Leadership and Global Understanding (LGU), Minor
Program Description
This program is designed to make undergraduates more active learners and give them the tools to become truly engaged citizens in the various communities (local, national, global) they will enter after graduation. Our primary objective is to create students who come to understand, value and accept their responsibility to become active citizens in their community, sensitive to cultural diversity, so that they may assume active leadership roles and help others do the same. In order to meet this objective, the minor in Leadership and Global Understanding (LGU) will integrate service learning, community leadership, intercultural/ international studies, travel study and student-centered pedagogy. But the key to such an objective is the integrative student centered pedagogy where students assume primary responsibility for their own learning.
Mission Statement
The Leadership and Global Understanding Minor is a program in civic engagement. Its mission is to teach students to be productive citizens and leaders in all of the communities in which they live: local, regional, national and global. Students are immersed in these communities through travel study and community partnerships. LGU begins with a commitment to the common good, showing students how to use curricular knowledge to improve the world from a social justice perspective. They are taught to connect inequities they see locally to those around the world and encouraged to work for both immediate and systemic change.
Why Take This Minor?
The LGU program is an interdisciplinary minor that aims to foster leadership qualities in undergraduate students by giving them intensive civic engagement experience on the local, national, and international levels. LGU students come from all academic units (Arts and Sciences, Nursing and Health Sciences, Business) and all majors within those schools. Over the course of their studies, LGU students interact directly with diverse individuals, which increases their intercultural competencies and inevitably changes the way they view their own academic and, ultimately, professional careers.
Students in the program engage in regular community service activities on campus and in the greater Philadelphia community, participate in travel study courses around the world that deal with overarching issues including education, social justice, and civil rights, and reflect critically on how they plan to contribute to the various communities they belong to.
Admission Requirement
Admission into the LGU minor requires an interview with the director of the program.