Learning Outcomes

Learning is a transformative, iterative, and lifelong process informed by diverse sources of experience, information, dialogue, and reflection. SIT academic programs are designed to engage students in this process of learning, supporting and challenging them as they develop the knowledge, skills, and values SIT envisions. While students benefit from their studies in innumerable ways during their program and beyond, SIT articulates the learning students are expected to be able to demonstrate upon completion of their program through Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs). These Student Learning Outcomes are expressed on multiple, integrated levels: Institutional (ILOs); Divisional Learning Outcomes (LOs); and Program Learning Outcomes (PLOs).

INSTITUTIONAL LEARNING OUTCOMES

Institutional Learning Outcomes encapsulate the unique characteristics that define an SIT education. Whether a doctoral degree or a first-year program, students are expected to gain proficiency in key areas that will be measured at various points of their academic experience with SIT. These key areas are defined as:

Global Learning: A critical analysis of and engagement with complex, interdependent global systems and legacies and their implications for people’s lives and the earth’s sustainability. As a global institution of higher education, SIT is rooted in an educational approach that views human experience as a domain in which intellect, affect, and imagination intersect to create inclusive and innovative ways of thinking about critical planetary issues such as inequality, climate change, health, education, and peace and justice. SIT understands global learning as an interdisciplinary dialogue and cross-disciplinary collaboration with the desire to create conditions for the attainment of academic excellence through bottom-up engagement.

Social Justice: An ethical orientation to our world based on the acknowledgment of the pervasiveness of inequality and inequity. SIT programming seeks to address social injustices by centering analyses of power, history, systems, and accountability. It embraces values of fairness, respect, self-determination, and opportunity within the social, economic and political systems in a way that maximizes individuals’ and communities’ abilities to achieve basic human needs and reach their full potential.  

Critical Inquiry and Reflection: A mindset and process that guide the exploration of issues from multiple perspectives. Through the process of gathering and evaluating information, ideas, assumptions, and experiences, students develop their own analysis and reasoning, which leads to new avenues of thought, innovation, questions, and meaning-making. By providing models for critical reflection, SIT programs challenge students to articulate and constantly interrogate their own worldview.

Integrative Learning and Practice: An understanding and a learning disposition that a student builds across curriculum and co-curriculum environments. SIT’s integrative learning and practice is embedded in the curriculum and program design through academic scholarship, experiential pedagogy, and a multidisciplinary approach that fuses local and international perspectives on critical global issues. Through structured integration of research, groundbreaking engagement with different forms of inquiry and cross-cultural sources of learning, and community interaction and cultural immersion, integrative thinkers become intentional learners empowered to make connections through various experiences, approach intellectual and life practices in an ethical and responsible way, and participate fully in a plurality of cognitive domains and the life of their communities. Through synthesis of information from multiple sources and social practices, self-directed learners are able to develop transferable knowledge, skills, and attitudes. 

Interculturality: A learning experience of living and interacting between peoples and cultures based on equitable exchanges, dialogue, and mutual respect. Interculturality goes beyond passive coexistence and values of pluralism and seeks to build pathways between cultures and different ways of being and knowing. 

Upon completion of an SIT academic program, students will be able to:

  • GLOBAL LEARNING ILO: Apply the plurality of disciplinary and transdisciplinary knowledge to critical global issues and contexts.
  • SOCIAL JUSTICE ILO: Respond ethically to issues of inequity and inequality.
  • CRITICAL INQUIRY & REFLECTION ILO: Ask and propose answers to thought-provoking questions through inquiry and analysis.
  • INTEGRATIVE LEARNING & PRACTICE ILO: Synthesize various streams of information, experience, and reflection into a transferable and evolving body of knowledge and skills.
  • INTERCULTURALITY ILO: Negotiate similarities and differences between peoples and cultures through respectful and equitable dialogue and exchange.

DIVISIONAL LEARNING OUTCOMES

Divisional Learning Outcomes contextualize Institutional Learning Outcomes with respect to the distinctive ethos of each branch of SIT’s academic programming.

Program Learning Outcomes are listed in the SIT Graduate Institute Catalog and online.

SIT Graduate Institute
SIT Study Abroad, IHP, and SIT First Year