foundations of education, learning theories, educational research, assessment, curriculum development, strategies for working with diverse learners, classroom management, school law, and content area pedagogies among others. Candidates spend one day a week observing and participating in curriculum development and guided teaching in regional schools. During Year two students complete two full time student teaching quarters in fall and again in spring, with generally one of the placements in a diverse, urban setting. Winter quarter is devoted to reflection on teaching and learning, the development of a Professional Growth Plan, and professional development related to job searches. The program has been graduating about 36-38 students annually and our candidates are well prepared to positively affect the students who enter their classrooms. Our high placement rate, first or second in the state for the last five years, suggests that principals and hiring committees agree! The University of Washington’s retention and mobility study, which indicated that nearly 80% of our alumni who graduated in 2001 are still teaching, reflects MIT’s own data which suggests that the great majority of our graduates tend to remain in teaching. Data from alumni, principal, and mentor teacher surveys all attest to the excellent preparation and effectiveness of MIT graduates.

The Master in Teaching (MIT) Program at Evergreen is a nationally recognized, state accredited teacher preparation program. In 2003, the MIT Program received the Richard Wisniewski Award from the Society of Professors of Education in recognition of outstanding contributions to the field of teacher education. We are proud of this recognition of the quality of the program, of our faculty, and of our candidates. Admission to the program is competitive and the content and processes are quite rigorous. Participants earn a master’s degree of 96 credits and certification while obtaining the critical understanding and skills needed to teach in today’s diverse public schools. Its structure, content, expectations, and outcomes are clearly outlined in the program catalog and website, and have been approved regularly by the State of Washington’s Board of Education since the program’s inception. MIT also completed a successful state accreditation visit in late October 2007, having met all five standards for an advisory board, accountability, unit governance and resources, program design and knowledge and skills.

Teacher education began at Evergreen in 1986, when, a faculty team crafted the Teacher Education Program (TEP) program to embody the same values and visions as those that permeated the Evergreen undergraduate curriculum. At the heart of TEP were the Five Foci and at its center was the belief in learning and the power of the learner working in collaboration with other learners. Evergreen's approach to teacher preparation emphasized building a community of learners, developing a strong theoretical foundation, and learning to apply theory through extensive opportunities for practice in public school classrooms. The Master in Teaching (MIT) Program replaced the TEP in 1992 but retained its core values.

As documented in the MIT Institutional Report and accreditation website, a variety of individual components contribute to the wholeness of the program, including the commitments embedded in Evergreen’s vision of education and in the MIT Conceptual Framework (Democracy and Schooling, Developmentally Appropriate Teaching and Learning, Multicultural/Anti-Bias Perspective); the unique experiences and talents represented by the faculty and candidates in each cohort; research about learning and effective teaching practices; on-going program and individual assessment; and attention to the State of Washington's Learning Goals and Essential Academic Learning Requirements. The creative integration of these components is what makes Evergreen's MIT program unique, responsive to individual and cultural diversity, and able to support the development of skilled and compassionate teachers who care to create just and educative learning experiences for their students.

Our candidates and graduates are supported by faculty who are skilled and dedicated educators. MIT faculty members create significant learning opportunities that incorporate emerging local, state, and national initiatives and they also make time for scholarly work and service to Evergreen and to the larger community. For example, in two recent cohorts, faculty skillfully responded to Washington State HB 1495 by including studies of tribal histories through reservation-based work and through curriculum development projects that may be included in the Chehalis culturally appropriate social studies curriculum. The two most recent cohorts have benefited from statewide math research in which one of our math faculty has participated. Two recent cohorts experimented successfully with innovative ways of incorporating arts across the curriculum. In all cohorts, candidates review and critique educational research that can help them become more effective teachers.

