Programs Committee: School of Education Meeting

The Programs Committee of the School of Education has the purpose reviewing proposed changes to the coursework of the school. These proposals include new courses, programs, or revisions. The Committee can initiate courses and delegate future action. It can be reviewed by all levels but it a source of an intermediate body that reports to all of the different departments.

The most recent meeting took place on Friday, December 21st. The meeting agenda consisted of several parts.
The first was to rework the course Counseling Psychology 270-810. The proposal creates a greater range of credits (1-9) to account for summer supervision of counselors. There was little debate, because such a course would increase student options, and the credit change was approved. Hopefully, the change will be implemented by summer of 2008 to allow 1-2 credit courses to be offered.
The second proposal was to raise the minimum GPA for admission into secondary English, math, science, and social studies programs. The GPA would be 2.75 which was the initial GPA for entrance to the school before holistic entrance was considered. This increase will better the odds that graduates from the secondary program will be able to maintain the regulated GPA for graduation, while decreasing exceptions. The committee approved of the change with the standard is aimed to go into effect by the 2009 admission. World Language and Communication is likely to follow suit with an increased standard.
The final agenda task was to approve a large stack of course material for the Art Department. As a massive clean up project, several of the changes were to delete courses that had never been offered by the university, or whose specialized professors had left the university. The committee debated whether it was necessary to delete courses, and several were pulled. Other changes involved adding an additional credit to studio courses because of their large time commitment. According to the Art department, there is a large amount of student support for this change. Yet, because art education majors need to take some of these courses as prerequisites, but cannot fit so many credits into their schedules, the credit addition was made optional with an additional project to correlate with the additional credit. There were also changes to rework the names and orders of course series by certain professors. The final type of revision was to clarify the prerequisites for Art courses. The department had not used timetable and the catalogue to demonstrate enforceable prerequisites, and students were taking courses they were not yet prepared for. With clarified requirements, students will be better placed and still have the option of instructor consent to skip to higher levels. The committee looked through the syllabus of each class, and approved the course changes while pulling out those that were unprepared for complete approval because of their incomplete information. The next step is for the changes to go to the departmental board, where the revisions must be perfected to pass. The Art department hopes that the proposals will pass and that the courses can be implemented as soon as possible. The change requires that timetable also make appropriate alterations so that the registration of Fall 2008 will prove easier for students interested in art. If you have any questions on the specific course changes, or need clarification on the reasons, just post it here and I'll be happy to respond.
The meeting was then adjourned and all were sent off for a wonderful winter break. Happy Holidays everyone!