Academic Foundations is a process of academic remediation and cultural enrichment by which a student creates a foundation for his or her higher education and lifelong learning.
Academic Foundations is a program which includes individualized instruction, academic advisement, career planning, peer tutoring, and other supportive services.
Academic Foundations is a department which boasts a committed faculty of full and adjunct educators; a practical, individualized, learning-centered curriculum; and a diverse enrollment of students who learn in different ways and at different speeds.
Academic Foundations is a department which boasts a committed faculty of full and adjunct educators; a practical, individualized, learning-centered curriculum; and a diverse enrollment of students who learn in different ways and at different speeds.
Academic Foundations is a curriculum designed to enhance the ability of students to communicate effectively in writing, to augment and enrich their experiences through reading, and to function as consumers and producers by problem-solving in mathematics. Academic Foundations is a concept which describes students as follows:
- The most important people on campus. Without them, there would be no need for the institution.
- Not cold enrollment statistics but flesh-and-blood human beings with feelings and emotions like those of their teachers.
- Not someone simply to be tolerated as an interruption of our “work” (i.e., grading, planning, reading, researching, serving on committees, etc.) but to be regarded as the purpose of it. We teachers are not doing the students a favor by serving them; rather, they are doing us a favor by giving us the opportunity to do so.
Academic Foundations is a commitment to the following objectives:
- To diagnose specific skills deficiencies among entering students.
- To provide for appropriate placement of the underachieving student in developmental or self-development courses and in the traditional college program to follow.
- To provide curricula for remediation of skill deficiencies to the point where the student may be expected to compete successfully with other students in college-level academic courses.
- To minimize failing grades of hard-working students during the period of remediation and to create a climate in which they can experience success through awareness of their own learning.
- To develop flexible, meaningful curricula, using innovative techniques, together with a multimedia approach.
- To provide for individualized learning programs with each student working at his/her own pace – both rate of progress and coverage of material to be determined by the student’s own ability and application.
- To encourage personal communication and rapport between students and instructors.
- To identify students in the program within the total college from the time of their initial enrollment.