Responses to Community Needs Beyond Initial Residency Certification Since Last Accreditation

In response to the Washington Learns report, state data about under-staffed curricular areas in public schools, and requests from public school personnel, Evergreen, through the MIT program, has provided a number of learning opportunities for practicing teachers. We offer a strand of classes that prepare teachers to endorse in Special Education, one of the top shortage areas in the state. In addition, we offer a Professional Certificate Program that leads to the required second certification stage for teachers in Washington, Professional Certification. Finally, MIT’s certification officer meets individually with teachers seeking endorsements in a wide range of areas, helps assess their coursework, and supports them in creating plans of study that lead to their ability to add endorsements to their teaching certificates.

The college’s most recent response to identified shortage areas in public education was the development of a proposal for a Master in Education program, a collaborative effort among the Master in Teacher Program, the Evergreen Center for Educational Excellence, and Evergreen’s Grants Office, that has recently been submitted to the state Higher Education Coordinating Board for approval. This program will allow certified teachers to earn a masters degree while improving their knowledge and skills in two other state-identified shortage areas, math and ESL. In keeping with Evergreen’s mission and the mission of the Master in Teaching Program, the new masters program will also have at its center the development of teachers who can provide just and equitable learning opportunities for all children and youth.

Issues to be Addressed

• Currently, the Master in Teaching Program is the only teacher preparation entity on Evergreen’s campus that leads to state certification. The director for the Master in Teaching Program has primary responsibility for administering this program but has also, by default, assumed responsibility for the Special Education Endorsement sequence, the Professional Certificate program, and the addition of endorsements for certified teachers, none of which are included in the MIT program. For greater efficiency and consistency in supervision, hiring, and accreditation activities, the college might want to consider how to officially bring all of these education components under the supervision of a Director of Education.
• The accreditation process for teacher preparation programs has become considerably more rigorous and data-driven in the last two to three years. The college administration may need to review the needs and relationship of graduate teacher preparation to the undergraduate college. Specifically, what resources and intentions need to be available for hiring appropriate faculty and completing data analysis related to successful accreditation reviews?
• Evidence and Sources

1. Copies of MIT catalogs from 2002 through 2008 will be provided in hard copy.

• 2002-2004 Cohort
• Admissions Requirements, pages 12-14 and 19-25
• Graduation Requirements, pages 9-10 and hard copy of Covenant which can also be found at http://www.evergreen.edu/mit/publications/guidebook.htm text pages 10-13

• 2003-05 Cohort
• Admission Requirements, pages 13-16 and 20-24
• Graduation Requirements, pages 9-10 and hard copy of Covenant which can also be found at http://www.evergreen.edu/mit/publications/guidebook.htm text pages 10-13

• 2004-06 Cohort
• Admissions Requirements, pages 5-12
• Graduation Requirements, page 4 and hard copy of Covenant which can also be found at http://www.evergreen.edu/mit/publications/guidebook.htm text pages 10-13

• 2005-07 Cohort
• Admissions Requirements, pages 8-14
• Graduation Requirements, pages 5-6 and hard copy of Covenant which can also be found at http://www.evergreen.edu/mit/publications/guidebook.htm text pages 10-13

• 2006-08 Cohort
• Admissions Requirements, pages 8-14
• Graduation Requirements, pages 4-6 and hard copy of Covenant which can also be found at http://www.evergreen.edu/mit/publications/guidebook.htm text pages 10-13

• 2007-09 Cohort
• Admissions Requirements, pages 10-23
• Graduation Requirements, pages 6-8 and hard copy of Covenant which can also be found at http://www.evergreen.edu/mit/publications/guidebook.htm text pages 10-13

• 2008-10 Cohort
• Admissions Requirements, pages 9-23
• Graduation Requirements, pages 6-8 and hard copy of Covenant which can also be found at http://www.evergreen.edu/mit/publications/guidebook.htm text pages 10-13

1. Graduate Faculty – All faculty at Evergreen are hired to the college. However, MIT does have core faculty who regularly teach in MIT and systematically rotate into the undergraduate curriculum every two or three years. In addition, a liberal arts faculty member teaches on all MIT teams. To see the qualifications of all faculty who have taught in MIT since 2002, including their resumes¢, go to [../teacheraccred/index.php?title=Standard_III_Criteria_B%283%29 http://www2.evergreen.edu/wikis/teacheraccred/index.php?title=Standard_III_Criteria_B%283%29]

