Core Commitments: Educating Students for Personal and Social Responsibility
Core Commitments Symposium: Taking Seriously the Perspectives of Others
as a Core Institutional Commitment
October 15-16, 2008
Long Beach, CA
Goals |
Speakers | Program |
Registration | Hotel | Contact
Also register for the Network for Academic Renewal meeting, Diversity, Learning, and Inclusive Excellence: Accelerating and Assessing Progress, October 16-18, 2008.
The Core Commitments initiative supports a national re-engagement with issues of personal and social responsibility on college and university campuses. This symposium focuses on the project's fourth dimension of personal and social responsibility - taking seriously the perspectives of others. The symposium offers important framing plenary sessions, interactive workshops, and opportunities to share and reflect upon campus practices.
Symposium Goals
This working symposium is designed for campus leaders interested in:
- enhancing students' development of perspective-taking as a resource for learning, citizenship, and work;
- learning about holistic and developmental frameworks for educating students in the areas of personal and social responsibility;
- considering their institution's current efforts in diversity, global, and civic learning in light of personal and social responsibility outcomes for students; and
- analyzing new multi-campus climate data on faculty and students in the area of diversity and perspective-taking. (For more information, please visit our PSRII Findings page).
Symposium Speakers
L. Lee Knefelkamp, director of dialogues and assessment for Core Commitments and professor of psychology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University.
Lee Knefelkamp received her M.A. and Ph.D.
in counseling psychology from the University of Minnesota and her B.A. from Macalester College. She teaches in the programs of social-organizational psychology and higher education, and she has also held administrative posts as program coordinator and department chair. She directed the student development graduate program at the University of Maryland, served as dean of the school of education at American University, and as academic dean of the faculty at Macalester College.
A selection of recent publications include "Integrating Jewish issues into the teaching of psychology" in P. Bronstein & K. Quina (Eds.), Teaching gender and multicultural awareness: Resources for the psychology classroom and "Encountering diversity on campus and in the classroom: Advancing intellectual and ethical development" in Diversity Digest.
For thirty years, she has researched and written about student intellectual, ethical, identity, and intercultural development; curriculum transformation; issues of race, ethnicity, and gender; campus climate assessment; and the psychology of organizational change and resistance to change. She is a senior scholar with AAC&U and served as a national panel member for the American Commitments and Greater Expectations initiatives.
Laura I. Rendón, Professor and Department Chair, Educational Leadership and Policy Studies, College of Human Sciences, Iowa State University and member of the Core Commitments advisory board.
Laura Rendón's current research focuses on access, retention and graduation of low-income, first-generation college students and the transformation of teaching and learning to emphasize wholeness and social justice.
Rendón earned a Ph.D. in higher education administration from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She holds a M.A. in counseling and guidance and psychology from Texas A&M University-Kingsville (1975). She earned a B.A. in English and journalism from the University of Houston (1970), and holds an associate of arts degree from San Antonio College. Rendón also attended Laredo Community College.
Her new book, Sentipensante (Sensing/Thinking) Pedagogy: Educating for Wholeness, Social Justice and Liberation, will be published this fall. Rendón is co-editor of Transforming the First Year of College for Students of Color, Educating a New Majority, and Racial and Ethnic Diversity in Higher Education ASHE Reader. She is also co-editor of the ASHE/Lumina Policy Briefs and Critical Essays Series. Her scholarly work on access and achievement has been featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education and the PBS documentary, The College Track. She has received numerous awards including the ASHE Distinguished Service Award and the NASPA Latino Knowledge Community Outstanding Faculty Award.
Rendón is Chair of the Board of Directors for the National Council for Community and Education Partnerships. She also serves on the Board of Trustees for Naropa University, and is past president of the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE), the nation’s premier scholarly organization focusing on higher education research. Rendón has also been a fellow of the Fetzer Institute.
Program Overview
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
1 - 2 pm |
Symposium registration |
2 - 2:30 pm |
Welcome and framing remarks - “Taking Seriously the Perspectives of Others: A Collective Responsibility”
Caryn McTighe Musil, Director, Core Commitments and Senior Vice President, AAC&U |
2:30 - 3:45 pm |
Table Work on Institutional Values
Discussion and Feedback |
3:45 - 4 pm |
Refreshment break |
4 - 5:15 pm |
Plenary — Taking Seriously the Perspectives of Others: Difference, Discernment, and Decision-Making
Research demonstrates that students’ intellectual and cognitive development — from narrow and dualistic thinking, through more multiplistic thinking, to complex and constructed views of knowledge — affects learning about the self, other people and cultures, and the reasoning used in discerning ethical issues and making ethical decisions. Lee Knefelkamp will explore this relationship, focusing on models of intellectual development and intercultural sensitivity and recent research on microaggressions. She will examine how students think about difference—internally and externally, domestically and globally—and how their developmental phases affect their responses to each other and to course material. How do developmental stages affect what — or who — is perceived as different, how one processes encounters with difference, and how one acts in response to these encounters?
