The American University of Paris | Academics

"Envisioning a World of Interdependence"

The goal of an AUP education is ultimately to nurture the development of individuals to become independent thinkers, adaptable lifelong learners, and active contributors to society. Students are encouraged to translate intellectual endeavor into civic responsibility, and to apply the lessons of history to today’s exigencies and those of the future.

In academic year 2004-2005, AUP inaugurated its new general education program, “Envisioning a World of Interdependence.” This four-year program has been designed to complement work in the major, by running parallel to it over the course of a student’s academic trajectory. Students begin with a content-rich, team-taught, interdisciplinary, first-year learning community known as FirstBridge. Reading, writing, researching and public speaking are central to the FirstBridge experience. Students begin learning here how to communicate effectively—in multiple modes and formats—across cultures.

At AUP we place a high value on the capacity to speak more than one language fluently, and to use second and third languages in research, travel, and internship situations. A general education curriculum designed to envision a world of interdependence necessarily emphasizes the links between language and culture, between language learning and cultural discovery, integrating across the curriculum at every checkpoint of a student’s educational trajectory writing, speaking, and arguing skills.

Education for global citizenship also requires familiarity with new technologies, from mastery of state-of-the-art software to data retrieval and evaluation, from information gathering to advanced research methods. At AUP we often embed technology skills within general education courses.

We also put a premium on interdisciplinary modes of thinking, precisely because they develop powers of synthesizing, adapting, applying, or comparing different approaches.

Additionally, we believe that world citizens must be given opportunities for autonomous work as well as for work in cross-cultural groups where they must adapt to the pace, dynamics, various worldviews, and the exigencies of a team.

Finally, global citizenship calls for an integration of higher learning and the demands of full participation in an increasingly transnational world. We encourage our students to integrate work inside and outside the classroom by means of internships, co-curricular opportunities, and both virtual and person-to-person links to other schools, and to the world beyond the university gates, such as the communities of business, law, communications, the academy, and science, to name but a few.

Our general education program emphasizes the following values:

	the importance of science and math as essential means of learning for informed, ethically aware citizens;

	the recognition that our international, poly-lingual student body requires a special culture of literacy, one that respects the ongoing work of language acquisition—of French and English—for nearly all our students;

	the flexibility of choice or options in a student’s general educational trajectory, as learning objectives may be reached by different paths - a student’s linguistic skills, career interests, background, as well as many other factors may influence the series of choices made over the course of an AUP career;

	the creation of a voluntary Senior Capstone that permits a student to reflect back on his or her education, apply knowledge and skills acquired at AUP to real-life situations, and integrate in some way work done in the general education and major programs of study.

General Education?

A pillar of the American model of education is the undergraduate general education program that exposes students to a broad range of academic disciplines. In the American system, this “generalizing” stream of courses is balanced by concentrated or “specializing” study in a single discipline or “major.”

Normally the undergraduate program is divided into three parts: general education, the major, and elective courses. Although formerly general education referred to the introductory courses students took in their first two years of college, today it is a vertical plan stretching across a student’s four years in college.

We believe that generalizing at its best occurs alongside specialized learning, and often requires grounding in the major to be practiced most responsibly.

The four pillars of an AUP education —knowledge, intellectual skills, contexts, and creativity— are designed to interweave reception and production, past and future, personal and interpersonal, tradition and invention, self and other. They are implemented sequentially in a dynamic, international setting through an interdisciplinary curriculum that is both coherently organized and flexible enough for individualized participatory learning.

The general education program at AUP has been designed to produce students who will be actors and agents in an increasingly complex world. We aim to foster in our students a critical, informed, active belonging to the world that responds to, and helps shape, the intellectual and practical challenges of the twenty-first century.