1. Assessment data for MIT graduates is provided in attached hard copies and in a chart at [../teacheraccred/index.php?title=Standard_II_Criteria_B%281b%29#Application_to_Program http://www2.evergreen.edu/wikis/teacheraccred/index.php?title=Standard_II_Criteria_B%281b%29#Application_to_Program]

Master in Environmental Studies

The Evergreen State College began its Graduate Program on the Environment in 1984. The program integrates the study of the biological, physical and social sciences with public policy and leads to the Master of Environmental Study (MES) degree. The program aims to produce graduates who combine an interdisciplinary understanding of the social and natural sciences with the skills and wisdom to intelligently address environmental problems. The program is centered on highly participatory evening classes that accommodate full- or part-time students. Many alumni are employed in the public, private, and non-profit sectors, while others continue their graduate study in related Ph.D. programs. The perspectives of the MES program are national and international, but extensive use is made of the environmental issues in the Pacific Northwest.

Faculty members come from biological, physical, and social sciences and a balance of these disciplinary fields is maintained in the teams of 2-3 faculty members who teach each of the 4 required, “core” courses. The MES program admits up to 40 students each year. Each entering class takes the core sequence as a group. Students develop a cohesive and cooperative approach to learning that cannot be matched by taking a scattering of individual courses. Continuing students work to integrate their first-year colleagues into a strong, supportive learning community of about 100 students overall, dedicated to increasing their knowledge and understanding of the many facets of professional environmental work. About two-thirds of Evergreen's MES students have undergraduate degrees in the natural sciences, primarily biology or environmental studies. The remainder has degrees in the social sciences and humanities. Some come directly from undergraduate work. Many bring to the program work or volunteer experience in diverse areas. MES students have ranged in age from 22 to well over 60. We are also privileged to have at least one international student enroll each year. The students and faculty report that this diversity of backgrounds, experience and ages contributes significantly to their overall learning.

The MES curriculum consists of three closely integrated components, which are (1) the 4 required core programs; (2) electives, offered to provide more specialized training in subjects related to environmental studies; and (3) thesis work, which often takes the form of applied research. Students are also encouraged to undertake internship and independent learning activities in their second year. An MES degree requires 72 quarter-hours of credit, including 32 credits of core work and 8 or 16 credits of thesis, along with 24 or 32 credits of electives. The exact mix of elective credits and thesis credits will vary according to which of two thesis options a student selects. Students enrolled full time (12 hours per quarter) can complete all degree requirements in six quarters. A new joint MES/MPA degree has been offered since 2006, which requires 96 quarter-hours of work in both graduate programs.

MES Curriculum

The MES program is designed so working students can attend part time. Core and elective programs meet in the evening and late afternoon. Students who enroll for 8 hours per quarter require a minimum of 9 quarters to complete the MES degree. These students usually take the core sequence before enrolling in electives or beginning the thesis project. Electives and thesis work are also available in the summer.

The MES core sequence starts with a general view of environmental study, in the course “Political Economic and Ecological Processes.” This program provides a framework for understanding current environmental issues from an interdisciplinary perspective. Students begin to develop the skills to become producers of new knowledge, rather than being strictly learners of information already available. Multiple methods of data acquisition and analysis are introduced through examples drawn from many fields of study. The philosophy of science and the problematic relationship between science and policy are also introduced.

The second core course is “Ecological and Social Sustainability.” This course addresses central issues in contemporary sustainability studies on theoretical and practical levels. Emphasis is on ways to promote both environmental and social sustainability. Areas covered may include environmental quality at regional, national and global scales; energy use and alternative energies; resource availability and access to resources; social and cultural issues of sustainability; and indicators to guide policy. As part of this program, students write and present a research paper to provide evidence of their readiness to advance to candidacy.

The third core course is “Quantitative and Qualitative Data Analysis for Environmental Studies.” In this course, students learn how to integrate the use of inferential statistics and qualitative data analysis to conduct rigorous examinations of the social, biological, and physical aspects of environmental issues. This knowledge prepares students for their own research and for understanding and critiquing research articles and reports in fields of their choosing.

