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Introduction
By acting thoughtfully, and jointly, the College of Arts and Science will renew, strengthen, and advance arts and science disciplines, programs, and research, scholarly, and artistic work, and collaborate, thereby setting strategic directions for the university as a whole.
Creativity is empowering and in the College of Arts and Science, creativity is in all that we do. It is encouraged, accepted, championed, rewarded and implemented.
We will create and strengthen partnerships inside and outside the college and university, create diverse teams and nurture critical skills, set platforms for identifying local and global issues and solve complex problems.
Together, we will be innovative: taking measured risks and working dynamically.
With an enthusiastic and energetic approach to change, the College of Arts and Science will create innovative plans in anticipation of future issues, including infrastructure, funding, programs, research, scholarly and artistic work, enrolment (vision in what we do, and how we do it).
Our students will know that they belong, that this college is truly theirs, and that opportunities are unlimited.
Our college family comprises many valued strands of communities. We are enriched when we embrace all points of view, cultural diversity, and backgrounds: this is especially appropriate for a college as diverse as Arts and Science.
Internships offer a sort of safe space for you to put your learning into practice. They are a soft-launch into the working world where you can test your skills and put what you learn in class— often abstract concepts applied to theoretical situations— to good use, without the added pressure of doing it for money. Experiential learning is the best way to prove, even just to yourself, that you know what you’re doing and that there is so much potential for turning your degree into a career.
College-Specific Commitments
With an enthusiastic and energetic approach to change, the College of Arts and Science will create innovative plans in anticipation of future issues, including infrastructure, funding, programs, RSAW, enrolment (vision in what we do, and how we do it). Our students will know that they belong, that this college is truly theirs, and that opportunities are unlimited. Our college family is comprised of many valued strands of communities. We are enriched when we embrace all points of view, cultural diversity, and backgrounds: this is especially appropriate for a college as diverse as Arts and Science.
- Put Students First: Recruitment, Retention, Development, Experience, Success
- Build an Arts and Science ‘Student First’ center to give students direct and immediate access to the co-located services they need, and a gathering space for collaborations, pop-up performances, readings and conversation;
- Target recruitment to increase student enrolment in programs with capacity, and create capacity in programs with high demand;
- Increase retention of students between first- and second-year, with special attention to Arts and Science Indigenous student populations, and individuals who are among the first generation in their families to attend university;
- Improve the student experience, build student community, and formally recognize non-credit learning opportunities with co-curricular record;
- Promote and facilitate internationalization through study abroad, student exchange, and international student recruitment initiatives.
- Inspire Excellence and Increase Diversity and Equity in Faculty and Staff
- Build and retain an outstanding faculty and staff complement:
- Increase college’s percentage of and support to Indigenous faculty, and Indigenous role models in all fields;
- Increase percentage of women promoted in a timely manner to full professor in all departments;
- Increase percentage of women in college leadership positions and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields;
- Ensure commitment to diversity is long-term, sustainable, authentic, and self-perpetuating.
- Inspire and Foster Excellence in Research, Scholarly and Artistic Work
- Cultivate a growing culture of RSAW engagement and activity by providing a suite of supports, services and strategies tailored to faculty and students;
- Appreciate the rich diversity of RSAW approaches, resources, timescales, outcomes and impacts across all disciplines in our college: humanities, fine arts, social sciences, science and technology;
- Incubate cross-disciplinary clusters from existing and emerging RSAW strengths;
- Partner with community and institutional initiatives to support all aspects of Indigenizing RSAW;
- Build capacity and continue to advance community-engaged RSAW across the college;
- Celebrate and champion the impact and achievements of our artists, scholars, and researchers, acknowledging that those impacts and outcomes vary greatly within the rich diversity of our RSAW activities.
- Implement New Curricula
- Equip our students with the skills, knowledge, and cultural competencies needed for the challenges and opportunities of the twenty-first century;
- Implement new degree requirements for all our students: English Language Writing, Quantitative Reasoning, Indigenous Learning;
- Encourage and support faculty to offer courses and programs that cross traditional departmental and disciplinary lines;
- Encourage and support faculty to offer courses and programs that extend off campus and into local and regional communities;
- Encourage and support students to take courses for credit in select locales around the world;
- Develop a School of Architecture and Visual Arts with vibrant interdisciplinary curricula that embrace, reinforce, and amplify Saskatoon’s standing as a city of economic and artistic ambition.
