Making Excellence Inclusive
The Making Excellence Inclusive initiative is designed to help colleges and universities fully integrate their diversity and educational quality efforts and embed them into the core of academic mission and institutional functioning. Through this initiative, AAC&U re-envisions diversity and inclusion as a multi-layered process through which we achieve excellence in learning; research and teaching; student development; institutional functioning; local and global community engagement; workforce development; and more.
Key Definitions
Diversity: Individual differences (e.g., personality, learning styles, and life experiences) and group/social differences (e.g., race/ethnicity, class, gender, sexual orientation, country of origin, and ability as well as cultural, political, religious, or other affiliations) that can be engaged in the service of learning.
Inclusion: The active, intentional, and ongoing engagement with diversity—in people, in the curriculum, in the co-curriculum, and in communities (intellectual, social, cultural, geographical) with which individuals might connect—in ways that increase one’s awareness, content knowledge, cognitive sophistication, and empathic understanding of the complex ways individuals interact within systems and institutions.
What’s New
Expanding the Making Excellence Inclusive Initiative
The Association of American Colleges and Universities has received a grant from Lumina Foundation for Education to support its work on Making Excellence Inclusive. This new funding will support the scaling up of efforts already underway as part of AAC&U’s project, Give Students a Compass. Participating colleges and universities will build their capacity to support underserved students’ level of academic success by broadening their participation in a set of educational practices that research has shown to be effective. Both Making Excellence Inclusive and Give Students a Compass are part of AAC&U’s Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP) campaign.
Making Excellence Inclusive newsletter (forthcoming, January 2009)
The Making Excellence Inclusive newsletter will provide periodic updates on the work of the initiative and feature promising practices.
Making Excellence Inclusive is housed in the Office of Education and Institutional Renewal, led by AAC&U Vice President Alma R. Clayton-Pedersen.
|
 |
|
