From the Office of the Provost
Episode 11: Checking in on General Education Reform at Pitt
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Joseph McCarthy: Hello. Welcome to “From the Office of the Provost,” a podcast that highlights exciting activities and initiatives in the Office of the Provost or University wide that bolster and enhance our collective vision for growth and transformation.
I'm your host, Provost Joe McCarthy, and today I'm joined by Belkys Torres, Associate Vice Provost for Inclusive Excellence in Education.
Belkys joined the Office of the Provost in January of 2023—after serving as the Executive Director of Global Engagement at the University Center for International Studies—to lead efforts in increasing educational equity. She heads the General Education Task Force, which is working to reshape the University's general education curriculum.
You may recognize her voice from a previous episode where we discussed the introduction of this initiative. She's made a lot of progress so far, so I'm excited to have her back to discuss the current state of the Gen Ed Reform Project here at Pitt.
Welcome, Belkys.
Belkys Torres: Thanks. It's good to be back, Joe.
McCarthy: So last time we discussed the state of general education at Pitt. At present, as I'm sure we'll hear, all six first-year admitting schools and three campuses adopt their own gen ed requirements, and there tends to be limited connections between these different curriculum.
Through the work of the task force, we aim to respond to and prepare our students without increased financial burden or time to degree.
Belkys, can you share more about your vision for the Gen Ed Reform Project?
Torres: Absolutely. I'll start by reminding everyone that this is definitely a key initiative in the Plan for Pitt to cultivate student success.
And so, our aim as a task force is to design general education as a purposeful program with a beginning and an end, while inviting students to understand, explain and showcase the value of a liberal arts education.
So, the task force is imagining a program that's founded upon four major principles.
First, we're committed to enhancing student agency. That means we are trying to design a program where students actually get to choose intellectual pathways that complement learning in their chosen majors and minors.
Second, we recognize the challenges in preparing. Students to thrive in the 21st century professional environments and industries that may not even exist at the moment. So it's also crucial that our offerings teach students the skills, attitudes, knowledge, and awareness that helps them remain flexible and agile in a rapidly changing world.
The third principle that's guiding our work is really inspired by students who confess that many times they're not entirely sure why they're required to complete the courses that our faculty know are critical to their advanced learning in the major.
So, we're considering a more connected and scaffolded approach to student learning that includes moments of intentional reflection on the value of taking courses across varied and broad curricula.
This will entail continued collaboration across schools and disciplines so that students don't miss opportunities to connect prior learning with assignments and activities in upper division courses as they progress through their general education.
Finally, we're also getting creative and leaning into what makes the Pitt experience unique.
We're a place where students remain at the center of our work as an R1 institution, so everyone in our community agrees our students are not only creative and high achieving, but also intellectually curious and seeking opportunities to curate their own learning.
So, we aim to create a program that supports students experiential learning and also offers reliable advising so that students can curate their own pathways to multiple majors and minors across disciplines and schools without adding time to degree completion.
McCarthy: You know, I completely agree. Our students are amazing, and it's great that we're leaning into that and and letting them to, you know, allowing them to explore their creativity.
This is a big project though, as you might imagine, and I understand that you've broken it into a couple of phases.
Can you run us through where we are right now and what that timeline looks like?
Torres: Absolutely so this project entails all of our schools on the Pittsburgh campus as well as our regional campuses.
And so our priority has been to develop a general education program with goals that are measurable and transparent with achievable timelines and that show our foundational liberal arts education and how that aligns with Pitt values.
So, because we are so large and decentralized, the task force has deliberately taken time to work in consultation with colleagues and students across all campuses.
So last year in December, we completed Phase 1 of this project after spending the year engaging with all of our community, benchmarking our peer institutions, reviewing that data and researching options that would meet our guiding principles for general education reform.
Since early January of this year, we've been working on Phase 2. Here we are designing and analyzing models, testing scenarios, proposing student learning outcomes, and mapping curricular options, and our hope is to keep working through this process with our thought partners this summer and then start to share out ideas with faculty, staff, students and leadership for comment in the fall.
Hopefully, then, in 2026, we'll begin Phase 3, which is the phase where we'll revise proposals based on leadership and and community comments. We'll finalize plans for the new curriculum, seek formal approvals, and then work through operational needs before we start the pilot phase of the project.
McCarthy: You know, as you said earlier, this is really about what makes Pitt unique and it's sort of a co-created exercise, so it's not surprising in Phase 1 that you mentioned engagement as a critical part of that phase where in that step you spoke with students and faculty and staff.
