General Education Program

Jeffrey W. Coker, Director

General Education Council
Sarah Adams, Madeline Bridges, Jimmy Davis, Larry German, Larry Wacholtz, Steve Guthrie, Jane Shelby, Andrea Stover, Lori McGrew, Tommy Wooten

Vision:

The diverse educational communities of a comprehensive university have a common interest in liberal learning. Liberal learning nurtures each student’s capability for transforming human culture and complements professional and vocational pathways. Liberal education involves acquiring fundamental intellectual skills; becoming conversant with a variety of human ideas, cultural perspectives, and conceptual frameworks; and developing habits of ethical reflecting and acting in an interdependent world. This vision of General Education enables Belmont University to achieve its vision to be a premier teaching university, bringing together the best of liberal arts and professional education in a Christian community of learning and service.

Purpose:

General Education at Belmont University fosters the skills, knowledge, perspectives, values, and dispositions that will enable students to apply their understandings and abilities beyond the classroom, encouraging them to become responsibly engaged in their community and in the world.

Values:

These values will be infused throughout the courses in the General Education curriculum and pursued through a wide variety of active learning experiences, all of which seek to meet the learning goals delineated below:

1. The importance of life-long intellectual growth and development;
2. The importance of moral values and personal commitments;
3. The importance of the application of classroom learning to the "real world";
4. The importance of extending the boundaries of learning beyond the classroom.

Learning Goals:

1. General Education seeks to help students develop sophisticated rhetorical skills, with particular emphasis on written and oral language, including:
2. • Effective writing
   • Effective speaking
   • Recognizing, evaluating and constructing written arguments
   • Recognizing, evaluating and constructing oral arguments
   • Recognizing and evaluating visual images and other forms of non-language-based communication
   • Effective use of technology.
     
3. General Education seeks to help students develop sophisticated critical thinking (inquiry, reflection, and analysis) skills, including:
4. • Quantitative reasoning
   • Critical reading and reflection
   • Engaging and solving complex problems
   • Understanding systems and relationships, including interdependencies and interconnections.
     
5. General Education seeks to help students develop an understanding and enriched appreciation of the arts, humanities, religion, social sciences, and natural sciences, by focusing on both the conceptual frameworks and the diverse achievements in these areas.
   
6. General Education seeks to help students develop an understanding of the complex nature of the world and become responsibly engaged with that larger whole, including:
7. • Local, national, international, and global perspectives
   • Multiculturalism
   • The consequences of individual decisions in an interdependent world