4: Learning and Commitment
Foster in Undergraduate Students a Passion for Learning and a Commitment to Making a Difference in the World Other Information:
We will continue to develop an undergraduate experience that deeply engages our students and faculty; enables students to
respond to the rapid changes in knowledge production, transmission, and application; and prepares them to be citizens of the
global community. -- Building upon efforts over the past ten years, Duke University is on a path toward creating a premier
educational experience for undergraduates, one that is distinctive for engaging the resources of a research university in
furthering undergraduate learning and connecting to real world issues. Three values inform our planning for undergraduate
life: integration, engagement, and community. Each of these is intended to promote achievement, excellence, a passion for
learning and the intellectual, social, and ethical values and skills among our students that can best prepare them for the
world into which they will enter and mature. We seek to build a more integrated experience for an undergraduate that provides
greater continuity between and among the various aspects of students' lives at Duke. We will focus on making transitions and
seamless connections between the East Campus experience and the upper-class years, majors and disciplines, the classroom and
co-curricular pursuits, students and faculty (and those in between, graduate/professional students and post-docs), the liberal
arts and engineering, and college and life after college. We seek to foster student engagement so that undergraduates assume
greater ownership and responsibility for their education rather than seeing it as a means to an end. If students are more
fully engaged, they will get more out of their courses and will want to build, through the study of particular subjects, the
skills that facilitate critical inquiry throughout their lives. We seek to help our students become active learners and involved
citizens and to maximize the benefits that come from close interaction with faculty and peers. We must place institutional
priority on community, on students' connectedness to others as well as to the city in which they are located. Community balances
both group benefits with individual needs and wants and a Duke identity with the many personal identities based on demographics
and interests. We seek to capitalize on the diversity of our varied constituencies by affirming and engaging the value of
difference and creating an environment that promotes civility and respect even as ideas are promulgated - and challenged -
in an energizing give and take. Over the past ten years, we have worked to develop a more robust undergraduate experience.
Over this period we have developed East Campus as a first-year community and implemented a new residential plan for upperclass
residential life. We have implemented a new curriculum, both in Arts & Sciences and in the Pratt School of Engineering, that
raised the bar for students and faculty and that takes greater advantage of the special resources afforded by a research university.
We are currently undertaking initiatives to make mentored research experiences and graduation with distinction through excellence
in senior honors thesis work more normative for undergraduates and to make learning within and outside of the classroom better
integrated. These individual and small group learning experiences better prepare our students to become intellectual leaders
in their chosen careers by equipping them with the intellectual independence and skills to meet the challenges of a life environment
in which the analytical and ethical challenges are multiple and rapidly changing. While we are proud of our accomplishments,
we are not content to rest where we are; rather, we must continue to work to establish a culture of inquiry and develop a
greater sense of community. In doing so, we must adapt to the changes in knowledge production, transmission, and application
that are occurring in the work of the academic community. We must increasingly focus on creating opportunities for experiential
learning, such as service learning, internships, field-work, and research service learning. Adaptation also requires creating
dynamic spaces, such as workshops and studios, that facilitate the discovery and learning processes and provide the necessary
social context for making meaning of complex information. And we must take care to build a campus culture that is respectful
and open to the contributions of others with varied backgrounds and experiences.
Objective(s):
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