What We Do
We create the space for students to individualize their curricula.
Our students are adults with a wide range of professional and personal experiences, whose expectations for graduate learning are not easily met by standardized curricula. With the individualized curriculum, they seek the flexibility to tailor their coursework so that it matches their own unique life circumstances, academic and professional interests, intellectual goals, and learning styles.
We encourage ongoing personal, professional and cultural learning.
We view learning as life practice–as holistic activity that deepens our engagement with the world around us. Rather than drawing rigid boundaries between the personal, political, socio-cultural, and professional, we recognize the integral nature of experience and legitimize inquiry into the knowledges inherent in all those domains.
We encourage creative, artistic and analytic expression.
Our program is decidedly interdisciplinary, drawing from the humanities, the arts and the social sciences. We believe that creative expression is not limited to the arts, nor that analytic expression is limited to the social sciences.
We foster the development of a collaborative learning community.
Pursuing individualized study does not mean our students need to work in isolation. Rather, we believe that a culture of collaboration provides the necessary basis of support, stimulation and challenge from which students are empowered to venture into their individualized endeavors. Learning communities develop during residencies when interdisciplinary groups of students begin to learn from their Faculty Advisors, Concentration Mentors, and each other. Collaboration continues in the online learning environment, which allows students to dialogue with each other and their Faculty Advisor.
We promote an awareness of how our world is divided into what may seem limiting and narrowing dualities such as theory and practice, reflection and application, right and wrong.
We challenge students to develop a more nuanced understanding of complexities to integrate multiple, diverse perspectives, and to use these understandings to affect progressive social, personal, political and cultural change.
