Program Overview

Welcome students to the university and provides a high impact educational experience for all first-year college students.

Introduce students to an academic culture, including concepts of responsible engagement, intellectual inquiry, methods, and civil discourse.

Strengthen the academic skills students need for success at the university.

Generate enthusiasm among students by articulating the educational aims and meaningfulness of the UCCS university-wide GE curriculum.

Provide initial instruction for students on GE Goals addressing: oral communication and responsibility. The purpose of oral communication is to enhance students' public speaking/presenting skills and/or extend their understanding of communication processes and skills to other contexts such as interpersonal communication, group communication, or digital, visual, and performance media. The purpose of responsibility is to alert students to the need to act in a conscientious and respectful manner towards peers, colleagues, and fellow citizens, and to make decisions about one's action that are in conformance with disciplinary, civic, and more general ethical principles. After this initial introduction and instruction, students will continue to develop these skills and understandings through their coursework.

UCCS faculty overwhelming believe that our Freshman Seminar should be molded into the Gateway Course because over the past twenty years the "gateway experience" has become a national model in the integrative learning movement. The Gateway course will communicate to students the General Education goals and competencies; so students understand what General Education is, why it is important, and what it means.

Currently, over 80% of fall freshmen take Freshman Seminar. As the program grows, strong efforts will be made to maintain class sizes under 20 students per section. Eventually, Freshman Seminar courses will also be offered during the Spring semester. The Freshman Seminar requirement will only apply to students who transfer to UCCS with fewer than 30 credit hours.
As the program grows beyond current Freshman Seminar (FS) Faculty and current FS courses, other UCCS tenured/tenured-track faculty and instructors will be encouraged to develop new FS courses. The Provost's Office is committed to fund the needed faculty off-loads (if taught on load) or overload stipends. The Center for Communication is committed to support faculty and student so they can address the public speaking/presenting goals of the Gateway course.

FS will encourage the development of rigorous college-level courses with high impact practices, and will remain open to new course ideas, enabling academic breadth and new opportunities for curricular creativity and innovation. As originally envisioned in the Freshman Seminar program, faculty will be encouraged to explore interdisciplinary and/or multidisciplinary approaches to the course topic.

JTAs (junior teaching assistants) will continue to team with faculty.

The Freshman Seminar Faculty and Director are committed to integrating into ALL FS courses these elements of the UCCS GE Goals:

Goal 1: Evaluate and Create

All Freshman Seminar Gateway courses will emphasize:

• Critical and creative thinking skills: transitioning from high school competencies to university competencies
• Information literacy/research skills: learning how to navigate the library and use online databases, university online technologies, and campus resources
• Communication skills: developing reading, writing, speaking, and listening competencies
• Specifically, Gateway courses will promote students' basic oral communication skills by including instruction on public speaking/presenting and providing an opportunity for students to experience, practice, and perform skills as well as receive feedback and performance evaluations.

Goal 2: Know and Explore

All Freshman Seminar Gateway courses will provide:

• A broad understanding of their specific course topics as it related to various disciplines and professions.

Goal 3: Act and Interact

All Freshman Seminar Gateway courses will emphasize:

• Responsibility: understanding the personal, civic, ethical, and social competencies that are required of university students (including academic professionalism and civil discourse)

Students may select from three options for their first core writing course.

• ENGL 1300 + ENGL 1305
• ENGL 1308
• ENGL 1310

The selection is made by students after learning about the courses through a process called "Directed Self-Placement." The three options are described below, but more information about the courses can be found on the website of the First-Year Rhetoric and Writing Program.

All three options meet the requirement for the first core writing requirement. Key features of the first core writing requirement are described below

Rhetoric and Writing I introduces students to academic reading and writing processes. Students develop critical reading, writing and thinking skills through class discussion, the rhetorical analysis of academic and civic texts, and the writing of documented analytical essays. Students analyze texts that were written for a variety of purposes and audiences. Emphasis is given to reading and writing processes as multiple and rhetorically diverse. Course content focuses on writing process theory and rhetorical theory and criticism-language matters-as the subject matter of rhetoric and writing as a discipline. Students explore language theory and practice through diverse frameworks: multicultural language practices; the reading and criticism of classics of American rhetoric, and issues in literacy, language and technology. The course serves two complementary purposes-to prepare writers for academic reading and writing assignments at the university level, and to introduce students to rhetoric and writing as a field of study unto itself. Signature features of the UCCS ENGL 1310 experience include: rhetoric and writing process theory; writing instruction in a computer-mediated classroom; low course caps of 19 students; extensive small group and whole class discussion, and one-on-one writing conferences for all ENGL 1310 students.