Guidepost:
Increase in student satisfaction, reflected in qualitative and quantitative ways
Growth of enrolment and retention rates
More inbound and outbound students participating in varied international activities
Guidepost:
Contribute to the university’s commitment to recognized Indigenous leadership at all levels of the academy, administration, and governance
Address in real and tangible ways the underrepresentation of women scholars at senior ranks
Enhance our position as an institutional leader of diversity, equity and inclusion
Guidepost:
Empower and support our researchers, scholars and artists at all ranks to engage in RSAW activity, and to promote the value of their work
Become a partner of choice for national and international collaborators
Increase number of competitive applications and the success rates in all competitions, including Tri-Agency and other sources of funding
Guidepost:
Students attain skills for forming conclusions, judgements, or inferences from quantitative information; have a writing-intensive experience to achieve competency in writing; learn the context of the contemporary and historical position of Indigenous people, and in so doing also understand the need to challenge and transform core elements of settler colonialism
Faculty offer courses and programs that attract, and meet the needs of, a changing student population that is more diverse and mobile than ever before
Alignment to the University Plan
OUR STRATEGIC FRAMEWORK: “THE WEAVE”
Strategic Commitments to the University’s Plan
- Join University to embolden partnerships in strategic developments and outreach opportunities:
- School of Architecture and Visual Arts: Participate with central administration on co-creating a strategy for program rollout that is cost-sustainable in terms of phased-in faculty complement, start-up costs, and operating costs, and that attracts new student enrolments to the college.
- “Galleries Reimagined”: Place Indigenous representation and engagement as cornerstones of the reimagined approach to visual arts on campus. Include Indigenous peoples in the hub’s activities, targeting growth of the university’s collection of works by Indigenous artists, and prioritizing partnerships with Indigenous arts organizations and artists under the new academic programming structure.
- Museum of Natural Sciences Revitalization: Update and redevelop to enhance its standing as a signature feature of this campus: a hub of scientific research, teaching, and outreach; a prime destination for families, school groups, and visitors to the city; and a vital link between the campus and the community. Build on our success in captivating and inspiring visitors, so that it serves as an inclusive space that respects the land we are on and the Indigenous peoples and cultures here.
- Science Meets Art, and the Public: “Smart-P” is a project through which university can provide a physical space to engage, excite, and inspire the public in the university’s creative scholarly activities. Interdisciplinary research and problem solving activities need to be supported in the university’s ecosystem to realize our community’s innovative potential. Curiosity-based scholarly inquiry, with community engagement and knowledge translation are top drivers in conceptualizing this new space.
- Sustain, coordinate, expand environmental programming: Dovetail with schools and colleges and departments, and coordinate our environmental initiatives with the Global Institute for Water Security, Global Water Futures, Global Institute for Food Security, Plant Phenotyping and Imaging and Research Center.
- Expand and re-envision Northern programming strategy. Build on current and past successes and use Prince Albert and La Ronge as jumping-off points for programs, faculty, and facilities in the north. Pursue creative course delivery options with our partners in regional colleges and communities. Enhance land- and community-based programming. Support a revisioning of the Emma Lake Kenderdine Campus.
- Increase internships and experiential learning: increase opportunities for students and engage more students in those opportunities; hire outward-looking new faculty and continue to align our degrees and programs to best equip our students for the challenges and opportunities of the future.
- Connect more meaningfully with our college alumni and the new generation of donor investors who seek long-term sustainable impact. Enable and enhance a culture of philanthropy founded on relationships built to last and evolve over a lifetime. Support lifelong learning, and in doing so involve seniors and retirees in college life.
- Transformative Decolonization Leading to Reconciliation: Indigenous students, faculty, staff, and communities are holistically strengthening the spirit and methodologies we inhabit.
- Productive Collaboration: Community, private sector, and international partnerships animate every facet of our research enterprise.
- Meaningful Impact: Our knowledge, discoveries, and innovations are helping communities achieve their social, cultural, and economic goals.
- Distinguished Learners: Our graduates are among the most inventive, collaborative, and sought-after in Canada and around the world.
- Global Recognition: Our research, graduates, academic programming, and reputation are recognized as world-class.
The College will align its strategic commitments and related goals and objectives to the university’s aspirations:
By 2025, the job market and technology will have changed, and the College of Arts and Science, through our students, staff and faculty, will ‘create the times’. A sustained breadth of knowledge-creation allows us to capitalize on existing and unpredictable questions and challenges of the future.
We will reach out more broadly across the college and see that the convergence of knowledge is bigger than the convergence of 21 major disciplines. We will use current and new frameworks for problem solving.
We need to work closely with the institution on risk mitigation for our top risks: academic program capacity and equipment age; financial reserves; cyber security; competitive, funded and in-compliance RSAW; communications; technological innovation; management structures; health and safety; post-secondary education competition; availability of information about critical operations and processes.
The college is an ecosystem, with students and researchers, scholars, and artists working across boundaries. The students who see boundaries as porous at the University are Arts and Science students. We are a college in tune with today’s problem-centric needs: our diversity is at the heart of why our college is such an asset to the province and beyond.
