Minutes

Core Committee

November 22, 2007

Lorentzen Conference Room – 8 am

Members present: D. Anderson, M. Burchill, P. Fretham, A. Ingberg, G Muilenburg, D. Sandgren, S. Schwartz, L. Sethre-Hofstad.

The Core Committee continued their discussion with David Sprunger regarding writing across the Core. Dr. Sprunger brought another draft (Working Draft 2.1) of an outline for writing in the core. In Part 1, of the document, there was no major changes from the previous draft. A small note was made about library usage being debated (i.e. how much that library literacy would be included in the writing-intensive Inquiry Seminars.

Part 2 is written about Expectations for Writing in All Core Courses. It was noted early that there is no agreement on a one-size fits all approach to writing. For some divisions it would be quite hard to make all core courses writing intensive, simply for the fact that their courses are not writing courses in the classic writing sense.

Some distinctions that could be made would be Writing-to-Learn (WTL) and Learning-to-Write (LTW). Learning-to-write courses would be capped at 22 students to maintain a high level of writing education. There would be an emphasis on polished writing.

• Polished writing would be defined as revised writing that is intended for people other than students, and one of the focuses would be on intentional teaching about what it means to WTL and LTW for each major or division. This would require each major program to have classes that would cover both areas (or designate a class from another major to fulfill this question).
• For more science related classes (i.e. lab classes) could a lab course with significant lab reports be considered under the LTW distinction?

Final thoughts came in asking for each department to address this fundamental question in a document or statement. “What is writing in your department?

• From that statement for each department, the class proposals would have a summary on how the class will address the writing requirement for each department.

Thank you to David Sprunger for visiting us this morning and shedding some light on what the Faculty Implementation Group has been working on.

Looking forward: Next meeting Kay Schneider will join us to talk about assessment for the new core and what it will entail. The next meeting will take place December 4^th.

Respectfully Submitted,

Paul J Fretham ‘08