English 1410: Rhetoric and Writing II is the second course of a two-semester written communication sequence required of all UCCS students. The course focuses on academic inquiry and argument, building on the basic analytical and rhetorical proficiencies learned in ENGL 1310. Writers engage in extended inquiry, which enables them to investigate issues in their full complexity. ENGL 1410 assignments teach students how to responsibly gather, evaluate, and integrate a range of sources into their writing. Signature features of the UCCS ENGL 1410 course include the use of classical stasis theory for the rhetorical invention of arguments; foundational information literacy competencies that are integral to the research process; writing instruction in a computer- mediated classroom; low course caps of 19 students; extensive small group and whole class discussion; and one- on-one writing conferences for all ENGL 1410 students. Prer., ENGL 1310 or equivalent.

TCID 2080 and TCID 2090, offered by the program in Technical Communication and Information Design each satisfy the second writing course requirements for students in the College of Engineering and College of Business.

TCID 2080: Business & Administrative Writing is the second course of a two-semester written communication sequence required of all UCCS students. This course is for all students and especially business and science majors. The course builds upon the basic analytical and rhetorical proficiencies learned in ENGL1310 by focusing on writing, reading, and thinking skills through class discussion, analysis of business and administrative texts, and creating business documents such as proposals, reports, letters and memos, and presentations. Signature features of the UCCS TCID 2080 experience include the following: classical stasis theory; writing instruction in a computer-mediated classroom; low course caps of 19 students; extensive small group work and whole class discussion; and one-on-one writing conferences for all ENGL 2080 students. Students learn foundational information literacy competencies that are integral to the research process. Prer., ENGL 1310 or equivalent.

TCID 2090: Technical Writing & Presentation is the second course of a two-semester written communication sequence required of all UCCS students. This course is for all students and especially engineering and science majors. The course builds upon the basic analytical and rhetorical proficiencies learned in ENGL1310. The course familiarizes students with the field of technical writing and teaches them to compose technical information- both written and visual-more effectively. Signature features of the UCCS TCID 2090 experience include the following: classical stasis theory; technical writing instruction in a computer-mediated classroom with access to software tools for the design of written and visual texts; low course caps of 19 students; extensive small group work and whole class discussion; and one-on-one writing conferences for all TCID 2090 students. Students learn foundational information literacy competencies that are integral to the research process. Prer., ENGL 1310 or equivalent.

INOV 2100 - Technical Writing, Proposals, and Presentations. Technical writing course. Replaces ENGL 1410/TCID 2090/TCID 2080 for Bachelor of Innovation majors. Addresses five major types of technical writing: project reports, funding proposals, magazine and trade articles, technical reports, and journal articles. Includes peer review and critical assessments of others' writings. Prer., ENGL 1310.

The "Explore" component encompasses three courses that expose students to a breadth of disciplinary perspectives and methods. To this end, the courses that satisfy this component are meant to provide a broad level of understanding within a particular discipline. Students will be required to take 3 courses (3 credits each = total 9 credits), with each one of those courses being from a different category. This type of engagement encourages students to explore disciplinary perspectives in order to gain a breadth of knowledge. Depending on the courses selected, the credit total could exceed 9 cr. since some courses in foreign languages or natural sciences with labs are more than 3 credits each. Regardless of the credit total, student will be required to complete one course in each category.

The three categories are drawn directly from Goal 2: Know and Explore of the GE Goals. The concepts are rooted in the traditional academic divisions (arts, humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences), but expand on them to include courses offered by the professional colleges and allow more flexibility for course offerings beyond disciplinary constraints.

1. The physical and natural world courses explore dynamics of natural sciences, engineering, and geography, among other relevant fields
2. Arts, humanities, and cultures courses explore some focused aspect of these broad fields and will include options for foreign language study
3. Society, social and economic institutions, health, and human behavior courses explore aspects of social sciences disciplines, business, criminal justice, nursing, and health sciences, among other relevant fields

All courses within the campus-wide Explore Curriculum will also be asked to adhere to some general guidelines based on their specific "category" in order to ensure breadth of experiences, approaches, and methods. Guidelines are meant to introduce the learner to how knowledge/skills are acquired within the field and to find ways to apply these to the undergraduate learning experience as a whole.

