By SHANNON O. WELLS
The past year has been a productive and encouraging one for Pitt’s General Education Task Force — with listening sessions, student surveys and benchmarking against peers.
Since the summer of 2023, Belkys Torres has led a mission to improve Pitt’s general learning outcomes and update gen ed requirements to reflect the many changes in academic and societal standards since the University last codified them in 2006. Her areas of focus encompass ethics, equity and inclusion, and data literacy language, among others.
“We actually had a really productive spring,” said Torres, associate vice provost for inclusive excellence in education. “Just learning, initially, thoughts from folks about what we can do better, what their questions were, and what their motivations were for supporting a project where we can streamline the general education curriculum … refresh the student learning outcomes that are tied to that curriculum, and really sort of enrich the student experience.”
The 20 listening sessions held last spring attracted about 140 faculty and 120 staff members. Although student attendance was low, the task force generated a survey for undergraduate students that brought back 3,000 responses.
“It seemed like students were more comfortable providing their feedback through an online survey,” Torres said. “We actually received a lot of valuable information that we were reviewing and organizing over the summer to share with the task force this fall.”
Listening sessions also were held at the Pitt–Bradford campus that included members of their Gen Ed Committee as well as faculty advisors and campus leaders.
“There were a few things that we learned from those engagement sessions that are driving what we're doing this semester and next semester,” she said.
For one, faculty and staff wanted more specific information about what gen ed reform would entail.
“They’re really curious to learn more about what change will look like, not only in terms of the curriculum, but also in terms of faculty workload, in terms of advising structures, in terms of student access and affordability,” Torres said. “In that request for more additional information, we've done several things.”
Those include partnering with the University Library System. With the help of Robin Kear, liaison librarian and Senate Council president, and Ashlyn Salvage, secretary of the Council of Graduate Students in Education, they created a library guide. Posted on the ULS website, the guide is meant to help faculty, staff and students to see “more holistically” the research that’s driving the task force work, Torres noted.
“What are the associations nationally that help support this effort and that are driving our thinking?” she said. “In other words, where are we going for professional enrichment and development, and how are we connecting with other higher-ed professionals who have already done this work? What does our external benchmarking looking like?”
This fall, the task force started the latter process, looking at 11 peer institutions. The chosen schools — Boston, Clemson, Ohio State and Carnegie Mellon universities among them — have already engaged in gen ed reform and come up with what Torres called “interesting models for us to consider” through a streamlined, university-wide gen ed curriculum that nurtures student creativity and innovation.
Allowing for “breadth and depth of knowledge,” the curriculum encourages faculty to continue teaching courses in their level of expertise, Torres noted, while allowing alignment with university-wide learning outcomes that students can readily identify as they search for courses.
Through three working groups, the task force has undertaken a SWOT — or strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats — analysis of each of the 11 schools.
“One working group is looking at this from the perspective of curricular design and student learning outcomes,” Torres said, with another focused on the operations and implementations perspective, and the third from the perspective of “administration oversight and assessment.”
Now meeting bi-weekly to engage in SWOT analyses of the institutions, the task force by next spring aims to create two or three models of gen ed curriculum and student-learning outcomes to share with the community for feedback.
“Our hope is that in the spring and in the summer, really throughout the calendar year 2025, we will have opportunities for faculty, students and staff to engage in this work, of looking at these specific models and giving their feedback and their opinion on which one of these would be their preference,” Torres said. “Why or why not? What elements of these models are really interesting, or they are curious about?
“What are the questions that come up for them as they look at these models in terms of operations, implementation, faculty, staff, student, engagement, etc.?” she added.
Varied outcomes
To select the peer institutions, task force members contacted Pitt’s associate deans and vice presidents of academic affairs, asking them to contribute lists of institutions they usually benchmark against for assessments and other purposes. Armed with the list at the American Association for Colleges and Universities’ annual gen ed reform meeting last summer, the task force sought out expertise from fellow attendees.
“Some of us went in person, some of us attended online, with the hopes of gauging which institutions we really should be looking at for inspiration,” Torres said.
Based on recommendations from Pitt faculty and those at the conference, task force members looked for alignment among the schools, creating a new list of institutions on which everyone agreed.
“Those are the ones that we're looking at right now for inspiration,” she said, adding that those schools are listed in the library guide, which also provides links to each institution. “Folks can see what we're looking at and what the models are like, if they're curious.”
Those schools have in common a unified gen ed program in which all students are required to engage.
“They've all really (centered on) student learning outcomes that are clear and transparent and that students and faculty and staff can understand,” she said, “so that you have a very clear sense of what the general education program, mission and vision is, and then how that helps students advance and achieve certain learning outcomes.”
For example, Penn State has had reformed gen ed requirements in place for years. “So it gives us, as a task force, the opportunity to see and to ask questions of our peers about the impact and outcomes of some of these curricula, and also talk with them about the best practices that they've adopted over time.”
“It gives us a varied sense of the outcomes and how they are measured across the different institutions that we're looking at, which is helpful,” she added.
Shannon O. Wells is a writer for the University Times. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.
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