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The New College Contract
A liberal arts education broadens perspective, sharpens
analytical abilities, produces intellectual self-reliance, and
inculcates a love of learning for learning’s sake.
Working together, these results encourage a lifetime of
learning and personal growth, which, in turn, will enable you to
respond creatively to countless career opportunities and not merely
one. For the
liberally-educated person, not only is the career path filled with
limitless possibilities, but life itself is more interesting.
The New College faculty combines this traditional
appreciation of the liberal arts and sciences with an emphasis on
active learning and individual responsibility.
Even liberal learning is not learning if you are a passive
spectator. Consequently, your instructors strive to generate engagement,
active participation, and persistence in learning on your part –
much like the experience of being so wrapped up in a good book that
you cannot put it down. This philosophy of learning accounts for the
considerable degree of freedom and flexibility associated with the
New College academic program, exemplified by the academic contract.
New
College offers you tremendous freedom to explore and define the
liberal arts experience in your own way, always with the help and
advice of faculty mentors.
What should you be considering when making your educational
choices and designing contracts?
You should of course be considering your own interests –
indeed, the freedom to pursue your own interests, without the
pressure of numerous course requirements, is one of the most
attractive features of New College.
But you should also consider pursuing fields of study and
experiential opportunities unfamiliar to you or even difficult or
unpleasant for you. After
all, one thing a genuinely “liberal” education does is to
“liberate” you from your provincialism, your fears, and your
ignorance. In doing so,
a liberal arts education helps you to deal constructively with
ambiguity and to enter more sympathetically into the experience of
people unlike yourself – precisely the qualities that will be most
needed in the twenty-first century.
This result is less likely to occur if you always gravitate
toward what is most familiar for you.
Your first contract will be your starting point on this new academic journey.
Each term you are at New College you will work with a faculty
member (your sponsor)
to design a program of activities for that term.
The contract you develop for each term is the document that
describes the program of study you will undertake.
Instead of grades your progress at New College is measured in
terms of the goals, activities, and criteria for success established
jointly with your sponsor each semester.
While this process might at first seem unfamiliar, the New
College contract should be seen as your first step toward the active
learning and individual responsibility New College embraces. The
following pages are designed to introduce you to the life of
learning by contract. This booklet will show you how to create your
contract with your sponsor, how to amend it if necessary, and
finally, how it will be used to evaluate your progress.
Writing the New College Contract:
4 Sections
Goals:
This part of your contract gives an overview
and unifying theme to your contract. In it you should state both
short and long term goals, and if possible, indicate how your
term’s activities relate to these goals.
Your goals might specifically relate to your
career and course objectives, such as taking courses to meet
prerequisites for graduate school or medical school. Or, your goals
may reflect more personalized issues, such as challenging yourself
to participate regularly in class discussions or to work on
improving your writing skills.
(sample contract: section 1)
Educational Activities:
This section lists the specific activities you
intend to pursue to meet your academic goals.
Such activities may be any combination of courses, labs,
seminars, tutorials, field work, or special projects.
Only activities sponsored by New College faculty members and
listed in this section will appear on your transcript when they are
satisfactorily completed.
You and your sponsor will discuss your choices
as they relate to your goals. Your
sponsor will also help you make a realistic plan, often suggesting
options you may not have considered or known about.
(sample contract: section 2)
Descriptions and Other Activities:
This section is typically used to describe
projects and activities that are not undertaken for transcript credit
but which are relevant to your overall goals.
These are activities to which you will be devoting time and
energy, and which are recognized as another facet of your
educational plan, but will not be formally sponsored or evaluated.
These activities might include a part-time job, volunteer work,
attending conferences, or practicing a new skill.
If you are undertaking a special project, this
section may be used to explain the nature of that activity as well.
(sample contract: section 3)
Certification Criteria:
In this section you spell out the criteria for
satisfactory completion of the contract.
Here you and your sponsor set rigorous but reasonable
expectations for a successful term’s work. The criteria might
require all or only some of the listed activities to be
satisfactorily completed as evaluated by the individual professors
of each class. This flexibility allows you to challenge yourself
above and beyond what might seem “safe” without risking credit
for the whole term.
(sample contract: section 4)
Sample Contract 2:
Including
an Internship
Contracts can be
designed to incorporate fieldwork outside the traditional classroom.
In this example, John B.
is a fifth-term student with an area of concentration in art
history. After
establishing a foundation by taking courses and tutorials covering a
variety of periods and themes, he wanted to arrange an internship at
the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, located adjacent to the
New College campus. By
working closely with the Museum’s Curator of Art on a specially
designed project, his goal was to gain valuable research experience
as well as insight into one of the career paths available to a
graduate who pursues professional training in art history.
The internship was then arranged in consultation with his
faculty advisor, a Professor of Art History at New College, and the
Curator at the Ringling Museum.
(sample contract: with internship)
Sample Contract 3:
A Skills-Based Contract
Contracts have the flexibility to be
tailor-made to meet your individual academic goals and needs.
