Do you want your voice to be heard in the creation of our university’s upcoming five-year strategic plan? Read below as Peer Advisor Daniel shows how you can do just that!
Every five years, GW formulates a strategic plan to present to the Board of Trustees. This plan will guide the university’s direction for—you guessed it—the next five years. Pres. LeBlanc has identified four areas that the strategic plan must address: world-class faculty, high-quality undergraduate education, distinguished and distinctive graduate education, and high-impact research.
As such, the university has launched four committees, each tackling one of these pillars of the eventual five-year plan that will be completed by early next year. I serve on the high-quality undergraduate education committee, and our charge includes four subcategories that address a subset of questions.
- #Only@GWSTEM: How do we find innovative ways of doing STEM at GW? How do we innovate by building on our strengths and existing resources?
- Academic advising and student success: How do we support students in their time at GW?
- Leveraging GW’s location: How do we draw on our unique location to enhance educational opportunities?
- Academic innovation: How do we ensure that students learn what they want and need to learn in a context in which new knowledge is constantly being produced? How do we eliminate barriers to their educational goals and aspirations?
Before answering these questions, our committee sought to understand what exactly a high-quality undergraduate education means. Here’s what we came up with:
- It is rigorous and inquiry-based
- It emphasizes creativity and intellectual curiosity; higher-order thinking skills
- It empowers students to chart the path of their learning
- It builds communities of learning (in and outside the classroom)
- It enables students to develop personally as well as intellectually
- It embraces evidence of learning sciences and is up to date with modern pedagogies
- It adapts to a changing world and to the production of new knowledge
- It is collaborative and equitable
As we work to put together our portion of the strategic plan to ensure a prosperous, exciting future for the university, we of course require feedback from the community. As an undergraduate stakeholder myself, I place particular importance on feedback from my classmates, especially those in the Honors Program.
For this reason, I ask that you please submit feedback via email to UndergradEdGWU@gmail.com. You are encouraged to include your year, school, and major, as this is not an anonymous means of sharing feedback. We will also be having a public forum at some point in the next couple weeks; you will receive an announcement via email about the time and venue as soon as we finalize them.
Moreover, I am working to find new, better ways to reach out to undergraduates in a way that is meaningful and frequent, because this process is not one that can occur behind closed doors. I will certainly provide updates as we move forward.
