On December 17, 2024, President Guskiewicz announced an initiative to update the university’s general education curriculum. The goal of the General Education Council (GEC), as articulated in the charge from the Office of the Provost, is:
“To develop a modern, innovative, inclusive, and global curriculum, preparing students for future success in careers and jobs that we cannot even imagine today.
The Directors of MSU’s five pillars of general education were all invited to present on our existing curricula to the GEC, focusing on two opportunities:
- Opportunity 1: Please provide a short asset (no more than 2–5 pages or 5–10 minutes of content) at least one week prior to your scheduled GEC meeting, addressing:
- How does your course or program contribute to the charged vision of what a bachelor’s degree from a 21st-century land-grant university should provide every graduate, including relevant skills, knowledge, and experiences?
- This may include elements like workforce readiness, critical thinking, cultural and global awareness, professional and personal ethics, AI and innovative technologies literacy, one health, or other outcomes that align with MSU’s land-grant mission.
- What specific evidence will help the Council understand what structural or resource changes could help students learn and thrive more effectively?
- Where are the current gaps or limitations that we should know about now to ensure any future design is efficient and future-facing?
- Please keep your materials specific, concise, and directly connected to these questions.
- Opportunity 2: The presentation topic (5 minutes)
- As one of our MSU experts in general education and pedagogy, you are designing a general education program for freshmen and transfer students who are beginning their coursework at MSU in Fall 2029. What should their program look like?
The Directors of the three Centers for Integrative Studies (Arts and Humanities, Social Science, and General Science) presented our materials to the GEC on September 19; First-Year Writing and Mathematics presented the week following.
Because IAH benefits from the hard work of so many people across the Colleges of Arts and Letters, Music, and Social Science, I want to make sure that the materials created for and presented to the GEC are visible to our full teaching community. Please review the CISAH letter composed for Opportunity #1 and the presentation recording for Opportunity #2 posted below and email sabogart@msu.edu if you have any questions.
(Please note: The recording of the GEC presentation has not been shared publicly, so the video above was recorded after the fact as a way to share this material with our IAH community.)