Self-study needs you!
After two years of campus-wide input and meetings, the self-study phase of Skidmore’s 10-year reaccreditation review by the Middle States Commission is nearly complete. For the next phase, a team of evaluators will visit campus March 6 through 9. The College community is encouraged to attend the closing meeting with the evaluators at 10 a.m. Wednesday, March 9, in Gannett Auditorium, where they will announce their findings.
While on campus the team will meet with various groups of students, faculty, and staff. To help in preparing for these meetings, the self-study report, preceded by an executive summary, has been posted here.
Dean of the Faculty Beau Breslin is co-chair of the self-study process, with Professor Sarah Goodwin, Skidmore’s faculty assessment coordinator. They have worked closely with a steering committee from across the campus, and five working groups drafted the reports on which the self-study report was based. Noting its special focus on integrative learning, Goodwin says, “The self-study pulls together invaluable information and analysis that will remain useful for our curriculum reform and strategic planning processes.”
The report explains that Skidmore’s concept of integrative learning refers to the ways students integrate their learning from different sources into coherent wholes. A fundamental liberal arts value, it encompasses “students’ learning across disciplinary boundaries, across time as they progress through their education, across the boundaries that traditionally separate the curriculum and the cocurriculum, and across the border between the campus and the world beyond.” The report notes that such learning incorporates “reflection and self-awareness that help to prepare students for their intellectual, professional, civic, and personal lives after college.”
In short, the goal is for students “to draw connections among their disparate ‘Aha!’ moments and create for themselves a coherent understanding of their education.”
The self-study evaluates pedagogies, facilities, and other resources to further this goal, and Goodwin says, “We take pride in the way our self-study leans into the data,” even when they suggest areas in need of improvement. For one example, the report admits uncertainty as to “what our students are actually learning about intercultural understanding, communicating across differences, and theoretical and practical relationships between power and identity.” The Skidmore team, as Goodwin puts it, “takes the process seriously, to make it work for us. None of it is polishing up the brass handles.” In fact, she calls the self-study itself a good example of the integrative learning process.
More information about this year’s Middle States process is here.
