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ParisInternationalization --
Understanding the world and valuing difference in the spirit of service

The International Education Council is a a group of faculty and staff appointed annually by the Provost.

The IEC is charged with promoting and strengthening the international mission of the University. The IEC initiates, advocates, and oversees various efforts to help integrate internationalism throughout the institution and to deepen its impact for teaching and learning at WKU.

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:

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

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

3. 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.

 

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