Like WKU's strong strategic planning process, which has greatly improved the university's focus and effectiveness, we anticipate that a visible emphasis on engaging students for success in a global society will enhance the education we offer and provide a distinguishing student learning feature to the Western experience. Unlike strategic planning, which must concern itself with the whole range of university services and activities, this QEP zeros in on student learning by explicitly tying academic experiences to co-curricular activities and concepts. We hope to encourage students to see their education as directly tied to their own lives beyond the time they spend in the classroom and to their continuing responsibilities as citizens of a broader community.

Although our ultimate plan is to encourage individual programs, faculty, and students to pursue engagement in their own ways, we expect designated initiatives to advance our QEP student learning goal by promoting one or more positive outcomes:

QEP Goal

Students will engage with communities other than their own in purposeful learning activities that explicitly address their capacity and responsibility to contribute to community and society. 

Attendant Student Outcomes:

Students will demonstrate their capacity to apply knowledge and training to address relevant concerns in community or society.

Students will demonstrate respect for diversity of people, ideas, and cultures.

Students will demonstrate awareness of their opportunities as responsible citizens working and living in a global society.

These elements are related to each other as theory is to practice. Each is meant to support and balance the other. The outcomes might, if left by themselves, devolve into dry theoretical exercises. The “engagement” component in our goal, left alone, might lead to scattered efforts with no sustaining educational purpose. By adopting both, we hope to ward off these unfavorable results. Western graduates will come to understand the relevance of their educations to the needs of society by engaging communities other than their own—whether those be geographical or cultural communities—and they will engage these other communities, not for the sake of engagement itself, but in order to learn the relevance of their educations to the needs of society. Of course, in order to achieve its intended goal, the QEP must also move according to a coherent timeline and in keeping with performance indicators analogous to those used to assess our strategic plan.

Engaging Sudents for Success in a Global Society