Classes have started back up at Carleton, but there’s one notable change to many student’s schedules: the PE curriculum has been altered significantly.
The wide variety of PE courses taught by Carleton students have been almost entirely canceled, though some classes now have student assistants helping teach and faculty in charge, rather than being entirely student-led (some of these classes include rock climbing, juggling, Afrofit, and Nordic skiing). The total number of PE courses offered in the fall has decreased from 26 in 2023 to 16 this year (not including club or varsity sports that provide PE credit).
Additionally, instead of a large majority of PE classes taking place outside of the normal class schedule, these classes are now being taught during normal class block times.
The Physical Education, Recreation, and Athletics (PEAR) department chair Heidi Jaynes stated that the changes were made primarily because of an external review. An external review is a typical process for all departments on campus, in which roughly every ten years, a committee overseen by the Provost and the Education and Curriculum is formed. According to the Carleton website, this committee “offers a comparative perspective and assesses the overall shape and quality of the department and program and proposes suggestions for shaping its future.”
Jaynes explained, “We agreed that we wanted to make curricular changes such as adding more variety of classes taught by PEAR faculty and staff, supporting the late afternoon time slots for student wellness and extracurricular activities, partnering with the Dance department on more classes and removing student-led classes that no longer align with our policies around attendance, grading, supervision, and assessments.”
Regarding the changes to PE class schedules, Jaynes explained that the changes were made “in order to support times for extracurricular activities such as athletics, dance, theater, music and club sports. We have classes between 8 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. so that our PEAR faculty and staff can also shift to teaching their varsity sport teams during their afternoon/evening practices and competitions.”
One student who took Beginning West Coast Swing in the spring of 2024, a student-taught class that has since been canceled, Colin Willette ’27, feels disappointed by the changes made.
“I had a fun time in the class I took, and I feel like a really big part of that was the relaxed atmosphere the student instructors created.” Had the classes continued to be offered, Willette feels he would have taken more. “Obviously I have to keep taking PE classes because of the graduation requirement, but I think I would have gravitated towards the student-led classes.”
He also voiced concerns about the schedule changes, noting that “it’s already hard enough to schedule classes without overlap in a way that doesn’t create a crazy schedule, and now we have to worry about PE on top of that.”
The cancellation of student-instructed classes has been particularly impactful on those who relied on teaching the classes for their tuition. Carolina Cabanela ’25, who taught social dance, was one of those affected.
There were about eight students in charge of teaching Social Dance I, Social Dance I Accelerated, and Social Dance II, with two or three instructors per class. Cabanela taught one term of each class in the 2023-2024 school year and was expecting to teach again this fall.
However, “on a Friday in early May, all eight of us got an email that said, ‘We’re so sorry, but we will have to cancel Social II this term, and we will also be canceling Social I Accelerated. We are keeping Social I, though, so you pick one of the eight of you to teach the class next term,” Cabanela explained. They gave the eight students four to five hours to decide one of them that would instruct Social I.
“A lot of us use this towards tuition, almost all of us have jobs that we use to fund tuition, so it’s kinda scary, especially in May after all of the other places have finished their applications. So it was like, ‘aw man, we might be losing our jobs,’ which is scary.”
The student instructors negotiated with PEAR to allow for two student instructors along with the faculty member supervising the class, because social dance requires both a follower and a leader and the faculty member would not be a dancer.
Cabanela was selected to be one of the instructors for Social Dance I. She was disappointed in the class cancellations, but thought, “At least we kept Social Dance I, we’ll go with it.”
The school year ended without Cabanela receiving any updates on the class, but then Cabanela was surprised with more bad news. “I was at lunch and one of my friends showed me a screenshot of an email on her phone, and it said, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, your social dance class has been canceled, please pick another PE class.’ And I thought to myself, that’s weird because I did not get an email about this.”
Cabanela contacted Jaynes and found out that the class had been canceled due to low attendance. The class had seven students enrolled, and the incoming freshmen had yet to register for classes. The Carleton policy for PE classes does state that “If enrollment is too low in a class, then the class may be canceled,” but it does not state the exact number of students that would be considered low enrollment.
Jaynes and Cabanela met over Zoom to discuss what happened, and Cabanela learned that all of the student-taught classes had been canceled for the fall and winter terms (except for the classes that were reformatted with student assistants and faculty supervisors or teachers).
PEAR offered to fund weekly dances for all of the dance clubs and teams at Carleton with the funds they would have spent on paying instructors, but Cabanela didn’t take them up on the offer. “I kind of just gave up after that because it was like they weren’t being honest, it didn’t feel honest, at least.”
Cabanela, who is also a captain of the ballroom dance team, has both concerns and hopes for the future of social dance at Carleton. Even if classes were to eventually return in the spring or next year, she worries that it won’t be the same. “I think, the person that I am, I will always have hope. Because I really want there to be classes. The problem is that if we go an entire year without teaching classes, all of our teachers graduate.”
In response to the disappointment voiced by students, Jaynes said, “We are grateful for the students who helped teach some classes in the past, but we have valued the experience from our external review and have made changes to better align with our PEAR mission and policies for our Carleton community.”
Nevertheless, Cabanela wants to remain hopeful about returning to teaching before she graduates in the spring. “I don’t have super high hopes about it, but we’re totally willing [to return to teaching], please! It would be great. I love teaching, I love dancing, I love teaching new dancers, I love meeting new dancers, I love that sort of stuff.”
