Guiding Principles - School of Professional & Continuing Studies

What We Mean

SPCS affirms that the critical, ethical and global values of the liberal arts enable meaningful learning and growth take place. Our liberal arts approach brings together theoretical insights with real-world applications. We emphasize critical thinking, including encouraging students to actively engage with subject matter in real, meaningful and concrete ways and to question assumptions, biases and ethical implications. It’s through this process of critical engagement that learners grow in intellectual and personal terms.

The liberal arts emphasize flexibility, problem solving and collaboration, each of which are key to thriving in the increasingly globalized world. These are also attributes necessary across career fields and academic disciplines. Oral and written communication skills are interwoven throughout the liberal arts, and we take seriously the need to provide extensive opportunities for students to apply those skills in a variety of settings for a variety of purposes. Our approach emphasizes the importance of information and quantitative literacy and analysis in order to thrive in our changing, increasingly technological and intercultural world.

What It Looks Like

We offer these as examples of integrating Guiding Principle 1 in the classroom, but recognize there are many additional ways to integrate the values of a liberal arts education in teaching and learning.

Active and engaging coursework and learning opportunities where students take an active role in co-creating knowledge. Students are fully engaged in class assignments, group discussion, collaborative work, making personal connections to the course content. 

Relevance of course content to career aspirations and real-world application may include guest speakers who are leaders in their field and research on issues impacting the community as well as the student personally. 

Cooperative learning with classmates that leads to critical thinking may include group work on co-selected and impactful research topics and presentations along with collaboration on practical solutions to real-world problems. 

Student independence and choice may include student selection of project-based learning topics, formats and genres of presentations and performance-based products along with and development of authentic portfolios where students select exemplars of their learning. 

Engagement in deep and reflective inquiry may include research papers, presentations, performance-based products, projects, real-world solutions in the field and reflective writing.

Experiential, integrated and hands-on environments may include observing collecting and connecting examples in one’s community, neighborhood, and home to course content and student-created projects. 

Authentic learning communities where learning is social and collaborative may include group discussion, group projects, group presentations, group research and group performative products.

Appeal to multiple learning modalities, styles and approaches may include the use of video, music, movement, hands-on, verbal, visual, digital, and other elements across a course’s content and delivery choices.

Appreciation of diversity may include general attitudes towards student differences as normal and desirable; flexibility for student choices in assignments, products, and readings; selective groupings to expand cultural competency opportunities for students; encouraging differences of position and opinion; and taking into account student differences when creating course content and assignments. 

Ethical reasoning components may include ethical components to research projects, reflective writing with prompts that encourage ethical and normative aspects of course content, critical questioning of the status quo, social justice issues and structural barriers in society, lively debate over contentious issues, and opportunities to bring in student experiences as examples of ethical scenarios and real-world issues.

Intercultural and global competency elements may include collaboration with students, guest speakers, and practitioners from different geographic, socio-economic, cultural, social, linguistic and political perspectives; exploration of topical issues unfamiliar to students; opportunities to co-construct knowledge with a diverse group of learners; and opportunities to communicate worldwide with digital platforms in authentic dialogue.

Civic engagement may include collaboration, volunteering or other engagement with community members, civil society organizations and practitioners, government leaders and officials, and other stakeholders in an authentic manner.