Transformative Learning

UBC Arts offers diverse, customizable, and high-impact learning opportunities.

Arts students are empowered to chart their own course of study, and to immerse themselves in diverse learning experiences.

Our strategies

Goal: Facilitate innovative, student-focused teaching practices.

  • Redesign degree requirements to align with faculty priorities, situating requirements as meaningful learning opportunities, not boxes to tick.
  • Enhance and evaluate systems to assist students in navigating degree programs, and map interdisciplinary pathways through the curriculum.
  • Build on our Program Learning Outcomes, map how students fulfill outcomes, and assess their effectiveness, providing students with agency and clarity regarding their learning during and beyond their degree.
  • Collaborate with the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies to improve graduate curriculum renewal and program outcomes at the departmental level.
  • Create incentives and rewards for excellence in teaching within the faculty.
  • Enhance staff support and resources for curriculum renewal and design.

Goal: Renew our academic offerings, find areas of niche strength and emerging societal need, and foster a culture of innovation and flexibility in teaching and educational design.

  • Strengthen the Masters of Public Policy and Global Affairs (MPPGA) degree.
  • Expand and enhance the Writing Studies program to develop academic writing and communications curricula in collaboration with other faculties.
  • Inaugurate the new stream in the Master of Data Science in Computational Linguistics.
  • Support the launch of the Language Sciences program.
  • Collaborate with the Faculties of Science and Medicine to develop an undergraduate Neuroscience program.
  • Launch a new interdisciplinary program in the Study of Religion.
  • Explore new undergraduate minors, joint degrees with other faculties, international dual degrees, and certificates.

Goal: Provide transformative and high-impact education guided by learning outcomes.

  • Enhance first-year cohort learning communities, writing-intensive small-class experiences, global learning and research, community-service learning and community-based research, and practical experiences including co-op, internships, work learn placements, and interdisciplinary research opportunities.
  • Integrate career preparation into the fabric of our undergraduate and graduate programs.
  • Support and develop intensive interdisciplinary field school courses.
  • Develop best practices for experiential learning and community-based experiential learning (CBEL) from UBC faculty, staff, and the community.
  • Recognize the diversity of community-based learning including the need for sustained development of relationships.
  • Explore the integration of case studies involving external partners into the curriculum.
  • Continue to support the adoption of Arts Co-op Program graduate student initiatives.
  • Collaborate with the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies to reimagine the PhD program and support the Public Scholars Initiative.
  • Develop curricular and co-curricular opportunities for student career development.
  • Improve our ability to track student employment data after graduation.

Goal: Create a personalized, responsive, structured, and supportive student experience.

  • Move from a disciplinary approach to academic integrity issues to one that promotes the importance of ethical scholarship, for example, the Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund project, Our Cheating Hearts.
  • Work with the university and the Faculty of Science to pilot student retention activities.
  • Enhance student support through the assessment and redesign of Arts Academic Advising Services, and enhance support for students at academic risk.
  • Develop flexible and personalized learning plans for students.
  • Support students in assembling portfolios including curricular, co-curricular, and extracurricular achievements and experiences.
  • Improve waitlist procedures through input into the upcoming Workday Student Information System.

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