Eckerd College is a small, residential, liberal arts college related by covenant to the Presbyterian church. Since curriculum planning for Eckerd (then Florida Presbyterian College) began in 1958, the general education program has been at the heart of the college's vision of liberal education, and the first-year curriculum has been at the heart of our four-year general education program. The first-year curriculum begins with what we call Autumn Term, a three-week special topics course delivered in August each year. This intensive class meets daily for three hours, and in addition to introducing students to the subject of the course, includes a library orientation workshop as well as workshops on effective writing strategies, studying for exams, and giving oral presentations. The purpose of Autumn Term is to engage students in the excitement of the intellectual enterprise, to socialize students to college work expectations, and to orient them to the college. To these ends, the faculty teaching Autumn Term work closely with administrators and staff in our student affairs division to bridge the all-too-typical divide between academics and student life.

The first-year curriculum continues with a year long, two-semester course entitled Western Heritage in a Global Context (WHGC), required of all first-year students. The course is organized around thematic conversations among the great ideas and enduring texts of both western and non-western traditions. The emphasis is on enduring classics and widely influential materials that have contributed significantly to their respective cultures. For example, in the section of the course on justice, students read Mencius, Sophocles’ Antigone, and the book of Genesis. In the section on nature, students read Basho’s Narrow Road to the Deep North, E. O. Wilson’s “The Florida Keys Experiment,” and Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. The objectives of the course include introducing students to a sampling of the many influential ideas and thinkers of the western tradition in conversation with those of non-western traditions; developing students’ understanding and appreciation of major historical, intellectual, spiritual, and artistic transitions in western and non-western traditions; improving students’ ability to analyze, evaluate, and synthesize complex ideas.

In WHGC, students meet regularly in discussion sections of about twenty; approximately ten times during each semester, all faculty and students in the course attend a lecture to introduce a theme or to develop their understanding of the arts. In addition to the content of the course, faculty help students meet two general-education competency requirements: oral communication and information technology competencies. Our goal in the first of these is to encourage students to become more comfortable as well as more skilled in a variety of forms of classroom oral communication. In the second category, information technology competency, we seek to ensure that each student has the basic skills to use web and internet resources and to use the on-line library system in research projects.

The key to successful implementation of the college’s general education program is effective mentoring. The Eckerd faculty is strongly committed to serving as caring scholar-teachers in a mentoring relationship with individual students, thus encouraging them to make the most of the learning opportunities that the college provides. The mentoring relationship begins during Autumn Term when the freshmen, in groups of about twenty, are introduced to the liberal arts by the faculty member teaching their class. This faculty member becomes those students’ mentor, and the Autumn Term group continues together as a discussion section of Western Heritage in a Global Context throughout the remainder of the first year. First-year mentors help students plan a four-year curriculum, including study abroad and involvement in campus activities. They also encourage reflective learning and goal setting. Although first-year students choose a new faculty mentor in the spring when they declare a major, the pattern has been set in the first year for continuing close collaboration with between each individual student and his or her mentor.

Eckerd College has a strong commitment to the texts studied in Western Heritage in a Global Context as the foundation of a liberal education and as the source of the college’s learning community. Every full-time member of the faculty, on a rotating basis, leads a discussion section of the course throughout the year, not only in order to provide students with a model of the educated mind at work, but as a way of renewing his or her own liberal education. Each faculty member is expected to participate in the course once every three to five years. In addition to socializing individual professors to the values at the heart of a liberal education, this policy also spreads responsibility for the general education program across the faculty as a whole

Our program’s effectiveness was recently confirmed through two independent assessments. In the 1999-2000 academic year, we invited J. Scott Lee, Executive Director of the Association for Core Texts and Courses, to serve as an external evaluator in our assessment process. In the conclusion of his evaluation of our first-year program Lee writes, The students [in Western Heritage in a Global Context] are reaching an understanding and appreciation of ideas and works within the course. That understanding should form a groundwork for students to build their bachelor’s education with much better confidence about what sort of questions to ask of what they read and learn as they mature through their four years’ stay. The course, also, provides assurance that Eckerd students are exposed to important works, to introductions and overviews to ideas which span fields and which are part of every baccalaureate student’s legitimate claim to be literate and educated. No disciplinary structure of courses can guarantee this kind of broad overview which is so necessary in helping our citizenry relate one field to another. Eckerd, indeed, is to be justly commended and proud of the curricular accomplishment and content and of the student achievement in Western Heritage in a Global Context. (Brunello Appendix 2)

Further evidence of the effectiveness of our general education program comes from our participation in a comparative assessment by the Higher Educational Data Sharing Consortium (HEDS). “In the survey administered to graduating seniors in 1997, Eckerd Students consistently rated themselves ‘very satisfied’ to ‘satisfied’ or their capacity ‘moderately’ to ‘greatly enhanced’ with the core-curriculum-related aspects of their education (in comparison with other participants in the survey)” (Chapin 120).

These assessments suggest that Eckerd College’s first-year curriculum is highly effective in helping us achieve the academic mission of the institution.

Works Cited

Brunello, Anthony. “General Education: First Year Program Assessment Report.” Eckerd College, 2000.

Chapin, Lloyd W. “The Core Curriculum at Eckerd College.” Alive at the Core: Exemplary Approaches to General Education in the Humanities. Michael Nelson, ed. San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2000. 96-122.