Guidelines for Explore Courses

Faculty overwhelmingly supported these suggested guidelines for Explore Curriculum listed below. Explore Curriculum courses could be asked to include:

Goal 1: Evaluate and Create

Courses will teach knowledge of the essential terminology, concepts, and topics of the discipline.

Courses will teach skills, concepts, analytical tools, and/or basic research methods for engaging within the field.

Courses will provide opportunities for students to practice foundational skills, such as writing, oral communication, or qualitative and/or quantitative reasoning, among other possibilities, within an applied context.

Courses will encourage students to discuss methods and directions for assessing data and claims to new knowledge.

Goal 2: Know and Explore

Courses will allow students to know and explore different disciplinary approaches, especially given that students will complete one course in each broad category.

Courses will present ways to evaluate claims to knowledge outside the discipline (interdisciplinary perspectives) using the knowledge gained within the course.

Goal 3: Act and Interact

Courses will, where appropriate, reflect the core ethical principles and responsible methods of disciplinary work.

Provide UCCS students with a common educational experience at the upper-division level that broadly expands their perspective beyond their major discipline (within or between colleges), thus clarifying the value and relevance of GE learning and skills to their future work and lives.

Engage students actively in applying and integrating knowledge, which is drawn from a range of disciplines and includes advanced-level critical and creative thinking.

Promote curricular and intellectual connections between students' GE and major coursework, while providing students an opportunity to integrate their learning, ideally beyond their disciplinary area of study, thus distinguishing the Navigate course from the major Summit experience.

These courses will have a flexible format; a set of designated courses with common elements and centered on common idea of putting knowledge into action will be offered by multiple departments and in different course structures.

All Navigate courses will center on the idea of "Knowledge In Action." Faculty from a broad range of disciplines will teach courses centered on how engagement in real world endeavors is informed by academic knowledge. These courses will underline the reality that putting ideas into action increasingly requires a broad- based understanding and an even broader ability to work with people from diverse backgrounds. The format of the classes will vary, but all will include hands-on, creative, and/or collaborative projects/activities that require students to reflect and build upon their academic and personal development.

Multiple course formats might include: interdisciplinary, project-focused, research-centered, student group projects, performance-based, field-based, internships, travel courses, service learning, weekend, or team-taught courses (across department or colleges), etc. Many current courses across UCCS departments could be re- focused, with minimal changes, to serve as Navigate courses. One intention is to encourage collaboration among students and among faculty from a range of departments and the professional schools in these courses.

Departments and/or colleges will be encouraged to offer Navigate courses proportional to their number of majors. Faculty will be encouraged to develop new hands-on, collaborative courses. In many cases, however, Navigate courses will be developed by modifying existing courses within each department to Navigate course guidelines. Optimally, Navigate courses will be open to non-majors, even if the course is offered for credit within specific majors. Students will be encouraged to take Navigate courses that push their disciplinary boundaries allowing them to apply and integrate their knowledge, beyond their focused major course of study, either within or between colleges. Flexibility and innovation will be considered in the implementation of this component to ensure the integrity of academic programs (including majors, minors, and General Education). Also, the current LAS Humanities Program is collaborating in the Navigate course discussions. Revamped HUM 3990 courses, adhering to common guidelines for all Navigate courses, will be among the options students, university-wide, can take to satisfy the Navigate requirement. As part of these efforts, the unique model of the Humanities Program will be broadened to include humanities-centered, team-taught courses across colleges and disciplines, providing new opportunities for cross-disciplinary collaboration.

Tenured/tenure-track faculty and instructors will be supported in their efforts to adapt existing courses to the Navigate guidelines as well as to develop new courses. The Provost's Office is committed to funding the additional costs associated with developing and staffing Navigate courses.

Goal 1: Evaluate and Create

Courses will explicitly link action projects with academic skills and knowledge-particularly critical and creative thinking-ideally in ways beyond standard disciplinary assignments.

Courses will have students critically reflect on the "Knowledge in Action" learning experience using appropriate communication modalities at an advanced level-reading, writing, speaking, and listening.

