Portlandia

Association of General and Liberal Studies, Portland, OR September 20-22, 2012

This conference is small (about 300 participants) and is primarily comprised of general education administrators and faculty who teach or lead general education programs.  Most of the universities represented were smaller than JMU (there were a few notable exceptions – Portland State, North Dakota State).  JMU has a long history with this organization and has been recognized by AGLS as an exceptional General Education program.

The theme was sort of depressing - degree completion and the role of general and liberal studies programs to help students reach graduation.  This has been communicated in the higher education press as the Completion Agenda and several of the speakers took issue with the problems an agenda like this brings.  Examples include, a managerial approach to higher education (efficiency is more important than quality), administration-driven top-down decision-making, and deprofessionalization of faculty as well as issues surrounding NTTFs (you can’t go to a conference and not pick up a new acronym, this one=non-tenure track faculty).  But it did make me feel happy to be at JMU where we have all the alert systems in place to catch struggling students, like high admissions standards, clear pathways through general education, intrusive advising and mandatory orientation.  While raises for faculty are an issue at JMU, we are not as adjunct-heavy as some of our less well-off peers.   (For more information on this issue, visit

The Changing Faculty and Student Success).

Much of the conference was dedicated to assessment of student learning in general education.  Interestingly, most of these schools use off-the-shelf measures of student learning outcomes (Collegiate Learning Assessment was mentioned by many) but many do not seem to know what to do with their assessment information.  Many participants noted that what assessment should be doing (improve student learning, inform pedagogy) gets consumed by what assessment actually does (satisfy mandates, accountability to legislators or accreditors).  As recent discussions in JMU’s General Education Academic Program bear out, even though JMU tends to use its home-grown measuring sticks, we still might not know what to do with our measurements. 

The main reason for my trip was to present with Gretchen Hazard (Cluster One Coordinator) on First Year Reading as an Introduction to General Education.  We had about 20 folks turn out (pretty good given we presented near the end of the conference and at 8:45AM on Saturday).  We talked our participants through a model first year program (Preface) as a stage-setter for what students should expect in their first year classes.  For those of you who have seen the Preface Facilitators’ training, this is a similar presentation with more emphasis on the goals of the program and their connections to first year general education courses.  The feedback we received was quite positive and several folks even thanked us for an upbeat presentation. 

BTW, Portland is AWESOME.  I love a town with menus that are loaded with bacon AND gluten-free options.  

PS:  If you have read to here, you deserve a little love from VooDoo Donuts!