New minors reviewed

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Author: Lucy Feickert

New public health and neuroscience programs prompted by student and faculty interest are undergoing the proposal process to become minors. The education department is restructuring the current education minor to focus more on urban education.

“Since there’s already a lot of curriculum around public health it’s just a natural minor to develop, and the same is true for both the education and the neuroscience minor. So those are all moving through the pipeline,” Academic Planning Committee (APC) president Irene Girton said.

The APC is just one of a few steps that evaluates proposals for all new programs, departments, majors and minors. Proposals are also submitted to all the department chairs, the dean of students, and all the faculty. Ultimately, the president makes a decision about the proposal after it has been evaluated by the faculty and the APC, according to a document titled “Guidelines for proposing a new major, minor, program or department to APC.” A proposal might be returned to its originating department for revision at any point along the process, according to Girton.

The APC evaluates a proposal and makes a recommendation to the faculty.

“One of the things that the APC has the responsibility for that no other individual, like a department chair, has the responsibility for, is a bird’s eye view at the entire curriculum,” Girton said. “So if we look at something like the neuroscience proposal, we know, partly because we have representation from each division, and also because we review course proposals and curricula for a living, we know how such a proposal is going to impact the whole curricula.”

Public Health

The Urban and Environmental Policy (UEP) department is working to create a public health minor that will be available to all majors. There are currently classes in the UEP department around public health, and according to Program Director of the UEP Institute Heng Foong, student interest is high.

“I’ve learned that there has always been interest in public health on campus, faculty and students just needed to be brought together and we needed a common understanding/definition of public health, as well as what we wanted it to be at Oxy,” Foong said in an email.

UEP professor Jane Steinberg, who taught the first class in public health at Occidental, also sees student interest in the field is high.

“At the beginning of each semester I ask for a show of hands in my class to see who would be interested in a minor and at least half of the hands go up,” Steinberg said in an email.

Steinberg, who works for the L.A. County Department of Public Health, also notes the importance of public health workers.

“There will be a workforce shortage in the near future,” Steinberg said in an email. “There will be a need for many public health practitioners in different facets of public health – chronic disease prevention, bioterrorism, infectious diseases, food safety, etc. A minor exposes students to a broader range of public health topics which will hopefully encourage them to go into the field!”

The existence of classes already in public health prompts the easy growth of the minor program.

“Since there’s already a lot of curriculum around public health it’s just a natural minor to develop,” Girton said.

The minor is still in progress, but Foong hopes it will be soon be available to students.

“I am one of many who hope to have a public health minor implemented in the 2013-2014 academic year,” Foong said in an email. “The minor will be chaired by three departments – Biology, Kinesiology and UEP. There will be two new public health classes offered in the Spring, Epidemiology (which will be a requirement for the minor) and Environmental Health and Policy (elective). I expect there will be other new classes which will be developed over the years.”

Additionally, there are opportunities for students interested in public health beyond the classroom.

“The President’s office will fund two summer public health internships administered through UEP,” Foong said in an email. “Students will also have increased opportunity to participate in community health engagement (through the practicum class) as well as other CBPR [community based participatory research] based opportunities.”

Neuroscience

A proposed minor in neuroscience has come from professors in the departments of cognitive science, psychology and biology. According to cognitive science professor Carmel Levitan, the minor has been proposed as interdisciplinary between the departments.

“We’ve designed it so that the existing classes would configure so that they could make a minor,” Levitan said. “We thought of it as a really interdisciplinary minor.”

Currently students majoring in cognitive science or psychology can take an emphasis in neuroscience, but students outside those departments can only take the classes, according to Levitan. The minor will allow all students from any department not only to take neuroscience classes, but also to gain the recognition of their accomplishment with the label of a minor.

According to biology professor Renee Baran and Levitan, many professors at Occidental have experience doing research in neuroscience.

“We have more neuroscience people than many small colleges and that may not be apparent to prospective students,” Baran said. “So [the minor] will also, we hope, make visible both on campus and off campus the strengths that we already have at the college.”

Additionally, student interest is high in the field of neuroscience, according to Levitan, as well as general interest from those involved in the field.

Urban Education

An education minor currently exists but members of the education department are working on a proposal to update and change the minor, ultimately renaming it a minor in urban education, according to education professor and department head Ronald Solórzano.

The proposal is still in progress, and comes after a proposal of an urban education major last year, which was rejected by the APC with recommendations to work on changing the existing minor before proceeding with a major in the future, according to Girton.

“We cycled it back and made some suggestions for an alternate pathway,” Girton said.

Last year the department administered a survey to education students with about 50 percent of respondents saying they would major in urban education, and more saying they would double major, according to Solórzano.

“There are a lot of students who don’t want to go into teaching, but want to go into education,” Solórzano said. “And they want to have a breadth understanding of what the issues are and how to address them. They want to be working perhaps outside the classroom.”

For these students, many of whom are currently majoring in sociology, psychology, UEP and American studies, according to Solórzano, an urban education major would allow them to work on educational policy, not be teachers themselves.

“We have found that a lot of our students come back to us and say, ‘I’m working for a community based organization… where I’m the educational adviser or consultant to the community, a liaison to the schools in our organization,'” Solórzano said. “Other former students are working with congressmen, senators or the Board of Education as advisers or field representatives, so they’re involved in educational policy.”

Current plans for the new minor would include many of the classes offered already in the education department, such as critical race theory and education policy classes, according to Solórzano. Additionally, Solórzano said there are plans to develop a quantitative course in the department, which would provide an introduction to the evaluation of research designs and studies.

 

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