Mission, Vision, & Values

MISSION

The Center for Undergraduate Scholar Engagement provides programs, opportunities for engagement, and advising services for students at Grand Valley, helping them identify, explore, and pursue opportunities outside of the classroom that connect with, clarify, and deepen their intellectual areas of interest and career plans. The Center offers pathways for students that enable them to create bridges between what they learn in their courses and what they do (and will in the future do) on campus, in their communities, and in the world at large. We build these pathways through:

· elevating narratives of success that capture the diverse ways students reach their academic and professional goals.

· informing and enriching our professional knowledge and understanding through continual learning and critical engagement.

· creating collaborative connections with colleagues across divisions and professional roles; and,

· focusing on the shared goal of student agency, well-being, and thriving as we support undergraduate research, applications for competitive fellowships and many other high-impact practices deepening and expanding student engagement with their own learning processes.

VISION

CUSE is a dynamic university center that elevates and supports the diverse educational pathways and opportunities for research and academic engagement through which students can transform their lives, communities, and the world.

VALUES

Love (Ethic of Care): We are committed to embodying a culture of compassion and empathy, fostering deep connections in all our interactions with students, colleagues, and the GVSU community. Our unwavering dedication to nurturing personal and collective growth through

acts of kindness and caring defines who we are. Love is at the heart of our mission, and we view learning, collaboration, and challenges as opportunities to strengthen our bonds and enrich our community.

Collaboration: We are committed to a culture of collaboration that fosters trust, creativity, and respect for differences in our identities, histories, and ways of knowing. We nurture our partnerships within the Center and across the University, and our value of these partnerships is founded upon our belief that collaboration, resource-sharing, and reciprocity are avenues to effective and efficient support for students.

Adaptability: We intentionally engage with and understand differences in pace, strength, and ability. We work together to move forward and nurture personal and collective growth. Diversity and inclusion are at the core of our programs, services, and professional practice. We welcome all into this space. We also have a shared expectation of curiosity, as well as a willingness to learn, grow, and enrich lives through meaningful experiences. We are committed to be proactive regarding changes to the student body, institution, and community so we can continue to meet the ever-changing needs of our students, faculty, and communities.

Trust and Courage: We recognize that vulnerability and uncertainty are inherent elements of our work. Conversations centering on personal and professional growth inevitably involve sharing of ideas, questions, concerns, and needs. We strive, therefore, in our collaborations with students, faculty, staff, and colleagues to foster the expectation that such sharing of thoughts will be met with respect and curiosity and without judgement, dismissal, or belittlement. We find strength and opportunity in this responsibility. Our work challenges us to take risks, to make mistakes, and to continue growing. Our success occurs when individuals embrace the necessity of vulnerability and uncertainty and persist in the work anyway.

We Define Inquiry Broadly and Inclusively

In Life on Other Planets: A Memoir of Finding my Place in the Universe, Dr. Aomawa Shields describes her experience of research as an undergraduate student: "It didn't matter where I did the research. It didn't even really matter what the research was. I was energized by all of it. ... What mattered was how much I learned that I didn't know before, and someone taking the time to teach me that new thing. It's what I have to remember when I'm too busy to mentor an undergraduate because they don't know much yet and need lots of time and attention. Someone--many people--gave that to me once. My world, my very universe, kept getting bigger and bigger. Research became more a part of me with every project."

We take as a touchstone William Cronon's landmark essay, "'Only Connect...': The Goals of a Liberal Education."  - 

"More than anything else, being an educated person means being able to see connections that allow one to make sense of the world and act within it in creative ways. Every one of the qualities I have described here—listening, reading, talking, writing, puzzle solving, truth seeking, seeing through other people's eyes, leading, working in a community—is finally about connecting. A liberal education is about gaining the power and the wisdom, the generosity and the freedom to connect." ~William Cronon

"We believe the time has come to move beyond the tired old "teaching versus research" debate and give the familiar and honorable term "scholarship" a broader, more capacious meaning, one that brings legitimacy to the full scope of academic work. Surely, scholarship means engaging in original research. But the work of the scholar also means stepping back from one's investigation, looking for connections, building bridges between theory and practice, and communicating one's knowledge effectively... Specifically, we conclude that the work of the professoriate might be thought of as having four separate, yet overlapping, functions. These are: the scholarship of discovery; the scholarship of integration; the scholarship of application; and the scholarship of teaching (p. 16)."

~Ernest Boyer, Scholarship Reconsidered (1990),