Fourth Biennial Meeting--October 24-27, 2002

Description

Higher education faces a challenge preparing students for an increasingly interdependent world--a world marked by permeable borders and persistent inequalities; a world of shifting boundaries between local and global, domestic, and international; a fractured world in profound need of socially responsible and more fully engaged citizens. For more than a decade AAC&U has helped campuses tap diversity as an educational and societal resource. This conference builds upon that by addressing:

• cognitive and democracy outcomes of diversity initiatives
• connections between U.S. and global diversity
• religious pluralism at home and abroad
• migration, hybridity, and identity
• assessment of diversity courses, programs, and services
• culturally informed democratic practices and pedagogies
• enhancement of diversity work through technology
• holistic approaches to student development

Join a national network of practitioners and researchers in St. Louis on October 24-27, 2002 to enhance existing campus diversity initiatives and chart the next frontiers of work. Diversity and Learning is a valuable meeting for faculty, administrators, students, and others interested in improving pedagogy, enhancing the curriculum, enriching the campus climate, leading systemic institutional change, promoting intergroup dialogues, and engaging communities.

Thematic Highlights

This year's Diversity and Learning conference will explore the challenge of educating students for a world lived in common, despite the divisions, inequities, and differences that often seem to dominate. How can the campus provide spaces - both literal and intellectual - that foster new knowl-edge and new capacities for informed, sustained engagement between individuals, groups, local communities, and global partners? Below are some special areas of focus for this year's meeting.

Common and Uncommon Knowledges

To be educated for a world lived in common, students need to encounter knowledge often inconvenient for them to know, knowledge that shakes their unexamined assumptions and ultimately leads to deeper convictions. What are some of the promising new curricular and co-curricular frameworks that develop habits of the mind that invite comparative, integrative explorations in the face of compet-ing kinds of knowledge? How are the boundaries of traditional knowledge and disciplines being remapped and what curricular designs encourage developmental models of reflection and engage-ment? As the urgency for global knowledge increases, what have we learned from the study of U.S. diversity that can most effectively enhance the approach to global diversity? And what can we learn from the world that will, in turn, enrich our understanding of domestic diversity?

Structures of Engagement

How can we create new spaces of engagement on campus? What new disciplinary or interdiscipli-nary designs, intentionally integrative general education models, or co-curricular programs bring students into sustained conversation with one another? How can we bridge the habitual divisions between student and academic affairs, between campus and community, and between academic disciplines?

Civic and Intercultural Capacities

What skills, arts, and competencies will enhance students' abilities to connect across differences? How can those capacities be developed? At this year's conference, we will linger over the kinds of demo cratic pedagogies emerging from diversity work that promote the arts of connection and the commitment to responsible citizenship. Some of these are deployed in the classroom, others in community-based learning at home and abroad, and still others in the public spaces of student leadership.

Identity Development in a Transnational Multicultural Context

The connection between identity and intellectual development has been a constant thread through our Diversity and Learning conferences. This year, however, we will explore what one might call globalized identities. Some of these identities reflect the one-fifth of America that is composed of new immigrants. Other hybrid identities might weave national and ethnic, religious and racial, socioeconomic and gendered dimensions together. Still others might reflect imagined identities forged through the powerful force of a globalized media. How do all of these complex identities influence intellectual development and what promise do they have for new abilities to cross boundaries?

Research That Connects

This conference will highlight insights from campuses about how their diversity work connects across differences and in the face of asymmetries of power. What does research reveal about the impact of individual campuses, new diversity requirements, experimental living/learning centers, service learning, new pedagogical approaches, or other institutional innovations? How might research improve our ability to cul-tivate civic and intercultural learning?

If you have questions, please e-mail us at meetings@aacu.org.