By: Jade Rayner
News Editor

Western Oregon University fits under the description of a liberal arts college, but as participants of the “Current Trends in Liberal Education: What’s Driving the Change?” town hall session on Thursday, May 18 learned, liberal arts education is a broad term for many different types of education systems.

Paul Hanstedt, an English professor at Roanoke College in Salem, Va., held the session in order to discuss the changes in general education over time. He challenged the professor-heavy group in attendance to look at the way other colleges organize their general education programs and envision how those systems may or may not work with Western’s curriculum.

Hanstedt prefaced his presentation saying, “part of the conversation about the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ is really important…one of the things we figured out is in order for it to make sense to students, they need to have a very clear understanding, not just of what you want them to learn, but why you want them to learn.”

He later went on to talk about the difficulties of fitting a continuously growing course load into a four-year degree plan using his English classes as an example.

“Here’s how it’s happened in the last thirty years in our field … you’d study Chaucer, you’d study Dickens, you’d study the Brontes, George Eliot. You knew who you were gonna study… Well, then suddenly we realize ‘hey, wow, there’s a bunch of other writers from other cultures, and there’s a bunch of other literatures from all over the world,’” explained Hanstedt. “So the cannon, what we need to cover has spread… now we have to think not just about what to read, but about how we read it… we can’t cover everything. We just simply can’t. It’s growing so quickly.”

Another issue that Hanstedt discussed was the way in which the workplace is changing, which then affects the way that colleges frame their degree programs, saying, “If 80 percent of the classes a student takes are within a major where the goal is content coverage and skill coverage, then if the student changes [their] field they’re in trouble.”

Using a study done by Harvard Research Associates in 2015 that states, “93 percent of employers care more about applicant’s problem solving skills, critical thinking skills and communication skills than they do about the field that the student studied in.”

Hanstedt spoke about how it can become an issue if a particular degree program focuses too much on a student’s major.

“Students have to be prepared not just for what they know, but for what they don’t know.”

Hanstedt ended his presentation by encouraging the Western professors in the room to discuss the different types of general education models, and which ones could work with Western’s program.

He left everyone with the question, “What kind of graduates do we wish to produce?”

Contact the author at journalnews@wou.edu