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Higher education institutions increasingly have gained momentum in integrating sustainability into university curricula. The purpose of this paper is to elucidate the approval, implementation and management process of the new university-wide, general education requirement in sustainability at the University of Vermont (UVM). The intent is to provide a case study to inform other institutions seeking to create similar university-wide sustainability requirements.

The authors applied a process framework focused on institutional dynamics and values to analyze UVM’s success in instituting a sustainability requirement across the curriculum. These two frameworks can provide a more general application of this case study to other institutional contexts.

The case study suggests that in the context of a diverse disciplinary and administrative environment at a university, the strategic unfolding, approval and implementation of UVM’s university-wide, general education sustainability requirement can provide a general model for other universities seeking to embed sustainability across the curriculum.

It is uncommon for research universities with multiple professional schools to offer a university-wide requirement in sustainability. This case study analyzes the creation of a sustainability requirement at UVM by using a process framework to organize the complex, multi-stakeholder activities and events that eventually resulted in a successful curricular change. Thus, it is potentially instructive for institutions seeking to integrate a learning outcomes-based sustainability requirement into a university curriculum because it is generalizable to other institutions and pushes forward our understanding of institutional change.

Heavily regulated higher education institutions may not be able to possess the autonomy to produce students who are both college and career ready. This paper aims to explore the role of the Ministry of Higher Education in Jordan in determining the content and direction of general education requirements, the historical roots of this type of intervention and its possible implications for the future of liberal arts in general education requirements.

The paper is a critical and historical reflection that combines practitioner research perspectives – the author is a university president – with reference to a single case study from a Jordanian university to demonstrate the real-life context of government intervention in general education requirements.

University education is inextricably linked with employability rather than inquiry-based disciplines that produce both intellectual development and technical skills. Jordanian universities, heavily regulated by the government, are required to allocate between 21 and 27 credit hours to general education requirements. Lost between universities that are mandated to have them and policymakers who impose them, general education requirements, as recently reformed, possess neither the ability to produce intellectual skills or career-readiness skills.

This paper highlights the importance of university autonomy in determining its approach to general education requirements to allow students to develop both career-readiness and college-readiness skills.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the reasons current or former tenured special education teachers in a Local Education Agency remain or leave their special education teaching positions through the theoretical perspectives of organizational learning and organizational culture. The paper aims to describe the influence of increased legal requirements on current or former tenured special education teacher attrition or retention by reporting their reasons for staying or leaving.

A qualitative multiple case study of two units of analysis was conducted through a constructionist epistemology. Data were collected from 40 current and former tenured special education teachers through focus groups, semi‐structured interviews, the Left Hand and Right‐Hand Column Case Method, and review of appropriate documents. The data collected were analyzed using text analysis software, content analysis, and pattern matching.

Four salient findings from the paper are: current tenured special education teachers want to be listened to and have their needs considered; current tenured special education teachers feel overwhelmed by the workload related to state assessments; current and former tenured special education teachers believe that legally‐required changes affected them in practice; and current and former tenured special education teachers perceive that time requirements for administrative tasks reduce time for student services.

Implications for praxis include organizational learning and organizational culture that encourage listening to the experience of tenured special education teachers and including them in decisions that affect them in an effort to retain them.

The paper assesses the impact of increased legal requirements on special education teacher retention and attrition.

This study aims to assess the spread of environmental literacy graduation requirements at public universities in the USA, and to highlight factors that mediate the adoption of this curriculum innovation.

The author analyzed the undergraduate general education curriculum requirements at all 549 public BA-granting higher education institutions in the USA between 2020 and 2022.

The study found that only 27 US public universities out of 540 have an environmental literacy graduation requirement, which represents 5% of universities and is substantially lower than previous estimates.

First, this study provides a more complete, more reliable and more current assessment of the graduation requirement’s presence at US tertiary institutions, and shows the number of universities that have implemented this innovation is lower than was estimated a decade ago. Second, it draws from the scholarship on the infusion of sustainability into the university curriculum to provide a comprehensive discussion of factors that mediate the pursuit and implementation of the graduation requirement. As well, it identifies factors that played a key role in one pertinent case.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how students choose their general education elective courses.

A survey was given to 12,000 undergraduate students at Utah Valley University (UVU) that asked about how they selected distribution courses to fulfill the requirements for the general education. UVU offers 113 different courses in the general education distribution area, but only six are needed to meet the requirements. Students were asked to both select all methods that they used and then to rank their selected methods. The results were analyzed using χ² methods.

