Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Abstract

Higher education usually reserves talk of “general education” to the undergraduate experience. When entering graduate schools, graduate students have dissimilar and diverse undergraduate experiences in general education. Some graduate students have benefit of a solidly constructed undergraduate curriculum, while others have experienced broad distribution or no requirements whatsoever. Demography, language, and their disciplinary curriculum serve to divide them. Interdisciplinary programs have students usually study within the confines of two or more disciplines, and still they would be studying and researching within their disciplinary structures. Even bi-lingual and multi-lingual students still act within their linguistic structures. Stimpson (2002) created a term “General Education for Graduate Education” recommending that some form of general education be provided (course work in her case) in graduate education. At the highest level of education, the doctorate, we wanted to know the influence of the doctoral program’s cohort structure (as a Professional Learning Community) and its related environment on the enhancement of a student’s general education. We hypothesized that the students’ cohort structure and peer-to-peer (conversations) interactions in various settings increased the presence of general education indicators.

Share

COinS
 
 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.