Goal 2: Know and Explore

Courses will be built around real world projects or applications from the broadest range of disciplines, ideally incorporating a multi-disciplinary approach.

Courses will show students how the practical application of knowledge/skills requires tapping into a range of perspectives and disciplinary approaches.

Goal 3: Act and Interact

Courses will actively engage students in applying academic knowledge more broadly to real world endeavors and contexts, encouraging their use of critical, creative, collaborative, artistic, or innovative approaches.

Courses will explore what it takes to work with different types of people, bringing different perspectives to the topic, and highlighting the relevance of several areas of the Act and Interact GE Goal.

Faculty will share the ways they personally have connected knowledge to action.

Many existing courses could be adapted as Navigate Courses.

Deliver on the promise of GE Goal 3, which is to Act and Interact. This goal states, "Students will cultivate self- awareness and understanding of their impact-locally, nationally, and globally. Students will be prepared to participate effectively in a society that encompasses diverse experiences, perspectives, and realities. GE Goal 3, specifies that students learn about "Inclusiveness," and develop "competencies for cultural responsiveness across social differences in contexts ranging from local to global."

Show students how their understandings of different social and global perspectives are relevant to their education, careers, and lives.

Build on the existing strengths and uniqueness of UCCS in education around inclusiveness-locally, nationally, and globally.

The Inclusiveness integrated requirement would further our curricular and institutional efforts as articulated in the UCCS Strategic Plan 2012-201 under three strategic plan goals:

• Foster academic programs that serve diverse communities and develop intellectually curious graduates who are globally and culturally competent.
• Substantially increase international and domestic multicultural program opportunities and the number of international students and scholars on campus to build cultural understanding and to develop the global competencies of the UCCS community.
• Build an inclusive UCCS educational community that attracts, embraces, and supports diverse students, faculty and staff to advance learning and scholarship in a multicultural world.

Departments will identity how the inclusiveness component already is/could be integrated into their major degree course content--either taught to students in one specific course, or integrated across several major degree requirements.

If having the content of Inclusiveness integrated into the major degree coursework is not a viable option, students will take a course addressing inclusiveness in their other GE or general elective courses. Many courses in the campus-wide GE curriculum (for examples, those in the Gateway, Explore curriculum, or Navigate) will address this content for those students. Integrated course content addressing inclusiveness should adhere to the guidelines explained below.

Many of the courses which currently fulfill LAS's "DOG" requirements (separate flagged courses for each: 1) D =diverse perspective; and 2) G = global awareness, would likely address this component. Due to their professional/academic accreditation standards, the College of Business, College of Education, and College of Nursing and Health Sciences currently address issues of inclusiveness in their curricula.

Tenured/tenure-track faculty and instructors will have access to educational resources to identify existing courses/ course content addressing inclusiveness and, where appropriate, to adapt existing course content or to develop new courses/ content to achieve the objectives of the Inclusiveness component. Providing leadership in inclusiveness education is already a priority identified at UCCS, and faculty in colleges across campus already have considerable experience incorporating elements of inclusiveness in the curriculum.

Integrated content or specific courses satisfying this requirement may focus on either global (international) or diverse U.S. perspectives for a significant portion of course. Ideally, courses would discuss both local and global multicultural perspectives, but the focus may be on one or the other. Inclusiveness content/concepts may be addressed in course content, required readings, course objectives, assignments or activities, among other ways.

Inclusiveness courses would significantly address at least one of the following areas:

• Instructors will explain how their course significantly prepares students "to participate effectively in a society that encompasses diverse experiences, perspectives, and realities," as stated in GE Goal 3. These courses will teach students the necessary understanding and/or competencies for effectively working with people across cultural and/or social differences.
• Instructors will explain how their course significantly addresses "inclusiveness" so students "cultivate self- awareness and understanding of their impact-locally, nationally, and globally," as stated in GE Goal 3.

These courses will include a focus on international/global/diverse perspectives and explicitly address dynamics and consequences of exclusion and inclusion. This focus could address social, cultural, political, economic, geographic, spiritual, or other diverse perspectives.

In the Spring 2012 Faculty Retreat on General Education, 94% of faculty described writing as "extremely" important for students' academic, professional, and personal lives. Almost all faculty respondents supported the integration of Writing Intensive courses, with 91% supporting inclusion of Writing Intensive courses in both Major and General Education curricular requirements. In this way, Writing Intensive (WI) courses are a response to faculty demand for greater student engagement in writing practices/opportunities.