The final core course is “Case Studies and Thesis Research Design,” in which students apply and strengthen the skills they gained in their first year of MES core studies, by carrying out individual or small group projects. Students and faculty also work together to apply what has been learned throughout the core sequence about interdisciplinary environmental research to design individual thesis research plans that will be ready to carry out by the end of the fall quarter of the student’s second year.

Four-credit electives offer students the opportunity to study a specific subject in more depth than is possible in core programs. Electives are listed in the attachment, “MES CURRICULUM, FALL 2007 – SPRING 2009.” MES students may also enroll in MPA electives and apply the credits earned toward their MES elective requirements. Additionally, students can take up to 8 elective credits of course work in the form of internships and individual contracts.

The MES program offers two ways to fulfill the thesis requirement, namely the 8-credit “Thesis: Essay of Distinction” and the 16-credit “Thesis.” Both require the student to engage in research on a significant topic and consider its political, economic and scientific aspects. It can be an individual or a team effort. The project preferably should be of value to an external client or organization as well as meeting high academic and theoretical standards. Primary differences between the two thesis options lie in the scope of the problem examined and the manner in which the research is conducted. The Thesis: Essay of Distinction reviews and analyzes an existing body of information and does not involve substantial original field or survey research. This thesis option is written in a workshop setting during winter and spring quarters of the student's final year. Students selecting this option take 8 hours of thesis credits and 32 hours of elective credits. The 16-credit thesis option represents a substantial research project conducted independently by the student with the support and guidance of a three-person thesis committee. It offers the opportunity for extended fieldwork, data collection and analysis. The thesis committee includes 2 Evergreen faculty members plus an outside reader appropriate to the topic. Students selecting this option take 16 hours of thesis credits and 24 hours of elective credits. As the culminating act of the thesis project, students share results with faculty and students in a public, oral presentation. Detailed information may be found in the attached MES Thesis Handbook.

Assessment

MES assessment is a continuing process that includes assessment of student work, of faculty performance, and of program effectiveness. Student work is assessed in detail during and at the culmination of each course through feedback on assignments and through the narrative evaluation process. Student/faculty evaluation conferences and narrative evaluations are carried out in the same manner as in Evergreen’s undergraduate program. Since the maximum student/faculty ratio is smaller in the MES program (18/1) than in the undergraduate program (25/1), we have close working relationships and excellent opportunities for assessment. Students also provide assessment of faculty and program performance through this process. The MES Director and Assistant Director regularly seek and receive informal assessments of program performance from students at all points in their academic trajectories. This is done mostly through personal meetings but also through correspondence. Faculty performance is assessed by the MES Director through regular communications with faculty and students and through formal evaluation conferences between the Director and adjunct faculty.

A detailed program assessment was carried out in a self-study completed in November, 2004 (see attached self-study). A year later, an intensive, two-day program assessment was conducted in September of 2005 in a “summer institute” called, “The Future of Graduate Environmental Studies at Evergreen.” The purpose of the summer institute was to assess where the MES program had been, where it should be going, and how to get there. Readings, presentations and working groups were organized to foster creative thinking about strengthening the MES program. MES was assessed within the broader context of the evolving field of graduate environmental studies programs and, for that reason, Dr. Will Focht was invited to assess our program (see his report to the Provost, attached) and to participate in the summer institute as a resource person and facilitator. Dr. Focht, who is Director of the Environmental Institute and Director of the Environmental Science Graduate Program at Oklahoma State University, has many years of experience leading a comprehensive survey of environmental studies and science programs offered in U.S. universities. Participants in the summer institute included every previous MES Director except one; many current, former and future MES faculty members; current students, alumni, and MES support staff. These participants formed working groups to developing recommendations for the MES program from a variety of perspectives.

