Examples of Good Practice from Westminster College

Diversity Lecture Series: Leveraging Guest Speakers for Student Learning

For the past eight years Westminster College has been the home of the Diversity Lecture Series, a year-long sequence of presentations by renowned scholars on race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and globalization, among other topics. The series has become the college’s most highly attended set of public lectures. Because the series is tied to one of Westminster’s college-wide learning goals—Global Consciousness, Social Responsibility, and Ethical Awareness—it is integrated into courses across the disciplines to help students achieve this goal.

In many cases, students attend the lectures as part of their course work. Some of the most significant connections, however, occur when students have open discussions with speakers in a classroom setting prior to a lecture. For example, last year, Dr. Robert Bullard (”the father of environmental justice”) had a lunch discussion with an Environmental Ethics philosophy class who had read his work as part of an assignment. Students later attended his lecture. Inspired their discussions with him, they initiated a public awareness activism project on environmental racism in Westminster’s home city. Their project began as a course assignment but soon expanded far beyond that to include discussions with several non-governmental organizations and plans for community discussions about how Salt Lake City, Utah can advance environmental justice.

The Center for Civic Engagement: A Developmental Approach to Student Civic Engagement

Westminster’s three-year old Center for Civic Engagement has a broad mission—to help students develop as learners, community members, and human beings through service, service-learning and civic engagement. Each year, over 40% of all Westminster students participate in college-sponsored civic engagement activities. The Center, though, aims to give those activities meaning by basing them in a developmental approach to civic engagement.

Entering students begin their college experience by participating in Helping Hands Day—a day-long, faculty-led service project immediately before the semester begins. Helping Hands Day introduces students to the local community, educates them about the community’s needs and assets, and helps them reflect on the connections between education, community, and civic engagement.

After developing their commitment to community service as first-year students, the Center for Civic Engagement works with academic majors to build service-learning into the disciplines. Students from across the college, in fields as varied as psychology, education, nursing, business, and mathematics, take courses in which community service deepens and amends their understanding of the theory and utility of their fields of study.

Finally, the Center for Civic Engagement works with students near graduation to encourage them to remain civically engaged once they leave higher education. The Center provides seed money and training for advanced students who wish to start civic engagement projects of their own. These projects must connect with their chosen careers, build on the work already existing in the community, and be sustainable over the long-term. Taken together, then, the Center’s activities help guide students to engage with the community, understand communities in the context of their course work, and contribute to their communities long after they have left the college.

May Term Study: Experiencing Intercultural Learning

Westminster College offers a widely popular May Term—a four-week intensive academic period immediately following Spring Semester. Encouraged by reduced tuition for students who have enrolled full-time during the previous two semesters, hundreds of Westminster students choose intercultural study experiences during May Term. These trips, led by Westminster faculty and staff, are based on an experiential model of learning. Rather than travel around the world to sit in traditional classrooms, students and faculty learn through intercultural experience.

Recent groups of students have walked the traditional pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, learned geology and biology at the Sea of Cortez in Mexico, and developed nursing skills on the Navajo Nation in the United States. The college is currently developing international humanitarian partnerships in Thailand and South Africa where students will learn public health by working alongside health and education professionals in those countries. The result of these and dozens of other May Term experiences is the development of a student body with broad international and intercultural experience. And those same students have learned how to learn outside of the classroom—using experience as an additional light onto the problems and opportunities facing the globe today.

This page is part of a series of Examples of Good Practice.