Part II. Overall statement of justification for revision
Explain, in detail, why the Department / School wants to make these changes. The explanation can include, among other things, changes in the department’s focus, changes in the field, changes in quality standards, changes in expectations regarding the qualifications of graduates, or weaknesses in the old program that the new program is designed to rectify. Some historical background and a comparative analysis with the programs of some universities will be most appropriate.
Journalism education is very suitable to General Education structure. Our existing curriculum used to be multidisciplinary and used to have a lot of Faculty core courses. With minor changes we have dropped a number of faculty core courses and replaced them with university electives. As a result, we are able to adapt the new curriculum to all of our students in a few years time.
If the adaptation process at the university goes on smoothly we plan to pass to the GE system as a whole.
NOTE: The Department of Journalism supports and complies with the spirit of the General Education and Liberal Arts Program and has as its primary goal the immediate implementation of this program not only within the framework of the Department but across the university campus although some of our members are highly suspicious of the GE program as I have discovered at the approval process of the curriculum. At this time, we have decided to assign specific “COMM” coded courses to the “GE” slots while each Department works vigorously with other Departments on campus to implement the GE program universally. Thus, while our Department has agreed to tentatively assign “COMM” coded courses to the general education slots (in Arts and Humanities and Behavioral and Social Sciences), our intention is to encourage a universal opening of courses across campus whereby Journalism students may take their elective courses in other Departments while other Departments encourage their students to satisfy one or more of their general education electives with us. We especially see relationships with Departments of Archeology and Art History, English Literature and Humanities, Music, Architecture, Computer Sciences, Business Administration, English Language Teaching, International Relations, and others, whereby students may circulate between our programs thereby enriching their university experience while satisfying the scholarly requirements for the acquisition of their university degrees.
