In a guest column today, Matthew Boedy, an associate professor of rhetoric and composition at the University of North Georgia, discusses changes by the Board of Regents to core courses required at public campuses in Georgia. The changes shift the focus from essential knowledge to career readiness.
Boedy is conference president of the Georgia chapter of the American Association of University Professors, a national organization that represents the interests of college and university faculty members.
By Matthew Boedy
This week, the Board of Regents, who oversee our public University System, voted to pass changes to the state’s general education curriculum or “core” courses that all students at all schools must take. English, math, history, a foreign language, a lab science. You know the drill.
The regents passed a change designed by the University System leaders to reframe the “core” to students. Students often complain about the purposes of these courses, especially the ones not in their major. Maybe you complained when you took them.
Credit: Peggy Cozart
Credit: Peggy Cozart
The change literally renames the categories that once were simple letters — A through E — to create an acronym that spells “impacts” as to make clear on paper at least the impacts of the “core” to students.
This implies the goal of the “core” is not changing, merely the naming is. But this is not the case. The renamed “core” is also being redefined and oddly in my opinion. The current justification for the “core” says that the curriculum aims to provide “foundational knowledge in academic disciplines, exposing students to diverse learning perspectives.” The system is adding a second goal: “develop career-ready competencies.”
I certainly don’t mind the first goal. In fact, it is a better version of the tired cliche that such courses make students “well-rounded.” We all need essential knowledge in all academic areas. Why? Because as I argue to students in my first-year English class, all the subjects intersect and depend on each other. I specifically add that my area of expertise — rhetoric — is the ground for all the others. My proposal doesn’t turn students into English majors but I think it at least stops them complaining.
I take issue with the second goal.
What are these “career-ready competencies”? A list created by the National Association of Colleges and Employers gets the most citations. This list includes soft skills not so easily tied to a course such as leadership, teamwork, technological efficiency and one some Georgia lawmakers don’t like — inclusion. The University System forgoes inclusion in favor of “intercultural competence,” reflective of the political scapegoating in Georgia of diversity, equity and inclusion.
I criticize these competencies not because students should not be competent in them. But because they are linked to the concept of a career. In fact, that push seems to undercut the other goal of general education — to give students essential knowledge in academic subjects.
Can you do both in the same course? Sure. But it demands a specific way of understanding career education. It places the non-career subject or subjects under the career subject.
This is not what I mean when I tell students all academic subjects intersect. The stuff learned in English 101 or Psychology 101 may certainly be valuable to a nurse if one looks at the former in terms of skills for the latter. But it’s hardly the best sell to a nurse to say that she will write in her job and you need a course in writing. This student knows that writing as a nurse is different than writing an English essay.
More problematic is that this kind of career-heavy thinking makes those academic subjects often not designed for a specific career either at best in service to those who do or at worse, useful only for the designated competency a student is supposed to learn from it.
The University System is admitting implicitly that students’ complaints about the old purpose of general education — to educate in a wide variety of subjects — urged the system to create a more individualized reason to care about courses not in their major. The new reason? Look, kids, now those courses are ‘”in” your major.
For example, for the first-year English courses, the new competencies are critical thinking, information literacy, and persuasion. All parts of learning to write.
But my course teaches students an understanding of writing steeped in my academic discipline.
In fact, this understanding is at times at odds with how writing is understood by many careers. It’s not that I am not teaching the competencies but certainly not in the way that most employers might think.
Oddly, in many ways now, my English class will be judged by stakeholders in other fields.
Beyond the personal impact, will students see this as a “bait-and-switch” when they learn my course doesn’t match the writing in their career? Are we to count the number of times now I say “career-ready competency” in my class to cover for that possibility?
These are some of the many problems when you try to push career thinking too far into higher education. It makes college the new high school. Or the “core” curriculum in college becomes a pointless extension of high school. In short, if the public case against college is that you don’t need it for a career, how will making general education more geared toward career debunk that claim?
This kind of thinking limits what higher education is best known for — exploration, curiosity, advancement of knowledge.
By the way, curiosity is one of the “career-ready competencies” listed by the employer group cited above. But without irony, it is listed under the general competency of career development. Its definition — “display curiosity; seek out opportunities to learn” — is set securely within the knowledge area of one career.
That’s right, kids. Be curious. But only about your career.
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