2002-03 ANNUAL REPORT
       Preparatory Education Committee

To:  The Representative Assembly of the Davis Division of the Academic Senate

        The Preparatory Education Committee met once on April 4th and had several additional discussions by email.  Attempting to understand our charge and the new structure of the Council and its committees, we focused our attention primarily on the idea of revising our committee's charge in a way that would allow it more scope in its pedagogical monitoring duties and that would also allow the charge better to reflect changes that the Senate itself made in 1996. In this effort to learn something about the history of our committee, we were aided by Joe Kiskis and by Wendell Potter, Chair of the University Committee on Preparatory Education in 2001-2002.  We noted, specifically, that the courses that could be used to satisfy Subject A mentioned in Senate Regulation 636 go well beyond the definition of "remedial" in Senate Regulation 761. Our committee's discussions led us to question the definition of "remedial" given in the latter regulation; few theorists of writing instruction believe, today, that one can so neatly separate mechanical or "basic" writing issues from teaching complex matters involving logical operations (parallelism, for instance) as well as "correctness" in spelling and grammar. We would therefore like to ask the Council, and eventually, perhaps, members of the Academic Senate, to consider several revisions to Bylaw 121; our specific suggestions for wording changes will be on the agenda of the Council's May 28 meting.  We would also like to propose a revision, if it is deemed appropriate, to the definition of "remedial" in Senate Regulation 761--a revision which will, we believe, support the spirit of recommendations formulated in the Undergraduate Council's own forthcoming report on writing instruction at the University of California at Davis. Finally, we suggest that the Council consider either this year or at an early meeting next year revisiting Senate Regulation 2.85, concerning "Baccalaureate Credit in English Composition." Several members of our committee believe that we should award our students FTE (i.e., baccalaureate not only workload) credit for various courses with significant writing components if those courses are taken anytime in the first year of college, whether or not the student in question has passed the Subject A test or English 57.

        No-one on our committee, including the representative from the Mathematics department, saw a pressing need for changes in our handling of preparatory education in mathematics.

Respectfully submitted,

Margaret Ferguson, Chair; Janko Gravner; Kathryn McCarthy; Dina Okamoto, Ana Peluffo; Judith Welsh (AF Representative); and Shannon Mitchell (Undergraduate Student Representative)