Diversity, Learning, and Inclusive Excellence:
Accelerating and Assessing Progress
Network for Academic Renewal Conference
October 16-18, 2008
Long Beach, California
Also register for the Core Commitments Symposium (October 15-16)
"Taking Seriously the Perspectives of Others
as a Core Institutional Commitment"
About the Conference
Diversity, Learning, and Inclusive Excellence: Accelerating and Assessing Progress will highlight curricular, co-curricular, and institutional models that enable higher education leaders to develop, implement, assess, and continually learn from the experience of fostering diverse learning environments—environments in which all students develop, in increasingly sophisticated ways, critical knowledge, skills, and capacities for work and citizenship.
The conference aims to help campuses take diversity efforts to the next level of comprehensive, coordinated action, where educational benefits for all students and for the institution more broadly, can be demonstrated in meaningful ways. Campus leaders have too frequently marked progress by a proliferation of projects that lack connection to one another, to larger institutional goals, or to other campus activities. In this new conceptualization, progress is marked by a move from isolated programs and course offerings to a network of policies and actions, including policies and actions around assessment.
Diversity, Learning, and Inclusive Excellence: Accelerating and Assessing Progress will investigate ways to establish diversity as an institutional resource for helping students achieve a set of outcomes that employers and educational leaders have deemed “essential” for work and citizenship in the twenty-first century—cross-disciplinary knowledge, advanced intellectual and practical skills, an active sense of personal agency and social responsibility, and integrative and applied learning. (See www.aacu.org/advocacy/leap/index.cfm for more information on the essential outcomes.)
The conference also will highlight effective practices and robust evaluation processes that help institutions achieve inclusive excellence—where diversity and educational quality efforts are both inextricably linked and fully embedded into the core of academic mission and institutional functioning.
To advance inclusive excellence, the conference will feature efforts to reframe notions of underserved student success to focus not only on retention and graduation, but also on the achievement of the essential outcomes. These outcomes are necessary ingredients for an informed, innovative workforce and citizenry, yet far too often, underserved students miss out on a horizon-expanding education that hones high-level skills and abilities and prepares them to become tomorrow’s leaders.
For more information, please call 202.387.3760 or write to network@aacu.org.
Sponsors
Please contact the Development Office at (202) 884-7421 or e-mail Development@aacu.org for information about sponsorship opportunities for this conference.
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