Writing intensive (WI) classes are listed among the high impact practices that promote student engagement and learning¹. In WI designated classes, writing is embedded in the course to help students think critically about course content, practice core writing skills, develop information literacy², and gain an understanding of disciplinary specific writing conventions and ways of knowing.³ These courses help students develop competencies established in the first-year writing sequence, ENGL 1310 and ENGL 1410/2080/2090/INOV2100.

Writing Intensive courses are grounded in the following theoretical assumptions:

• Writing and thinking are interconnected recursive processes
• Writing can play an important role in students' engagement with and understanding of course material
• Writing must be practiced across contexts in order to promote transfer of learning⁴
• Writing is a process, and all aspects of the process, from invention through drafting and revision must be taught
• Writing abilities develop over time and across opportunities to write
• Writers develop when they receive meaningful feedback on their work from peers and faculty
• Writers need instruction as they develop into members of a disciplinary community⁵
• Instructors in the disciplines are best positioned to provide students instruction in disciplinary specific writing conventions

Students will be required to take 2 WI-designated courses beyond the two writing program courses (ENGL 1310 and ENGL 1410, ENGL 2080, ENGL 2090, or INOV 2100). One WI-designated course must at the upper-division level. This WI component could be integrated into courses within students' majors, general electives, or general education coursework.

Courses may be designated Writing Intensive if they meet the following criteria:

• Assign writing of at least 3000 words (approximately 12 pages) over multiple assignments and/or multiple submissions (revisions) of specific assignments (both formal and informal). Note that word count accrues across multiple submissions of an assignment. Assignments can be revised multiple times, with each revision contributing to the total word count.
• Emphasize, through course assignments and class discussions, writing as a process.
• Devote class time to discussion of genre features and writing strategies.
• Provide students with feedback about their writing, including instructor and peer review, and allow at least one opportunity to submit revisions based on feedback.
• Assess writing assignments as a major portion of course grade (at least 25-30%).

Note that WI courses provide multiple opportunities for sustained engagement in writing. As such, the WI designation is not fulfilled via a single term paper due at the end of the course. Instead, the traditional "term paper" assignment can be broken into stages and supported through class discussion, peer review opportunities, and drafting. The Writing across the Curriculum director provides group seminars and individual consultations for faculty members who are revising courses to allow for more student writing and/or a process approach to composing.

The Writing across the Curriculum advisory committee, comprised of faculty across disciplines, will work with the Writing across the Curriculum director to review syllabi from faculty seeking Writing Intensive course designation. Once a course has been granted Writing Intensive status, faculty will need to resubmit syllabi materials regularly to reestablish the designation.

Course Caps

Writing Intensive courses could vary in size depending on the instructor, course requirements, and the available writing support. Generally, class size should be taken into account in order to allow time for instructor feedback on drafts of student writing as well as to promote the type of peer interactions that support students writing processes.

Writing Fellows

Writing Intensive courses are eligible for instructional support via a Writing Fellow, contingent on funding. Writing Fellows are advanced undergraduate or graduate students who have received special training to support students' composing, reviewing, and revising processes. They may conference with students, provide written feedback on students' drafts, and give some classroom instruction around the writing process.

Writing Center

The Writing Center will continue to offer broad instructional support to students. Support from the Writing Center is highly accessible to students and includes extended evening hours during the week and availability on Saturdays. In addition, writing consultations are available via a variety of formats, including synchronous and asynchronous web as well as in-person sessions. The Writing Center also offers in-class workshops for instructors and students.

Faculty Support

Faculty interested in teaching WI courses may receive stipends for professional development via Writing across the Curriculum faculty seminars. These seminars support faculty as they work to design and scaffold meaningful writing assignments and provide students with useful feedback and assessment. In addition to offering these seminars, the Writing across the Curriculum director is also available to meet individually with faculty members working to revise or develop course materials. On a departmental level, the Writing across the Curriculum Director will work with departments to identify WI course designates.

Information Literacy Instruction

Where appropriate, Library faculty will partner with teaching faculty to teach discipline-specific research strategies and concepts that help students identify, evaluate, locate, and use information effectively and ethically. Subject librarians also offer individual research consultations for students by appointment.