Contradictions, Issues, and Future Directions

Evergreen exists within a web of tensions that structure the opportunities, limit the possibilities, and create the challenges the College faces. These tensions arise from the intersection of the college and the public world within which it exists, from the internal dynamics of its development and growth, and from the transformation of its personnel and culture as the college ages. Such tensions are the stuff of the college’s life. Many if not all of the tensions we experience have been with the college, in one form or another, for its entire history. They are not likely to go away. Without them the dynamism and vitality of the institution would not exist. The issue for us as an institution is not to eliminate these tensions, but to reflect on how they are manifested in our present experience. To ask if these manifestations have become destructive to our mission and to ask how we should mange these tensions in our present environment. Thinking of these tensions as a web is useful in as much as many of the elements interact not simply between two broadly held values, e.g., community and autonomy, but carry implications for such issues as the conception of interdisciplinary work, the relations of staff and faculty, or the size of our programs. Changes in one aspect of the college ramify throughout the institution. This self study helps us take a look at those changes, ask about the current state of our tensions, and to think about how we can adapt and respond to the present circumstances.

Public Education: The Production of Degrees or the Education of Persons

The tensions that Evergreen arose from in the late 1960’s and early 70’s have not disappeared. Today as then questions of diversity, war, class, gender, ecological sustainability, the privatization of knowledge, globalization, race and more raise questions about the role and place of public education in the lives of citizens. Not surprisingly these tensions continue to shape Evergreen.

At the heart of these tensions is Evergreen’s role as a public college. Two dimensions of publicness stand out: publicness as civil engagement and participation in the determination of collective life on the one hand, and publicness as accountability on the other. Clearly both have real claims and substantive demands. As the preceding discussion of goals, collaboration, difference, reflection, engaged participation, the linking of theory and practice and academic programs as communities embedded in a world of experience has made clear participation in collective life has been at the center of the Evergreen experience. The role of graduates in state, and local governments and politics, in social, political, and artistic movements, and work for social justice, environmental integrity, and public education demonstrates the ways in which Evergreen has enhanced citizenship and public life.

Publicness as accountability implies that the college be good stewards of the resources and privileges granted to it. At the most basic level of course this is simply honesty and fiscal responsibility. But as soon as accountability is understood as providing persons trained to exercise particular talents within a state economy, or less specifically as providing an education for which a definite number of students can be recruited, accountability starts to shape the educational choices and resources.

Evergreen like every other public college or university in the country is caught up in a long series of arguments about the relationship of education to economic productivity, about the efficiency of instruction, about the value of education in fundamentally economic terms. This is nothing new, since at least 1862 with the original founding of land grant colleges, education has been seen as an engine of economic growth worthy of public investment. What is new is the intensity, the pressure to justify, measure, and define the value of education in such terms over the past 10 years. This economic view of education as an investment with measurable and distinctly specifiable, predictable outcomes is distinctly different from Evergreen’s emphasis on an education that produces qualities of mind, capacities for engagement, and independence of judgment. The college faces constant pressure to explain itself in a language that is quite foreign to the internal dialogue of the college. Major efforts such as the work of the Masters in Teaching Program to account for its extraordinarily successful program during an accreditation visit by state accreditors in the fall of 2007 illustrates the huge investment in scarce resources and energy in efforts that are directed outward at convincing others of our worth rather than inward toward the intellectual and collegial life of the college. This tension is both a matter of translation and a matter of the substantive direction of the college. This tension confronts the college as it devises its student recruitment plans, identifies faculty hiring priorities, and plans for growth of the college. For example when we deal with issues of communication with potential students we must both convey what is substantively different about the college, but also need to assure potential students that the possibility to do disciplinary work, to produce a marketable degree, or to get a job is also a product of a TESC education. While this is seen as primarily an act of translating from TESC parlance to more conventional language, it has the effect of making the issue of disciplines, of pathways, and career preparation important drives in the choices of what we teach.

Indeed a fundamental tension at the college is the need for enrollment to meet state mandated levels. This pressure has lead to much useful innovation, but also to the proliferation of programs, courses and contracts that have significantly modified the college. The pressure has moved the college toward more part-time faculty for more flexible and expedient assignments rather than developing a long-term stable faculty.

