Global Health an Early Focus of Global Baylor Plan to Enhance Student Learning
Baylor's recent reaccreditation review by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC) advances the University's new Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP), Global Baylor: Addressing Challenges to Human Flourishing. Launching this August, the ten-year plan will foster student learning by deepening global engagement, with an emphasis on global health for the first few years.
The choice to focus initially on global health within the broader range of global challenges was a decision arrived at by the QEP Steering Committee—composed of students, staff, and faculty—after considerable discussion and reflection. Global health is an inclusive topic, engaging all levels of students and faculty from virtually all academic disciplines. For example, while faculty and students in STEM fields may work to develop the next great diagnostic instrument or treatment for a particular medical condition, it will require the support of colleagues trained in various business fields to scale this product and take it to market. It will need the expertise of trained medical health practitioners-nurses and physicians, therapists, social workers and counselors, with all their support staff-to deliver these services to patients.
In a global health setting, there will be a need for the insights of various disciplines in the humanities and social sciences to adapt and translate ideas across cultural boundaries in order to build community education and outreach programs to fit respectfully into local traditions around the world. It will, in short, require a comprehensive, transdisciplinary approach in which the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts to achieve the goals of improving human flourishing through advances in global health.
As a Christian research university, Baylor University is called upon to tend to a broken world. What better place for a student to start than by exploring key global health working alongside world-class faculty? Opportunities for global health experiences through research, study abroad or global missions experiences enable Baylor students to develop invaluable cross-cultural, transdisciplinary and discipline-specific skills while actively engaged in Kingdom work. Through the global health focus of the QEP, it is hoped that more students will discover ways to integrate their academic passions with their calling to serve. That is the mission of Baylor University.
To learn more, visit baylor.edu/globalbaylor.
[contributors: Jeffrey Hamilton, Kevin Chambliss, Shelley Conroy, and Shelby Garner]