Writing Intensive courses encourage writing throughout GE and the disciplines and approach writing intentionally, emphasizing the practice of the discipline across multiple contexts. As such, Writing Intensive courses provide coherence throughout the degree and interconnections between GE and the disciplines.

Goal 1: Evaluate and Create

• Writing engages our capacities to evaluate others' ideas as well as our own.
• Writing is a creative act.
• Writing prompts evaluation of sources and promotes information literacy.

Goal 2: Know and Explore

• Writing is a means for knowing and exploring knowledge, and writing can serve as an artifact of our knowledge.
• Written texts are means of creating and sharing knowledge within and among disciplines.

Goal 3: Act and Interact

• Writing helps shape our understanding of concepts and promotes deeper processing of ideas generated from reading, listening, and thinking.
• Writing can be a form of action in the world through grant proposals, op ed pieces, policy statements, and articles.
• Writing is a medium through which we interact and engage with our communities.

¹Kuh, George. High-Impact Education Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter. American Association of Colleges and Universities (2008).
² Galvin, Jeanne. Information Literacy and Integrative Learning. College and Undergraduate Libraries 13.3. (2008).
³ Farris, Christine and Raymond Smith. Writing Intensive Courses: Tools for Curricular Change. Writing across the Curriculum: Tools for Curricular Change (1992).
⁴ Anson, Chris M. and L. Lee Forsberg. Moving Beyond the Academic Community: Transitional Stages in Professional Writing. Written Communication 7.2 (1990).
⁵ Clark, Irene L. and Andrea Hernandez. Genre Awareness, Academic Argument, and Transferability. The WAC Journal 22 (2011).

The UCCS GE Goals approved in fall 2010 include the following:

Goal 3: Act and Interact

Students will cultivate self-awareness and understanding of their impact-locally, nationally, and globally. Students will be prepared to participate effectively in a society that encompasses diverse experiences, perspectives, and realities. This area includes [among others]:

• Sustainability-understanding the interaction between human development and the natural environment"

In order to achieve the terms of this goal, students will learn about key principles of sustainability including social equity, environmental protection, and economic development, among others. The sustainability GE goal will be achieved by integrating teaching about sustainability within discipline-specific coursework and/or other GE components, or in general elective courses.

Integrated content and/or courses will vary across disciplines and will examine the integrative nature of the sustainability concept to their disciplinary work. Ideally, students will gain knowledge about how to promote sustainability in their community and/or place of employment (e.g. support diversity, environmental activities such as recycling, reduction of waste, etc.).

An integrated Sustainability requirement will contribute to fulfilling UCCS' GE goals, as well as the UCCS Strategic Plan Goal 2, which aims to: "Provide excellence in leadership and execution of economic, environmental and social sustainability." Sustainability-related commitments already approved at UCCS include the American College and University Presidents' Climate Commitment (ACUPCC) and the Sustainability Strategic Plan (2012). The latter includes action items that can help inform the campus-wide General Education curriculum: a) to foster campus stewardship to minimize environmental impact and nurture a sense of place; and b) to provide exceptional education in sustainability and encourage experiential opportunities.

Departments will identity how the Sustainability component already is/could be integrated into their major degree course content--either taught to students in one specific course, or integrated across several major degree requirements.

If having the content of Sustainability integrated into the major degree coursework is not a viable option, students will take a course addressing sustainability in their other GE or general elective courses. Many courses in the campus-wide GE curriculum (for examples, those in the Gateway, Explore curriculum, or Navigate) will address this content for those students. Integrated course content or courses addressing sustainability should adhere to the guidelines explained below.

Tenured/tenure-track faculty and instructors will have access to educational resources to identify existing courses/ course content addressing sustainability and, where appropriate, to adapt existing course content or to develop new courses/ content to achieve the objectives of the Sustainability component. Providing leadership in sustainability education is already a priority identified at UCCS, and faculty in colleges across campus already have considerable experience incorporating elements of sustainability in the curriculum.

Course content/ courses satisfying the sustainability component will enable students to "cultivate self-awareness and understanding of their impact-locally, nationally, and globally," as stated in GE Goal 3, specifically around the concept of sustainability. Students will gain a necessary understanding and/or competencies for effectively understanding the interaction between human development and the natural environment.

