Fostering an intellectually vibrant culture rooted in our cross-disciplinary expertise.
Overview
HCDE’s Culture pillar is about creating the conditions for intellectual life to flourish across the department. That includes the habits, relationships, and practices that support curiosity, collaboration, mentorship, experimentation, and the integration of research and teaching.
This pillar recognizes that culture is not separate from HCDE’s academic mission — it is what helps that mission thrive. A strong culture makes it possible for students, faculty, instructors, and staff to engage with complexity, learn from one another, and contribute to a department where rigorous thinking and shared growth are part of everyday life.
Outcomes
HCDE cultivates a culture that is intellectually rigorous for both students and faculty.
This outcome focuses on maintaining high expectations while also supporting the kind of learning environment where challenge, experimentation, and productive struggle are valued.
Strategies
- Conduct continuous engagement with the HCDE community to shape expectations of intellectual challenge across the department.
- Encourage teaching practices that support risk-taking and learning through productive struggle.
- Strengthen mentorship and recognition practices that reinforce intellectual risk-taking and growth within the HCDE community.
HCDE fosters a vibrant intellectual community where faculty engage with each other’s research, teaching, and design practice across disciplines.
HCDE’s cross-disciplinary strength depends on active intellectual exchange. This outcome supports regular opportunities for faculty to learn from one another and connect across areas of expertise.
Strategies
- Create regular venues for faculty to share and discuss scholarship across HCDE.
Teaching is a central site of collaboration and shared intellectual culture within HCDE.
Teaching is one of the main places where HCDE’s values become visible. This outcome focuses on strengthening the instructional community and making teaching a shared, supported, and visible part of departmental life.
Strategies
- Increase visibility, knowledge exchange, and alignment in teaching practices and outcomes across HCDE instructors.
- Strengthen onboarding and integration for HCDE’s instructional community.
- Strengthen mentorship and support structures for the HCDE Teaching Assistant community.
HCDE’s research and education reinforce one another, strengthening shared intellectual vitality.
This outcome centers the connection between research and teaching so that each informs and enriches the other. It reflects HCDE’s belief that the department is strongest when students and faculty experience research and education as part of one connected intellectual ecosystem.
Strategies
- Use research expertise and trajectories to proactively shape curriculum direction.
- Build structured cross-community awareness of research and teaching.
- Integrate student researchers into the intellectual life of the department.