An alternative contract for an advanced student might reflect
academic activities designed to provide extensive experience with
specific methodologies pertinent to that student’s field of study.
The knowledge and skill mastery gained from these activities
then are the objectives of the term’s work and incorporated into
the criteria for evaluation. In
the following example, Jane X., a 7th term student, has
arranged a series of special tutorials with her sponsor in biology.
(sample contract: skills-based)
Contract Renegotiation
You and your sponsor may change your contract
up until the 12th week of the term through a process of renegotiation. This may
involve adding and/or dropping educational activities, and/or
changing the criteria for certification.
Add: If an
educational opportunity arises after you have submitted your
contract, you may still add it to the contract. List the new
activity and adjust the certification criteria accordingly.
Drop: Sometimes you
may find you have embarked on an activity that is more advanced than
you anticipated. With your sponsor’s consent you may drop the
course. This may also entail a change in certification criteria.
(sample renegotiation contract: add/drop)
Changing Criteria Only:
Because New College encourages you to challenge
yourself with new and often very difficult academic work, you may
sometimes find that you have overextended yourself. Rather than risk
credit for the whole term (or withdraw from the challenge), you and
your sponsor may decide to alter the certification criteria. This
allows the leeway for you to continue with all your courses without
being penalized if your efforts fall short.
In this case, your certification criteria would be changed to
reflect this new understanding between you and your sponsor.
(sample renegotiation contract: criteria)
Term
Evaluation
What is a “Term
Evaluation”?
At
the end of each semester you will receive a “Term Evaluation”
for each course you complete. Unlike
a letter grade, the Evaluation describes your specific strengths and
weaknesses – what you did well and what you can do better.
Instead of simply measuring you against your peers as many
grading systems do, the narrative evaluation system looks at your
work in terms of your own abilities and experience, and in terms of
your professor’s expectations.
The
Term Evaluation form contains two main sections: a summary
evaluation and a narrative section with specific comments about your
progress. The summary evaluation records one of three possible
outcomes: “Satisfactory,” should you successfully complete the
terms of your contract, “Incomplete,” should there be a need to
complete unfinished work for the semester, or “Unsatisfactory,”
should you fail to meet the terms of your contract. The narrative section contains a description of the course
plus a review of your performance in the course.
Notice
in this example that the student is a beginning literature student,
and that for such a student this is a very good effort.
A more advanced literature major might be expected to have
stronger writing skills and to contribute more actively to class
discussion, for example. The
student here is encouraged to try to take a stronger role in
directing class discussion, but is praised for consistent progress,
and for her good and interesting ideas about the works studied.
The instructor notes areas which showed improvement and areas
which need further work.
(sample evaluation)
Contract
Certification
What is a
“Contract Certification”?
At
the end of each semester your academic sponsor will complete a
Contract Certification form. This
document records whether you have successfully met the terms of your
semester contract. Moreover,
your progress toward graduation will be measured in terms of
completed contracts, rather than the traditional accrual of semester
credit hours. You will need a minimum of seven satisfactory contract
certifications to graduate from New College.
The
Contract Certification form consists of two main parts: a summary
evaluation, and a narrative section that includes detailed comments
on your semester performance. The summary evaluation records one of
three possible outcomes: “Satisfactory,” should you successfully
complete the terms of your contract, “Incomplete,” should there
be a need to complete unfinished work for the semester, or
“Unsatisfactory,” should you fail to meet the terms of your
contract. A typical
narrative for a Contract Certification contains a listing of your
educational activities for the semester, a statement of the criteria
for a successful completion of your contract, a review of your Term
Evaluations, statements reflecting your academic sponsor’s overall
impression of your work for the semester, and your academic
sponsor’s suggestions for your future course of study.
(sample certification)
In the Final Analysis…
Although
we have offered some models of possible contracts here, obviously
each contract will vary; no single typical contract will suit every
student at every point in his or her career. The New College
contract system recognizes that a liberal arts education is an
ongoing process that begins in college and continues long after you
sign your last contract with your sponsor. At the very center of the
New College experience, the contract is the key to balancing the
interplay between the “content” of a liberal arts education and
its methods or “skills.” That is, sometimes the proper
educational choice involves the mastery of a certain subject matter,
a body of knowledge that all liberally-educated people might be
expected to know, such as the history of your own country.
At other times, the proper choice involves exposure to a
methodology or a way of thinking, such as quantitative analysis,
that becomes a tool you can use in many different contexts. The
important thing is to develop the habit of reflecting on your
contract choices within the wider context of the aims of the liberal
arts experience. Moreover, you should also develop the habit of regularly
talking these issues over with your sponsor, who will be a ready
dialogue partner. In this matter, as in many others at New College,
the initiative rests with you.
Your
instructors believe that a New College education will help you to
live a life that is free, full, and productive. In the words of one
veteran faculty member, the New College approach to liberal arts
education will ideally make you a “freedom artist,” filling you
with wonder about the world in which you live, helping you to
realize your full potential, and enabling you to be genuinely useful
to the wider community in which you live. The difference your New
College education will make is the difference of a lifetime.
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