Educating for Personal and Social Responsibility:
Deepening Student and Campus Commitments
Network for Academic Renewal Conference
October 1-3, 2009
Minneapolis, Minnesota - Hilton Minneapolis
About the Conference
|
Carleton Wind Turbine – photo by Tom Roster |
Educating for Personal and Social Responsibility: Deepening Student and Campus Commitments will bring together faculty, student affairs educators, academic administrators, students, and others to explore how to move education for personal and social responsibility to the center of institutional culture and academic practice. The program will feature promising practices that develop students’ civic engagement and social responsibility in both a local and global context; personal and academic integrity; ability to examine and understand differing (and often competing) perspectives; and ethical and moral reasoning.
The central premise of the conference is that personal integrity and ethics cannot be developed in isolation from a commitment to and engagement with others, and that students’ ethical, civic, and moral development must be addressed as part of their basic responsibilities as learners. At a time when our nation faces ethical and civic challenges of daunting complexity, it is crucial that we return to the core commitments of personal and social responsibility inherent in liberal education.
Colleges and universities widely espouse the pursuit of excellence, integrity, and civic responsibility with their students, and many have taken active steps to address these issues on campus. Yet a gulf remains between our collective aspirations and our current practices. Despite strong agreement that education for personal and social responsibility should be a major focus of college, explorations of values, ethics, and civic responsibility frequently occur in “pockets” within the curriculum and co-curriculum and are typically undertaken by already-interested students, faculty, and student affairs staff. As part of this conference, participants will work together to consider how to take their most promising practices to the “next level” of institutional pervasiveness.
The conference is shaped by the ongoing work of the AAC&U initiative, Core Commitments: Educating Students for Personal and Social Responsibility, which calls on colleges and universities to be more explicit, purposeful, and consistent in creating environments that enhance all students’ competencies in personal and social responsibility. It is also informed by AAC&U’s Shared Futures: Global Learning and Social Responsibility initiative, which is focused on curriculum development to deepen students’ global knowledge, and by a partnership with the Council of Europe to promote education for democracy, human rights, and civic responsibility. An AAC&U-affiliated project, Bringing Theory to Practice, has also generated new research and promising practices related to the role of engaged learning and civic involvement in helping students make responsible choices in their personal lives.
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.
|