Can you give us some of the takeaways that you got from that step?
Torres: Absolutely. You know, we hosted over 20 listening sessions—some happened in person, some happened online—to engage hundreds of faculty, staff, students and engage their initial impressions on developing what would be a Pitt-wide student learning set of outcomes and tying them to a streamlined general education curriculum.
We also visited the Bradford campus to gain their insights and have been connected with other regional campuses as well.
I want to take a moment to thank all of our colleagues for inviting us in, for joining the conversations, especially the folks at the UTimes who have been really great at sharing stories of our progress with the rest of the community.
So, one way or another, you've been hearing about this project over the last year or so.
In addition to that, we sought student input in other ways beyond the listening sessions. We administered a Pitt-wide student survey that reached over 3,000 of our students across all campuses and included a wild card question in the last SERU survey that went out to our students last year.
So, based on what we heard in the listening sessions and what we read in those surveys, we learned that many of our stakeholders really wanted more information about possible curricular models that would then serve as a starting point for them to provide more detailed feedback.
And so we listened, and the first thing we did was partner with Robin Kear of the Hillman Library and along with our graduate student, Ashlyn Salvage, created a comprehensive library guide that's now available on our website.
That library guide creates a listing of all of the published research that's guiding our work, the national associations that support student success and general education reform, and the peers who have already undergone general education reform, and from whom we're learning.
We also learned from students that they wanted several things to be core components of our thinking. They requested better contextualized course requirements. They wanted to ensure reduced course hours so that they could spend more time in their majors and minors. They were hoping for greater course availability when enrolling in courses every semester.
We're seeking more reliable advising that could encourage more of that creativity and that curative experience that we talked about earlier. And we're really vocal about wanting more hands-on experiences. It seems students really enjoy learning by doing and are asking for more opportunities for that kind of experiential learning.
We also heard from faculty and staff who are concerned about the potential increase in workloads that comes from any curricular review, but certainly one of change at this scale. So, we're keeping all of those ideas and concerns top of mind as we continue the work.
McCarthy: No wonder this is going to take a while. In engineering, I think we call that an over constrained problem.
As you know, I often like to joke that it's sort of the Pitt way that we want to learn from our peers so that we can leapfrog over them. I noticed in the, in Phase 1 you did mention also benchmarking and so you've been looking at existing models of peer institutions to help guide what we're doing and make sure that we're that we're the best around.
Could you share a little bit about what you've learned from the peers?
Torres: Sure. You know, we looked at 12 peer institutions and and we gathered that information at the recommendation of Faculty Senate as well as our associate deans and vice presidents of academic affairs at our regional campuses, as well as some of our national organizations. And while we found that all institutions designed their general education differently to meet state and accreditation requirements, we did identify some interesting trends that may serve us well here.
The first is that our peers are really recentering the philosophy of their general education program to focus on student learning goals and outcomes, then mapping curricular options to those stated goals. This should help us clearly articulate the value proposition of a liberal arts education for all undergraduates, while signaling the skills, knowledge, attitudes, and abilities that students will gain through coursework and co-curricular experiences.
Another trend in unifying general education is that many of our peers are better able to design and implement holistic assessment and periodic review of students' foundational learning tied to those stated goals and outcomes. So, there's an opportunity for us to really think carefully about our assessment approach to general education moving forward.
A final lesson is that most institutions have gotten really creative with gen ed reform and showcased a unique facet of their institution when creating and even naming their gen ed programs. And so this inspires us to also ask how we might learn from our peers but also innovate and improve upon those approaches.
This is the really interesting and creative part of the work ahead and we're really excited about.
McCarthy: As always, we want to make sure that we can stay up to date. So, can you tell us how we can stay up to date with the initiative?
Torres: Absolutely. A few things that folks should know.
First, every school and campus has one or more representatives on the General Education Task Force. You can find them on our website, and they're definitely your point of contact, so please feel free to reach out to them with questions and feedback as we move on with our project.
If you look at our website, the library guide that I referenced, but also PowerPoint presentations that capture summaries of our findings so far and conversations that we've had and presentations we've delivered to Faculty Senate for example, are also available on our site on the Additional Resources page. And finally, you can always reach us via e-mail at generaled@pitt.edu.
McCarthy: Excellent. Well, thank you, Belkys. I appreciate you joining me today and sharing the great work that you, the task force, and really the entire University community are realizing in this project.
And as always, thank you listeners for tuning in. I’m Provost Joe McCarthy and this has been “From the Office of the Provost.”
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