Student Handbook:

Vision, Mission, and Goals

Vision

Walden University envisions a distinctively different 21st-century learning community where knowledge is judged worthy to the degree that it can be applied by its graduates to the immediate solutions of critical societal challenges, thereby advancing the greater global good.

Mission

Walden University provides a diverse community of career professionals with the opportunity to transform themselves as scholar-practitioners so that they can effect positive social change.

Goals

• To provide multicontextual educational opportunities for career learners.
• To provide innovative, learner-centered educational programs that recognize and incorporate the knowledge, skills, and abilities students bring into their academic programs.
• To provide its programs through diverse process-learning approaches, all resulting in outcomes of quality and integrity.
• To provide an inquiry/action model of education that fosters research, discovery, and critical thinking and that results in professional excellence.
• To produce graduates who are scholarly, reflective practitioners and agents of positive social change.

Walden University defines positive social change as a deliberate process of creating and applying ideas, strategies, and actions to promote the worth, dignity, and development of individuals, communities, organizations, institutions, cultures, and societies. Positive social change results in the improvement of human and social conditions.

This definition of positive social change provides an intellectually comprehensive and socially constructive foundation for the programs, research, professional activities, and products created by the Walden academic community.

In addition, Walden supports positive social change through the development of principled, knowledgeable, and ethical scholar-practitioners, who are and will become civic and professional role models by advancing the betterment of society.

Walden University strives to produce graduates with the knowledge, skills, and abilities to:

• Facilitate positive social change where they work, in their communities, and in society.
• Use their knowledge to positively impact their profession, communities, and society.
• Demonstrate a commitment to lifelong learning.
• Apply their learning to specific problems and challenges in their workplace and professional settings.
• Demonstrate information literacy.*
• *Information literacy is defined as the ability to know when there is a need for information, and being able to identify, locate, evaluate, and effectively use that information for the issue or problem at hand.
• Demonstrate an understanding of the methods of inquiry used in their professional or academic field.
• Practice legal and ethical integrity in their professional work.
• Effectively communicate their ideas and the rationale behind them to others.
• Support diversity and multiculturalism within their profession, communities, and society.

Quality | Integrity | Student-Centeredness

Values

Three values—quality, integrity, and student-centeredness—are the core of the university and the touchstones for action at all levels of the organization. They demand high standards of excellence, uncompromising openness and honesty, and primary attention to the progress of our students. These values and principles give Walden University its unique identity and underpin the Walden University mission.

Quality

• Walden University believes that quality and integrity are the cornerstones of all academic processes.
• Walden University believes in innovation and flexibility in the conception and delivery of its educational programs, and that there are many different academic routes to achieve quality and integrity.

Integrity

• Walden University believes that education and social change are fundamental to the provision and maintenance of democratic ideals and principles, especially that of the common good.
• Walden University believes that its learners effect positive social change when they behave as reflective or scholarly practitioners.
• Walden University believes that the inquiry/action model fosters critical thinking and underpins research and discovery for reflective practitioners (bachelor’s and master’s students) and scholar-practitioners (doctoral students). This model provides the framework for teaching, learning, and assessment.

Student-Centeredness

• Walden University believes that all adult learners should have innovative educational access, especially those who are without opportunity in other venues.
• Walden University believes that academic programs must be learner-centered, incorporating learners’ prior knowledge and allowing them to focus their academic work on their needs and interests.