Summaries from the Fourth Stakeholder Conference
Question 1
In what ways does the proposed Pillar of Distinction enhance the quality and distinctiveness of the Total Student Learning experience?
1. Residential Learning Communities
- Foster integrative learning.
- Build community, peer mentoring, and long-term ties to university.
- Support proposed cluster courses for new gen ed curriculum.
- Support learning beyond the classroom.
- Foster whole person, educating the mind, body, and spirit.
- Build a support structure for students and will help them thrive in an academic environment.
- Provide opportunities for greater interaction and bonds between faculty and students.
- Provide opportunities for social development/adjustment/responsibility and develop common set of skills for collaborating.
- Promote active and collaborative learning, creating a greater sense of engagement. It will help to prepare students for work on upper levels.
- Provide students with a sense of identity, ownership, confidence, and tradition.
- Provide opportunities for student leadership.
- Support the core mission of learning within a community.
- Support the learning that takes place outside of the classroom.
- Provide opportunities through theme-based learning communities for students with common interests to interact with each other and increase retention.
- Provide stability and sense of belonging through group identities as students return each year.
- Increase the private college quality of being in residence.
- Build on national successes with learning communities.
- Support the learning that takes place outside of the classroom.
- Can target real world concepts/applications through extra-curricular activities.
Learning Beyond the Classroom
- Connects theory to practice and produces well-rounded lifelong learners with breadth and depth.
- Prepares students for careers and lives of engaged civic service.
- Provides opportunities to explore personal interests and connect learning to individual experiences.
- Creates connections between majors and disciplines.
- Engages external congruencies.
- Improves self-esteem and creates a positive attitude about ability to learn.
- Inquiry makes learning more student-centered.
- Integrates many separate initiatives under one banner.
- Promotes leadership and could lead to a leadership center.
- Develops a coping mechanism for and an open mind to change and diversity of cultures/thought.
- Enhances the "liberating" quality of the liberal arts.
- Develops people skills and relationship building.
- Gives GC a real claim to distinction and would attract students who value an in-depth learning experience and have greater academic abilities.