“Personal interest” and “What best fit my schedule” were the top choices and where chosen as a method used by 69 and 67 percent of the students respectively. When asked to rank the methods, “Personal interest” ranked first most frequently at 32 percent and “What best fits my schedule” was ranked first by 29 percent of students. The results indicate that although personal interest is the most used method for choosing these classes, it does not dominate, and schedule remains a significant factor for students at UVU.

The data provide a look into the perceptions and attitudes of students at what is predominately a commuter school. This research provides the first step in understanding student motives in selecting elective classes.

The globalization of businesses, the increasing complexities of business transactions, and advances in information technology that are facilitating electronic commerce and communication are challenging the relevance and usefulness of traditional accounting education. This paper deals with recent changes in accounting education needed to prepare accounting students to face the challenges of the 21st Century. In addition, this paper investigates the future of the AICPA 150‐hour requirement, with emphasis on California.

Chief academic officers at four‐year institutions in the USA were surveyed electronically to examine the extent to which these institutions provide for the environmental education of students in non‐environmental majors, and to identify various approaches to increasing environmental literacy at the college level. Of the 496 responding institutions (representing a 42.3 percent response rate), 11.6 percent indicated that an “environmental literacy” course was required of all students, and 55.0 percent reported that such a course was available and countable toward the institution’s general education requirements. At least one “environmental” minor (e.g. Environmental Science, Environmental Studies) was offered at 33.7 percent of the institutions; 39 percent reported the existence of an “environmental” academic program that offered a course appropriate for non‐majors. Discusses various approaches to achieving environmental literacy at the college level and statistical differences in survey responses among Carnegie classifications, from Research to Baccalaureate; between public and private institutions; and among geographical regions.

The purpose of this essay is to comment on the philosophy of liberal education and its structure; the goal of general education and how it fulfills the goals of liberal education; and the four key elements of liberal education, including the “liberating” aspects of general education, the need for an emphasis on questions more than on answers, the meaning of a global perspective, and the connections of each of the above to extracurricular experiences and engaged citizenship.

This essay is a review of the topics of liberal and general education, their components, and their importance.

Using the design and methodology mentioned above as a way to explore the purpose, the essay reveals selected universal truths about a liberal or “liberating” undergraduate education.

The approach that is detailed can be assessed in comparison to other formulations of liberal and general education.

The framework described above suggests possibilities for redesigning liberal and general education programs so as to have a greater impact on undergraduate student learning and to foster experiential and interdisciplinary learning.

While this is a personal perspective based on many decades of senior positions in higher education, it is based not only on the author's own analysis and thinking, but also on a broad understanding of the literature about these topics.

This study aims to describe a project that aims to give students a choice to complete their general education requirements without purchasing a textbook.

In total, 26 faculty, teaching in the new general education curriculum, at Central Washington University were given stipends to eliminate expensive textbooks and use free to the student resources such as open educational resources (OER) or library resources. The data was collected on student savings and student and faculty satisfaction with the program.

Many paths were created through the general education curriculum, so a student may easily finish these requirements without purchasing a textbook. The data from this case study coincide with the literature on the subject. Faculty found it fairly easy to replace their required textbooks with pedagogically sound, free resources. Students were relieved to have some financial relief and found the resources to be good. The student’s biggest complaint was that faculty often use very small portions of expensive required textbooks.

This is a case study and the results are limited as such. This is one university and one general education curriculum. Also, if an academic library wants to replicate this case study, some funding is required.

Students struggle financially and alleviating the costs of textbooks is one-way librarians can ease that burden.

Students struggle financially and alleviating the costs of textbooks is one-way librarians can ease that burden.

There have been some case studies written about OER, where 8 or 10 courses are replaced. There are studies written about zero-textbook-cost degrees at community colleges, but this case study explores a textbook-cost-free general education program at a state university.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the visibility of learning outcomes within an academic institution permits the re‐imagining of general education as the conscious development in students of expertise that is more general than and perhaps more important than the specific outcomes of any major.

The study of expertise shows that it is a dynamic state; in any field of endeavor, experts learn differently than non‐experts. Likewise the study of students shows similar differences. Consciously developing the ability to learn well contributes greatly to becoming an expert in a specialized field.

The paper finds that explicitly attending to the progressive development of students' abilities to learn, and the application of those abilities in majors, creates a different model for general education.

Enabling explicit institutional attention to learning outcomes changes the assumed context for general education and opens up new possibilities.