The pressure of State defined goals for undergraduate education pushes the college toward patterns of growth that reflects public need as framed in state and national policy. The controversy over college growth hires in 2005-6 reflects among other things a continuing conflict between felt need to support state mandates and a set of proposals that emerged from faculty priorities. (Report of the Enrollment Growth DTF 2006) Or as in the 2006-7 cycle we attempted to develop hires in such a way as to define them as meeting state funding priorities.

Yet, it is the case that the college is overwhelmingly dependent on state funding. It is the case that the citizens of the state do have a right to know what sort of work we do here and what sort of graduates the college helps create. And it is the case that we, like our students, their parents, and employers, want our graduates to take a role in our economy. Yet the role we would like our students to play emerges from their inquiries into the world. And it is the case that in the long run the college both grows and changes to find an appropriate role within the culture. Ironically, Evergreen’s attempts to identify emergent tendencies, to anticipate public issues, and to prepare people with self confidence and holistic vision to help identify and define public issues through public interdisciplinary inquiry based study that sometimes leads us to speak a quite different language and see quite different issues than those identified by disciplines and training.

Community and Autonomy

Community and autonomy pose a fundamental tension at the college. A tension that operates at the level of student experience, of faculty teaching experience, of educational program design, and of governance and control of the institution. The tension is a necessary one and will only disappear when the college has ceased to be relevant. For students the autonomy that has been granted students to chart their own educational course through the offerings of TESC and to create their own educational options through contracts and internships creates one of the fundamental educational experiences and fundamental lessons of the college. Students are in some large measure responsible for their choices and the learning those choices entail. At the same time the education we offer turns in its most powerful form on the experience of a community of learners (faculty included) who collaboratively explore an issue, discipline, or question. This potential contradiction between the student’s individual desires and the direction of the program stand in tension. Students are always tempted to ask: Is this what I really want? If it is so hard, why must I persist? If I don’t like a subject, why should I take it? Acting on these questions, leaving a program, dropping out part way through a program has little overt consequence, for the student in the short run. But it does have consequence for the program, the community of inquiry who lose the participation of the community member. In the longer run switching allows the student to avoid the learning that comes when one persists through the hard work and confusion. Constant avoidance of difficult work can lead to a shallow widely scattered education. On the other hand, staying when there is no connection to the community or issues does not do any good for either the student or the community. Resolving this tension for the individual student demands, and can help create, a mature judgment about what he or she really wants and will work for.

At the social level tensions within programs, the necessary experience of being public with one’s learning and growth, which is exciting for some students poses real challenges for many. Reading a paper out loud to a group of student respondents, speaking and questioning in seminar, or working on a collaborative project and presenting results to the class all are necessary experiences of presenting ones self as a public learner. The re-acculturation that Evergreen requires with its demand to take responsibility for your own work and at the same time to share, collaborate, and become colleagues with classmates makes for a very new and often difficult balance for students.

At the institutional level as faculty attempt to accommodate students by changing the number size and duration of choices offered to students, the nature of student commitments to programs change and the balance between community and autonomy is shifted. The expectations of what students can learn in a program, the pace of the learning, the possibilities for reflection, and the kinds of assignments, advice, and support faculty can give to students within and beyond the duration of the program are changed.

Autonomy and community pose a major tension for faculty members individually and for groups of faculty as they attempt to create a coherent curriculum and experience for students. Individually faculty members at Evergreen experience a constant tension between the demands of the immediate work of teaching and learning and the processes of planning for the future work and participating in a demanding set of expectations for governance of the institution. Planning future work can easily involve faculty working to collaboratively plan work for the next quarter, work for the next academic year, work for the spring quarter of the next academic year, work and catalog copy for programs two years hence. The planning two years hence involves not merely deciding what one wants to teach, but locating a faculty team, agreeing on a theme, and coordinating with the planning unit the faculty member is a part of or potentially multiple areas when the design is for an inter-area program. The point is that simply planning puts a faculty member into wide array of obligations to different collectivities and elements of community: present colleagues, future colleagues, planning units and eventually to the college and its curriculum as a whole.

