Student Empowerment

Teaching & Learning Imperative: Foster Rigorous Exploration


Strategic Recommendation: Empower students to explore their areas of study with rigor by ensuring opportunities for initiative, ingenuity, risk-taking perseverance, project ownership, collaboration and communication.

  • Study implications of minors as a pathway to diversify areas of study.
  • Create a catalogue of campus spaces that do or could function as “co-laboratories” supporting discipline-transcending innovation.
  • Create new physical spaces for flexible collaboration that serve certificates, applied learning projects and other trans-disciplinary efforts.
  • Reward students with revised scholarship criteria, based on engagement in rigorous projects rather than on GPA.
  • Examine ways to assess rigorous exploration as an element of course-based instruction.
  • Create opportunities for students to learn from lifelong learners by funding faculty and staff to take a class as part of their regular workload every sixth semester. Reduce barriers in the employee tuition program to facilitate lifelong learning.