Converse Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP)

Converse’s Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) is Converse Across Boundaries: Learning Through Diverse Experiences. This theme combines diversity and experiential-learning initiatives in an effort to enhance students’ abilities to understand, evaluate, and personally reflect upon different cultures, worldviews, and social perspectives. Converse Across Boundaries represents an integration of existing and new initiatives and programs. In the classroom, students take core courses dedicated issues of cultural diversity, diverse social perspectives, or the experiences of non-mainstream or marginalized social groups. As one specific dimension of such diversity, the QEP also supports an Interfaith Studies program with both curricular and co-curricular components that celebrate the religious diversity of the region and broaden knowledge of diverse faiths and worldviews.

Outside the classroom, the QEP sponsors a series of campus events and activities in which students occupy or are exposed to roles or perspectives from different cultures, backgrounds, or identities. Within the wider community, Converse Across Boundaries advances student internships as a vehicle for crossing social and personal boundaries. And the QEP expands our study-travel programs as a powerful way to encounter other ways of life and to appreciate the cultural variation within our society. In the past four years since the QEP implementation, we have seen an increase in diversity-related courses, in terms of their overall footprint within the college curriculum, the variety of the kinds of courses offered, the number of separate departments contributing such courses, and the number of individual faculty members who have started teaching diversity-related courses. Read the QEP Executive Summary here