Institutes

Forward-looking institutions recognize the value of cultivating leadership capacity among STEM faculty and administrators. To this end, the PKAL STEM Leadership Institute empowers STEM faculty, principal investigators, and administrators to recognize their leadership strengths, navigate the politics of change, address conflicts, and restructure the institutional systems that limit America’s capacity for global competitiveness in STEM fields. Through experiential learning, reflection, and the simulation of diverse lived experiences, participants gain the skills and tools to embrace difference, initiate social change, and guide reform in undergraduate STEM education.

Today’s college graduates must be able to integrate knowledge and skills, as well as apply them within real-world settings for work, life, and citizenship. AAC&U’s Institute on Engaged and Integrative Learning helps campus teams develop strategies and advance institutional level efforts to embed engaged and integrative learning across student on and off-campus experiences. Teams will explore innovative approaches to community engagement, integrative learning, experiential learning, and global learning.

In bringing people together across lines of religious difference, a campus serves as both a laboratory and a model for how diverse societies can thrive and as a launching pad for the next generation of leaders who can transform diversity into engaged and productive pluralism. The annual Institute on Teaching and Learning for Campus-wide Interfaith Excellence focuses on the integration of interfaith cooperation into campus life and on the development of civic interfaith leaders.

Research shows that students involved in high-impact practices (HIPs) enjoy higher levels of learning success. These evidence-based practices include service learning, undergraduate research, and internships—to name a few. AAC&U’s Institute on High-Impact Practices and Student Success helps campus teams refine and assess their HIPs with an emphasis on quality, equity, and student engagement. Attendees participate in intentional reflection on institutional outcomes, develop comprehensive action plans, and have individualized consultations with HIPs faculty. The institute helps campus and system-level teams create sustainable student success goals and monitor progress toward achieving equity to improve educational outcomes for all students.

The growing division across racial and ethnic identities in America cannot be ignored. How can colleges and universities heal from the legacies and harm of racism and bias? AAC&U is partnering with higher education institutions to develop TRHT Campus Centers to prepare the next generation of strategic leaders and thinkers to promote racial healing and address current inequities grounded in notions of a racial hierarchy. As a part of this national initiative, each TRHT Campus Center prioritizes expansive, community-based healing activities that seek to change collective community narratives and broaden the understanding of our diverse experiences.