Program Objectives

  • Use effective high impact practices, including intensive undergraduate research, project-based learning, and service learning, to increase student retention and success among underserved student groups.
  • Demonstrate the practical career applications of students’ degrees through a community-based pedagogy while learning twenty-first century skills, including collaboration, systems thinking, and innovative approaches to digital communication.
  • Use the program’s nexus of community engagement and digital pedagogy to help students negotiate the civic responsibilities they bear toward others in both physical and digital spaces.
  • Engage students in interdisciplinary problem solving at the earliest stages of their college career.
  • Demonstrate the role that the humanities and social sciences play in understanding and addressing global problems such as poverty, discrimination, and climate change.