Kapiʻolani Community College’s Robert Franco has been selected to present at the American Association of Colleges and Universities annual conference on a panel discussion entitled, Perilous Times: Preparing Students Across Sectors for Civic, Ethical, Moral Learning, January 25–27, 2017 in San Francisco. Franco is the director of the Office for Institutional Effectiveness.
The panel is based on grantee work from the Teagle Foundation’s A Larger Vision for Liberal Education: Education for Civic and Moral Responsibility initiative, designed to foster systematic approaches for equipping students to address questions of value, meaning and personal and social responsibility.
Preparing today’s students to solve present and future challenges is fundamental to a liberal education. Colleges and universities have developed various approaches to enhancing civic, ethical and moral responsibility in a pluralistic society, though those approaches are not often grounded in research. The panel will share cross-sector, evidence-based practices to promote civic and moral learning across general education in community colleges and special programs at two research universities.
Franco and Liz Di-Giorgio, assistant professor of art and design at Queensborough Community College, will share results and tools from the Student Learning for Civic Capacity project involving 60 faculty at 6 community colleges.
These community colleges came together to reflect on the larger aims of liberal education and teach to the big question: How do we build our commitment to civic and moral responsibility for diverse, equitable, healthy and sustainable communities? In service-learning courses such as anthropology, botany, English, art, teacher education, environmental science and film production, and in innovative learning communities focused on communicating climate disruption, more than 3,000 students have responded to end-of-term, capstone reflection prompts at each participating campus. Results of the rubric assessments of these reflections will be shared as well as pre-and post-surveys and complete research protocols.
For more information, read the Kapiʻolani CC news release.
—By Louise Yamamoto
