When we met yesterday, here were a number of concerns. I think the most important thing is to realize that not all ‘buckets’ have to be filled with lots of courses. It is up to us in our various colleges to figure out who should have courses in what ‘bucket’ to preserve a structured set of requirements for our students and to avoid infighting among departments about who gets to have courses where. It is quite possible to require one specific course from all indigenous students at a college if that is the only course put forward for that ‘bucket’. This is evidently the logic behind EVC Logue’s response to the AATG letter when she says that [senior] colleges can require up to 6 credits of language [if they require to buckets full plus the entire college option]. Of course if this were so, one could not require much else. The important thing is to talk to other departments to make sure that we don’t go about killing each other.
Another issue is the learning outcomes. We are working on some language to establish that what we do in our language classes actually meets the learning outcomes goals of the flexible buckets. There is no need to bend ourselves into pretzels, just because some educators came up with not very carefully thought-out learning outcomes. Since FLs will be represented at the CUNY-wide committees that are supposed to approve the bucket-fillers, we should not be too pessimistic.