University Teaching & Learning 5000

Department-level Goals

I mentioned York’s Department of Political Science today as a unit that has developed a set of goals to guide their work that seem to actually capture something meaningful. If you would like to look at these goals more closely, you will find them on the Department’s Undergraduate Program webpage. Perhaps there is no significance to the order, but I find it interesting that the Department’s goals with respect to Critical Skills are described ahead of those for Political Analysis and Democratic Awareness. Another program that seems to have given a good deal of thought to describing their philosophy and goals is the School of Nursing.

I also mentioned in the class that the course goals which I placed on the UTAL 5000 Syllabus were adapted from those of one of my predecessors in directing the course. I had not yet read Ramsden’s chapter on goals when I made the revisions, so was working on my intuition as to what made sense as goals. You are welcome to have a look at the originals, compare them to my revision and then comment on whether you think I was moving in the right direction or not. I would also welcome comments on whether you think there are other goals implicit in what we have been doing that could be made explicit on the syllabus, as well as on whether there are goals that ought to be in the course but that have been missed out altogether. You will find the two sets of goals written out together here.