Working Group 1

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Chairs:

  • Simon Flores, Associate Dean, Retention and Persistence, Center for Academic and Student Achievement
  • Joshua Gamson, Associate Dean for Social Sciences, College of Arts and Sciences
  • Catherine Lusheck, Professor, Art History & Museum Studies, and Chair, Art + Architecture Department 

Members:

  • Ursula Aldana, Associate Professor, School of Education
  • Tracy Benning, Associate Professor, College of Arts and Sciences
  • Wayne Buder, Marketing Strategist, School of Management
  • Dory Escobar, Assistant Professor and Director of Applied Practice, School of Nursing and Health Professions
  • Mutiu Farokede, Interim Office Analyst, Office of the Provost
  • Katrina Garry, Deputy Title IX Coordinator, Student Life
  • Alex Hochman, Senior Director, Career Services, Student Life
  • John Lendvay, Professor, Environmental Science, College of Arts and Sciences
  • Christy Li, International Student Advisor, International Student and Scholar Services
  • Leigh Meredith, Assistant Professor, Rhetoric and Language, College of Arts and Sciences
  • Hannah Mora, Manager, Hilton Humanitarian Prize, Conrad N. Hilton Foundation; Co-founder, Powerful Children Colombia; President-Elect, USF Alumni Board of Directors 
  • Matt Motyka, Associate Professor and Director, French Studies, College of Arts and Sciences
  • Deanna Pachinger, Associate Dean, Faculty and Student Academic Services, CASA
  • Gennifer Smith, Assistant Professor, Engineering, College of Arts and Sciences 
  • Anna Tait, Leadership Annual Giving Officer, Development
  • Susan Zolezzi, Associate Director, Instructional Design, Educational Technology Services

SPAC Ambassadors:

The Working Group on Reimagining Jesuit Education is a widely-representative group tasked with the implementation of initiatives that will transform a USF education, ensuring we remain responsive to our students’ aspirations and prepare them for a changing and pluralistic world.  The group will engage the USF community to facilitate dialogue on this goal, coordinate with units to advance, develop and refine proposals, making them more concrete and actionable where needed, provide updates to the community, work collaboratively across the other working groups as needed, and generate recommendations for how best to implement the actions and objectives outlined in this goal.  Specifically, the working group is asked to develop recommendations that achieve the following:

  • Develop concrete, assignable and actionable next steps for reimagining a Jesuit education
  • Prioritize the objectives and action items to achieve goal #1
  • Establish ways of assessing progress and success (KPIs or other quantitative or qualitative metrics)

The working group will provide periodic feedback on its progress to the Strategic Planning Advisory Council and submit its final report and recommendations to the Council to be integrated into the broader strategic plan implementation process.

Goal 1

REIMAGINE JESUIT EDUCATION to accelerate the achievement of a more just and sustainable world.

Objectives Actions
1. Revise USF’s curricula and co-curricula to be responsive to our students’ aspirations and to prepare them for a changing and pluralistic world.
  1. Revise the undergraduate core, majors, and graduate degree programs to enhance transdisciplinary, global, experiential, and civically-engaged learning, and hone future-ready skills and nurture the whole person.
  2. Strengthen curricular and co-curricular programming in order to develop students as ethical leaders, change agents, and movement builders seeking solutions to the environmental, social, and public health crises facing our planet.
  3. Advance the international dimensions of USF’s educational mission by enabling and promoting global learning, engaging global thought leaders, nurturing institutional partnerships, and developing policies in support of internationalization in curriculum and exchange pathways.
2. Build alliances and integrated infrastructure that provide a sustainable and incentivizing process to invite, design, and implement new programs and academic initiatives that serve all learners – undergraduate, graduate, and lifelong.
  1. Foster collaboration between the schools/college and between academic affairs and other units to improve effectiveness and increase our ability to offer new programs and integrated curricular/co-curricular learning opportunities.
  2. Develop an infrastructure that breaks through existing siloes to support stakeholders to work collaboratively in proposing, testing, vetting, and launching new programs and non-degree offerings (e.g., career acceleration programs) that serve all learners.
3. Hire and invest in faculty, librarians, and staff to ensure that the curricula and co-curricula endeavors reflect USF’s commitment to equity and inclusion.
  1. Increase faculty, librarian, and staff diversity in order to infuse the curricula with diverse and global lived experiences and enhance equity and inclusion.
  2. Support faculty, librarian, and staff development for teaching, with a specific (but not exclusive) focus on how identity/ power/ privilege/ oppression/ anti-racism are present in their courses and disciplines, and transform curricula and pedagogy to address these issues across all USF courses.
4. Develop a culture of responsive and evidence-based assessment that is inclusive and equitable, ensures programs of the highest quality, and improves relevant learning for all students.
  1. Engage all faculty, departments, and programs in meaningful ways to utilize assessment as a tool to improve academic rigor and equity-centered pedagogy.
  2. Identify meaningful, useful, and diverse assessment strategies/types to improve student learning.
  3. Examine culminating experiences and high-impact practices across all departments to develop a comprehensive student-centered approach to academic assessment.
  4. Develop holistic metrics for assessing the value of a USF degree.
  5. Develop processes for clear communication of internal and external assessment results and decisions based on those results that are on-going, active, and responsive.
5. Transform and leverage physical and digital technology spaces to support collaborative work, prioritizing innovative and interdisciplinary learning and research.
  1. Build or renovate structures/spaces — for example, Harney Science Center, Presentation Theater — to advance collaborative, local and global, interdisciplinary, and immersive experiences for students and faculty with technology, and cutting-edge and hands-on learning and research spaces.
  2. Leverage physical and digital workspaces at our Hilltop and other campus locations to launch centers focused on (1) science for justice, health equity, and environmental sustainability; and (2) art activism, social justice, and community engagement.
  3. Integrate the use of technology and technology-enabled teaching (technology-enhanced, flipped, hybrid, HyFlex, online) into university academic programming to better leverage and adapt the university’s capacity to support an innovative, equitable, and flexible education.
  4. Support technology-enhanced teaching innovation by promoting exemplary faculty work.
  5. Implement a transparent and inclusive process and structure for decision-making around space and safety that establishes open, frequent, and transparent lines of communication between all stakeholders to ensure that space usage and needs are understood in the context of different academic priorities and safety.