L. Lee Knefelkamp, Director of Dialogue and Assessment, Core Commitments; Professor of Psychology and Education, Teachers College, Columbia University; and Senior Scholar, AAC&U |
5:15 - 5:30 pm |
Debriefing of the day
Nancy O'Neill, Assistant Director, Core Commitments and Director of Programs for the Office of Education and Institutional Renewal, AAC&U |
5:30 - 6:30 pm |
Reception— Relax and enjoy refreshments and informal networking with colleagues. |
Thursday, October 16, 2008
7:45 - 8:45 am |
Breakfast & Roundtable Discussions — Choose an informal discussion on institutional culture and values; pedagogies and practices that enhance student development; dialogue as a mechanism for institutional change; academic freedom and the teaching of values; or participants’ choice. |
8:45 - 9:45 am |
Plenary — Sentipensante (Sensing/Thinking) Pedagogy: Educating for Wholeness, Social Justice, and Liberation
Many college and university leaders today encourage students to embrace empathic capacities as a powerful tool in learning. But how frequently do students encounter messages that instruct them to focus on the analytic mind to the exclusion of feelings and emotions? And in allowing the analytic functions to dominate, what important knowledge is being excluding? In this plenary session, Laura Rendón will discuss the need for campus leaders to reframe current understandings of teaching and learning in order to truly help students take seriously the perspectives of others. Rendón will discuss her work in Sentipensante pedagogy, which helps students transcend limiting views about themselves, fosters high expectations, and encourages students to become social change agents. She argues that there is a “complementary relationship between the sentir of intuition and the inner life and the pensar of intellectualism and the pursuit of scholarship, between formal knowledge and wisdom, and between Western and non-Western ways of knowing.”
Laura I. Rendón, Professor and Department Chair, Educational Leadership and Policy Studies, College of Human Sciences, Iowa State University and member of the Core Commitments advisory board. |
9:45 - 10:15 am |
Table discussions |
10:15 - 10:30 am |
Refreshment break |
10:30 - 11:45 am |
Concurrent workshops
Deepening Core Commitments Work: Surfacing and Analyzing “Competing Commitments”
Very few people would argue against the development of personal and social responsibility in students, yet many students experience a “disconnect” between their academic studies and the personal exploration that inevitably occurs in college, are left to their own devices to address personal and interpersonal concerns as well as moral and ethical challenges, and receive few opportunities to place those experiences in a larger context of history, culture, and society. In this workshop, participants will surface a list of “competing commitments” in the structures and practices of higher education that prevent pervasive institutional engagement with education for personal and social responsibility. The group will then brainstorm strategies for aligning the broader institutional culture to the goals of this work, so that education for personal and social responsibility plays a significant role in the curriculum and co-curriculum.
Laura I. Rendón, Professor and department Chair, Educational Leadership and Policy Studies, College of Human Sciences, Iowa State University
Promoting Inclusive Excellence and Institutional Change through Deliberative Dialogue
By attending this workshop, participants will learn about the
“world café” method for campus-wide dialogue that involves both large scale community forums and small group discussion. This method has been used at Saint Mary's College of California as a means for community building, authentic campus conversation and change. Presenters and participants will spend the majority of the workshop modeling this method, a valuable tool for hearing the voices of all campus stakeholders, lessening issues of power and privilege across members, and developing strategic plans and timelines for action.
Frances M. Sweeney, Vice-Provost for Academics and Professor of Spanish, Shawny Anderson, Assistant Dean of the School of Liberal Arts and Professor of Communication, Jennifer M. Pigza, Associate Director of the Catholic Institute for Lasallian Social Action (CILSA), All of Saint Mary’s College of California, a Core Commitments Leadership Consortium Institution
Campus Climate: The Importance of Asking of Ourselves What We Ask of Our Students
Data from campus climate surveys point to a fundamental premise: we cannot ask students to learn what we do not promote in the institutional environment. What would it mean for an institution to take seriously education for personal and social responsibility, something wished for in our students? In this session, the facilitators will describe the new Personal and Social Responsibility Institutional Inventory (PSRII) developed by AAC&U. The PSRII is a campus climate instrument designed to gauge constituents’ perceptions about opportunities for learning about personal and social responsibility across an institution. The facilitators will present select findings for both students and faculty from the first major administration of the survey. They will also engage participants in an exercise designed to help them situate climate data in a larger process of campus-wide reflection for educational improvement.
L. Lee Knefelkamp, Professor of Psychology and Education, Teachers College, Columbia University and Director of Dialogue and Assessment, Core Commitments, and
Nancy O’Neill, Assistant Director, Core Commitments and Director of Programs, AAC&U |
11:45 - 12:30
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Closing Reflections
Caryn McTighe Musil, Director, Core Commitments and Senior Vice President, AAC&U |
Registration
To maintain a personal and effective working environment, registration for the symposium is limited.
A registration fee of $100 includes materials, a coffee break, an evening reception, and breakfast.
Please fill out our online registration.
We also encourage you to register for the Network meeting, Diversity, Learning, and Inclusive Excellence: Accelerating and Assessing Progress, which directly follows this symposium. However, the two events are distinct, and registration for one does not automatically register you for the other.
Hotel
NOTE: The conference room block is full. Overflow hotel information follows.
All symposium sessions will take place at the Westin Long Beach.
Westin Long Beach
333 East Ocean Boulevard
Long Beach, California
Overflow hotels are the Courtyard Long Beach Downtown and Renaissance Long Beach Hotel. Click on one of the hotel links to make a reservation.
Courtyard Long Beach Downtown
500 East First Street
Long Beach, California 90802 USA
Phone: 1-562-435-8511
Renaissance Long Beach Hotel
111 East Ocean Boulevard
Long Beach, California 90802 USA
Phone: 1-562-437-5900
Contact
If you have any questions, please contact Michèle Leaman at leaman@aacu.org.
The Core Commitments Symposium is underwritten by The John Templeton Foundation.
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