Weitzman is committed to creating a learning environment in which all students, faculty, and staff members feel valued. As a school whose faculty, students, alums, and friends have strengthened communities around the world through visual culture and the built environment, we recognize the profound importance of contributions from individuals with a variety of backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. Equal opportunity and a global outlook are foundational to the fulfillment of our mission and values.
Community building at Weitzman has taken many forms, including establishing a school-wide committee consisting of Weitzman faculty, staff, and students focusing on promoting our schoolwide values; partnering with the Penn Center for Excellence in Teaching, Learning and Innovation (CETLI) to promote effective and inclusive teaching practices across the school; and collaborating with communities across the region to implement neighborhood improvement initiatives. We welcome participation from Weitzman students, faculty, and staff in support of these programs, and to help us develop new initiatives in response to the dynamic needs of our vibrant community.
The Weitzman Engagement + Community (WE+C) platform creates opportunities and spaces to increase our understanding of others’ experiences and support one another through social activities, interactive discussions, trainings, and initiatives designed to promote a culture of care and respect. By creating more opportunities and spaces for connection, we are helping to build and strengthen the Weitzman learning and research community.
Weitzman Engagement + Community (WE+C) | Goal and Objective
New
Our Goal
To promote an environment for productive engagement opportunities to share in ideas and lessons learned through the practice of community building.
Our Objective
To reinforce opportunities for members of our community to engage in becoming more culturally literate school wide. These practices will be pursued through service to others and serving as a resource to develop partnerships across all relationship levels of the Stuart Weitzman School of Design.
Missing Each Other: How to Cultivate Meaningful Connections
Edward S. Brodkin & Ashley A. Pallathra
“Attunement becomes most powerful when we understand each other and foster mutual responsiveness. There are lots of things that can get in the way of understanding someone—including our own assumptions about the person, or
what we want or need them to be. Understanding someone else also involves understanding yourself, including your own triggers and the patterns in your relationships.”
Weitzman Engagement + Community (WE+C) | Focus
New
Focus
The Weitzman Engagement + Community (WE+C) platform is an invitation for all members of our school to contribute to sharing our best selves and welcoming the best of others. Ideally, this means we want to prioritize opportunities to build community and create engagement by increasing our understanding and support of each other.
That path starts by interacting with and becoming more intentionally literate about the various cultural values of our students and fellow community members. To do that it is important to provide spaces and seek out moments to engage and sometimes serve with our peers from all school levels. Open to active input from everyone, this platform is designed to safely focus our efforts on socially constructive ways to meaningfully reinforce our collective healthy, growth and development.
Our focus on building engagement and community will afford opportunities to:
• Build more awareness of other’s experiences, successes and challenges
• Be conscious of direct | indirect advantages and disadvantages within a community
• Gain appreciation for new perspectives through our regular | planned interactions
• Open us up to the rewarding experience of serving as a resource for one another
• Take creative approaches to growth opportunities to engage with all members of our community
Weitzman Engagement + Community (WE+C) | Our Why?
New
Our Commitment to Building Community and Creating Engagement:
“The Weitzman’s students, faculty, and staff from all over the world are committed to the continued recognition of our commonalities and becoming more aware of how to understand and support each other’s differences. We are confident that a consistent emphasis on the practice of cultural literacy will make community engagement in service to fellow humans a central motivation for our Weitzman design community. We venture to create a shared understanding of how to powerfully elevate our WE+C platform, school curriculum and a culture of service best and most appropriately.
An example of our commitment to such efforts includes:
// Continued support of our school-wide IDEA (Invite, Design Engaged-Awareness) Committee made of faculty, staff, and students dedicated to generating impactful Weitzman Engagement + Community (WE+C) building opportunities and
facilitating their implementation across the school.”
The site will also provide students the opportunity to…
• Find Information on upcoming events
• View (WE+C) updates
• Share IDEA suggestions
Our Why?
With so many challenging events surrounding us locally, nationally and globally we understand the importance of engaging productively about social and popular issues of the day. However, we believe, more importantly it is vital that we create a culture that values and builds common skills to discuss these tough topics. We invite you to participate in these activities.
We hope this time will provide us with techniques, tips and shared best practices to help improve our ability to seek productive ways of thinking about and building
opportunities and spaces for common ground. Let us work together to lean toward having open hearts, open minds, empathetic ears and a willingness to share in a powerfully rewarding moment to learn and grow together.
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