Beyond teaching faculty have artistic and scholarly work of their own that draws them away from collaboration and stands in significant tension with the obligations and needs of the community. Yet, in the longer run faculty often need just such intense personal work: an opportunity to look deeply into issues and work extensively on their own endeavors is often necessary in order for faculty members to function as effective teachers and learners with their students.

At the level of defining and developing a more or less regularly structured curriculum for students, faculty autonomy is constantly at odds with the perceived need for system and regularity. Such demands vary widely from planning unit to planning unit, yet even in the most dispersed, CTL, the unit needs to be able to specify repeating work in languages, participation in Core and inter-area programs and be sure that there is interesting advanced work available to students. In SI such patterns of repeating programs are much more clearly specified and organized and faculty are expected, but cannot be required to participate in the teaching rotation. The autonomy of the faculty is highly prized. It is the underlying condition that supports both the development of inter-area and core teaching. It supports faculty in their choice to risk teaching in new areas and helps faculty members take risks as learners. At the same time it offers faculty a chance to take leave to support their own work. Our individual and collective autonomy underlies the ability of the college to imagine itself in a new and different configuration with different emphases.

The tension that exists about the individual faculty member’s participation in the primary work of the college, in teaching, is exacerbated when we look to the major secondary work of faculty in governance. Active participation in governance is a strongly felt desire at Evergreen. The relatively flat organization structure, the ethos of participation in Evergreen as a community, the sense of empowerment that the faculty as a whole often feels all support a felt sense of obligation for many faculty to participate deeply and widely in the development of policies, the hiring and review of personnel, and the determination of the college’s academic agenda. The culture of evaluation and the creative restlessness that external reviewers note drives a constant sense of a need for faculty to take part. Yet the immediate pay off of such work is minimal and is often rewarded with further assignments, as one is perceived to be effective at such endeavors. As the institution grows the capacity for faculty to know each other, to make policy that effectively accounts for the whole college and to know the whole array of issues, becomes more and more difficult. Scale is a crucial issue in all of this, as policies come to replace face to face consultation, and the shear numbers of people potentially involved in decisions grows. Most of the governance institutions have been in place for 15 years or more while the institution has grown and will continue to grow both in size and complexity. Growth in scale makes the community based collaborative decision making of the Faculty Meeting as a whole a much more difficult reality to pull off, especially as obligations of faculty to assist the college in other ways expand.

Finally, the college is structured in such a way that participation in a program with one or two other colleagues is intense and extraordinarily engaging while one is teaching. But between the level of the program and the level of the college faculty as a whole there is very little structure. Planning Units can serve as meaningful intermediate structures especially in SI and ES, but their function as a source of social and collaborative work is much weaker in CTL, SPBC, and EA. This reality makes the absolutely necessary function of socialization of a new generation of faculty to the college difficult and imposes significant burden on the Academic dean in charge of faculty development.

In here we still have MES which is mostly drafted and has minor development . We need the Report from Theresa on Extended ed which was in draft form when last I talked with her plus we need a blurb (not large on summer school).

Most importantly we need a major piece on assessment and a characterization of Evergreen Graduates that Laura is working on.

Future Directions

As the discussion in section one of the report makes clear the college is in an important way in a period of transition. Most of the original faculty members have retired; all who remain are expected to retire within the next few years. All of the original administrators at the institution have gone and nearly all of their successors have gone. The college has moved from being an experiment in full-time interdisciplinary studies to being an innovative college within the mainstream of American higher education offering full time, part time, and graduate work in several locations. Yet as we have shown the founding ideals, many of the fundamental understandings of the college remain deeply embedded in the descriptions of the college, the working of its programs, and the aspirations of its administrators, faculty, and students. The issues the college faces today arise from this history of growth and change.