Integrated content or specific courses satisfying this requirement may focus may be either sustainability-focused, with a substantial concentration on concepts of sustainability, or sustainability-related, with a significant emphasis on fostering an integrated understanding of sustainability in a discipline-specific or broader set of contexts. Sustainability content/ concepts may be addressed in course content, required readings, course objectives, assignments or activities, among other ways. Ideally, students will also learn how to apply sustainability concepts in their places of employment and other contexts beyond the classroom.

Summit Experiences provide advanced college students the opportunity to apply and integrate their knowledge and skills. Summits can ask students to demonstrate their ability to write, speak, and otherwise communicate ideas, to use knowledge, to solve problems, and to apply a variety of skills/competencies, both general and discipline-specific. Summit Experiences have been identified by the AAC&U (Association of American Colleges and Universities) as a high impact educational practice. Summits can be designed in a variety of ways. Regardless of the form of a Summit Experience, the demonstrative student outcome integrates knowledge from discipline specific and general education courses in a unique way. The Summit Experience allows students to synthesize skill development at the culmination of their undergraduate education. According to the National Survey of Student Engagement (2011), 50% of incoming freshmen expect to complete a culminating experience such as a Summit project. In addition, Summit Experiences include transfer students in UCCS's signature general education experience.

At UCCS, 20 out of the 27 undergraduate degree programs offer a Summit Experience (Switzer, High Impact Practices, UCCS, 2010). Each department will retain full control over the Summit experience for their major, whether it is a course or some other format. For majors without a Summit, the campus-wide GE curriculum encourages each department to develop a Summit Experience for their majors, based on departmental needs and disciplinary approaches. The department can frame the Summit Experience within an existing set of upper- division courses through the addition or retooling of a specific assignment or a project such as disciplinary portfolio, performance/installation, final reflective paper, case study presentation, service learning project, travel or immersion experiences, specific work preparation experience/certification, senior thesis, or even a designated senior seminar. The Summit Experience can be individual or group-project based. Summit does not need to be a separate course. It is an identifiable experience that can range, based on department needs, from 0-3 credits that are offered within a student's major degree.

In 2012, the GE Taskforce administered a survey to explore how current Summit programs are administered, to understand what has led some programs to drop Summit experiences from their curriculum, and to identify how current and potential Summit experiences can help connect students to both discipline-specific and general education goals. From this research, we found significant support behind the value of the Summit Experience. Of those who responded to the survey, 81% identified a Summit Experience as valuable for their specific program. Further, many of the barriers identified by survey respondents to implementing a Summit Experience stem from a narrow conception of a course-based Summit. To overcome these barriers, UCCS must embrace the variety of Summit styles already utilized by a variety of disciplines that focus on how students can demonstrate learning through an experience rather than course. (see Table 1).

The inclusion of a Summit Experience encourages students to bridge general education goals with discipline objectives, allowing all UCCS students to point to an enriching and culminating experience to their undergraduate education. A unique opportunity communicated by survey respondents is the desire to engage in Summit development with additional support from the University. The campus-wide GE curriculum may serve as the vehicle that takes advantage of this faculty interest.

Table 1. Faculty assessment of the Reasonableness of including the assessment of GE goals in a Summit.

Summit experiences will remain fully under the control of the major program. As suggested by the graph above, the current Summit experiences in many programs address several GE Goals.

Departments will be supported in their efforts to further identify and instruct their majors in core aspects of the GE Goals delivered in the Summit, such as explicit discussions of critical and/or creative thinking and or qualitative and quantitative reasoning. Departments will be encouraged to review the core ethical principles of their disciplinary work in the Summit.

Ideally, Summit experiences will encourage general communication skills development, related to public speaking/presenting, interpersonal (one to one) and/or group communication, or digital, visual, and performance media. At the discretion of the Summit faculty, students' communication skills could be developed by providing an opportunity for students to experience, practice, and perform the communication skill and to receive feedback.

Some examples of how communication skills could be included in the Summit experience are:

• Public speaking/presenting: Students present a speech and receive feedback regarding their presentation skills.
• Interpersonal (one to one) and/or group activities: Students participate in a group and/or interpersonal interaction related to their studies in the discipline and the Summit experience.
• Digital, visual, and performance media: Students engage in an activity to demonstrate their understanding of the role and impact of media and technology on communication in their discipline.