American Commitments: Recommendations for
Diversity and Student Learning
The American Commitments national panel framed four recommendations
about addressing diversity in the college curriculum. As explained
in American
Pluralism and the College Curriculum (AAC&U,
1995), the recommendations propose that every student should:
- acquire knowledge of the diverse cultures, communities,
and histories that comprise United States society;
- connect this knowledge to a continuing engagement with
democratic ideas and aspirations;
- develop experiential as well as formal understanding of
these topics; and
- develop deliberative capacities for a world in which
unitary agreement does not, and is not likely ever to, exist.
In identifying these goals for diversity in the curriculum,
the panel report warns against the hidden message of many
diversity requirements that view courses on world cultures
and United States diversity as interchangeable or that leave
attention to United States diversity optional. Education for
United States democratic and cultural pluralism, the panel
holds, is just as important as global study and deserves its
own space and time in the curriculum (American Pluralism,
xx-xxi).
To meet the above goals, the panel recommends that each student's
education include studies in:
- Experience, identity, and aspiration: the study of one's
own particular inherited and constructed traditions, identity
communities, and significant questions, in their complexity.
- United States pluralism and the pursuits of justice: an
extended and comparative exploration of diverse peoples
in this society, with significant attention to their differing
experiences of United States democracy and the pursuits
(sometimes successful, sometimes frustrated) of equal opportunity.
- Experiences in justice seeking: encounters with systemic
constraints on the development of human potential in the
United States and experiences in community-based efforts
to articulate principles of justice, expand opportunity,
and redress inequities.
- Multiplicity and relational pluralism in majors, concentrations,
and programs: extensive participation in forms of learning
that foster sustained exploration of and deliberation about
contested issues important in particular communities of
inquiry and practice.
Taken together, these complementary forms of learning (personal,
societal, participatory, and dialogical) constitute an appropriate
college curriculum for effective citizenship in a diverse
democracy. In calling for this curriculum, we are asserting
that students must learn, in every part of their educational
experience, to live creatively with the multiplicity, ambiguity,
and irreducible differences that are the defining conditions
of the contemporary world.
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