New Faculty for Old

Over 70 faculty with extensive teaching experience in coordinated studies have resigned or retired from the faculty within the past 10 years. We have brought in nearly 100 new faculty in the past 10 years. Thus we have lost a great deal of skill and expertise in the organization and management of the complex interdisciplinary programs. Even more significantly, we have also lost a generation of teachers who were broadly dedicated to the idea that taking a risk, being a co-learner with their students. Many of the retired faculty recognized their expertise as partial, or significantly limited, and taught in order to learn and reshape their own and their students’ knowledge, not primarily to impart known understandings. The process of socializing new members of the community, of passing on some of the attitudes and practices is a crucial piece of work in the next few years. Two aspects of this work stand out. First, helping new faculty to engage with the curriculum through their disciplines and through their desires for new learning and experience. This involves learning to engage students in an exploration of well understood ideas on the one hand and learning to risk grappling with new or re-framed understandings on the other. Helping new Faculty develop their own understandings of inquiry and interdiciplinarity. Creating a sense of possibility for new faculty in a world constructed in large measure by planning units is an important challenge. More generally finding organizational mechanisms that provide support for inter-area work is a crucial part of continuing the ability of students to have transformative, reflexive educational experiences.

Reviving the Interdisciplinary Curriculum

The fundamental issue of developing and reinvigorating the interdisciplinary curriculum of the college has emerged out of the work of the faculty as a DTF (Committee) of the whole in the Curricular Visions process of governance groups and DTF begun in the 2005-06 school year. This work reflects the continuing and necessary tension between interdisciplinary and disciplinary work at the college. It raises questions about the central role of the Planning Units as the primary engines of curriculum and hiring and reflects uneasiness with broader issues of professionalizing and formalizing of the curriculum. Indeed it raises once again the question of the meaning of interdisciplinarity and a conversation about its importance. Understanding that interdisciplinarity as it has operated at Evergreen is not simply an instrumental technique to more fully impart disciplinary knowledge, but is based on inquiry that develops, challenges and reforms our understandings of self and critical issues is crucial.

Courses and Curricular Options

The third issue closely related to the reinvigoration of interdisciplinarity has to do with the question of full time study, the role of shorter and smaller pieces in the curriculum that at the very least raise questions about the assumptions we make about faculty student connection. The growth of course work within Evening and Weekend studies, the number of single faculty, single quarter programs, the growing number of individual pieces that students register for all suggest a change from the original model of multi-faculty year long coordinated studies. This tension that has existed from the earliest years of the college has important implications for our assumptions about advising, coherence, breadth and depth in student experience. The proliferation of pieces, the increasing array of options, especially course options, raises important questions about the role of advising by both faculty members and SAS. Developing breadth is in some ways simpler in such a curriculum as less than full time work is required to find opportunities for mathematic, languages, or arts. But finding a coherent path though this work is an even greater challenge than when the options were fewer.

First Year Work

The nature and function of first year work is also a major issue of the college. In the beginning of the review period 1997-98 71% of all first year seats were in Core programs by 1998-99 that figure was 84% from that point forward the proportion of Core seats has fallen to the point were on 40% of first year seats are in core 47% are in all level and 14% are in Lower Division work in 2006-07. This shifting structure of first year offerings, coupled with the concerns raised in the First Year Experience DTF raises questions about how we can support first years, continue work on General Education, and work on retention.

Others some of the below???

Role of social sciences in curriculum as a piece of the discussion of disciplines and interdisciplinary??

Pressure for transparency and clarity to prospective students and their families? Areas of Inquiry

Problem with workload/fac student ratio : Governance

Need for strong humanistic center to Core and other area issues??

Impact of assessment/ quantification and measurement pressure on the curriculum

Impact of low selectivity on teaching of and remediation of basic academic skills.

Things to be preserved as we change. Your ideas here. Matt

Standards

Standard 2.A - General Requirements

Standard 2.B - Educational Program Planning and Assessment

Standard 2.C - Undergraduate Program

Standard 2.D - Graduate Program

Standard 2.E - Graduate Faculty and Related Resources

Standard 2.F - Graduate Records and Academic Credit

Standard 2.G - Off-Campus and Other Special Programs Providing Academic Credit

Standard 2.H - Non-credit Programs and Courses

Supporting Documentation

See Supporting Documentation for Standard Two