The Careful Beginning of a Big Idea - The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

Executive Summary

The remarkable range of intellectual and cultural institutions in the nation’s capital makes Washington, D.C. an exceptional setting for the work of a university. As the next step in the enhancement of its general education design, The George Washington University’s Columbian College of Arts and Sciences seeks to exploit the city’s resources to introduce students to liberal learning in ways they will find engaging and challenging, not merely required. To do this, basic general education courses will be developed using teaching strategies that involve students as active learners, giving them opportunities to work directly with the resources of the nation’s capital.

The process that will be used in the project is as potentially important for the university as the courses that will be developed. A group of senior faculty from a range of departments in the Columbian College who are selected as Hewlett Fellows will meet together over the length of the project with a four-part agenda:

• to investigate appropriate Washington resources in greater depth
  
• to acquaint themselves with a variety of techniques for promoting active learning
  
• to develop meaningful ways to assess the effectiveness of the new courses
  
• to consider expansion of the project as a new approach to general education at George Washington

With the assistance of specialists at GW and elsewhere, these faculty will develop, offer, and assess 15 new courses over a two-year period. This core group of faculty will then be in a position to help lead this approach in their own departments and across the campus. If the project is successful, the ultimate result may include the creation of general education concentrations or sequences of Washington-based courses that form an integrated program of general education study. Particularly in view of this possibility, the body of data that will be assembled over the course of this project on how well students learn -- as well as on relevant student and faculty attitudes -- will be one of the most important outcomes.

We expect that for students, the project will produce significant intellectual excitement in required general education settings, and mitigate against the impression that such courses are not challenging. We expect that students in the target classes will satisfy specific faculty goals for general education at a high level, while gaining meaningful experience with the public resources of the nation’s capital.

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