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Institutional Information Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts is a small public liberal arts college located in the beautiful Berkshires of Western Massachuetts. We offer an array of undergraduate programs and additionally graduate programs in education, reflecting our 110-year history beginning as a normal teachers college. We have 1450 undergraduate students and 350 graduate students taught by 80 full-time and 30 adjunct faculty members.
MCLA's website
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Other Activities The institution is 3 years into implementation of an integrated core curriculum. This has been a challenge for an institution that has a substantial non-traditional student population and that also serves a transfer population. With minor adjustments to the original format, the program is continuing to evolve, with many successes in the integrative components. Below are links to the Core program and to presentation the Team made to the campus community regarding the ILP program.
Core Curriculum at MCLA
Campus Presentation on ILP
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Project Objective and Timeline MCLA's project is to develop objectives, assessment methods, and courses for the upper level integrated capstone course for our developmental core curriculum. By the end of the project in 2006, we hope to have developed a number of capstone core curriculum courses that engender the goals and spirit of integrated learning. Please take a look at our action plan for details of where we plan to focus our efforts for the next two years.
MCLA ILP Action Plan
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Resources The transition to an integrated core curriculum has been a 10-year process here at MCLA. Through that process we've studied many institutions that lead the way in integrated learning - Evergreen, Alverno, Kings to name a few. We've also been well-served by the AAC&U conferences on liberal learning; the format of our current core curriculum was developed on a napkin one evening at one of these conferences. Lack of resources as we faced severe budget cuts the last few years have made it difficult for us to implement the capstone course. The ILP project has provided us with the impetus to complete development of the capstone level and implement it in the near future. We already know what our greatest resources will be during the duration of the project - the members of the nine other teams and the staff of Carnegie Foundation and AAC&U. The first two meetings have created wonderful intellectual exchanges that will only become richer as we move through the project. As we find specific references we will add them to this website.
Objectives developed at July 04 workshop
AACU Presentation of MCLA Core Curriculum
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Left to right: Nancy Ovitsky, Jim May, Adrienne Wootters
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Team Our team includes Nancy Ovitsky, Team Leader, Chair of Business Administration & Economics Department and Acting Chair of Computer Science Department; Jim May, Chair of the Psychology Department and Chair of the Professional Development Committee; and Adrienne Wootters, Assistant Professor in Physics, also involved in the SENCER project and working with local math and science teachers in a Pipeline project. We work hard and have fun doing it!
SENCER project
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