2024-25 EMU Core

Owned by Jenni Piper
Last updated: Oct 16, 2023 by Amber Tobey
3 min read

Core Overview

EMU prepares students to serve and lead in a global context. Our community of learning integrates Christian faith, academic rigor, artistic creation and reflective practice informed by the liberal arts, interdisciplinary engagement, and cross-cultural encounter.  (EMU Mission Statement)

As educators in the EMU Core, we join with students of all faiths, ethnicities, and cultural backgrounds to engage in, contribute to, transform and be transformed within EMU’s community of learning. The EMU Core, our undergraduate general education curriculum, seeks to support students’ growth “as unifying leaders equipped with intercultural competence, oriented towards peace and justice, and rooted in an active faith modeled on the life and teachings of Jesus” (EMU Mission, Vision, and Values). The Anabaptist Christian faith sustains EMU’s focus on equity and peacebuilding, sustainability, and intercultural understanding. Christians have been complicit in colonialism, racism, and other forms of systemic oppression; and yet the life and teachings of Jesus contain wisdom and power to transform systems of oppression, build peace, sustain hope, and help us live ethically with each other in the natural world. 

Our EMU Core student learning outcomes promote EMU values and support social and professional development. Our students will graduate with a broad base of knowledge and professional skills augmented by their deeper exploration of a particular discipline. Moreover, we hope they will be attuned to wise ways of being in, understanding, and approaching their world--that is, that they develop awareness that can grow into wisdom through experiences at and beyond EMU. Wisdom flourishes in community, with many religious, ethnic, and indigenous groups sustaining wisdom traditions. Wise, unifying leaders have intercultural expertise, enabling them to work within and across communities, to find productive tensions in conflict, and to apply their knowledge reflectively towards transformative solutions.

Wisdom is acquired through experience and shared through storytelling. As students build their EMU portfolios, we hope that they will examine the stories that shape them, understand their own stories, and recognize the stories that shape their communities and the world.  We know that not all personal stories will be ready to be told during a student’s years at EMU, and that awareness and knowledge acquired in several years may require decades of experience, practice, and encounter to grow into wisdom. As students curate their EMU portfolios and tell the stories of their time at EMU, we hope that they will recognize that they have acquired skills and dispositions needed to become reflective co-authors in the story of the world.

We recognize diverse sources of wisdom and commit ourselves to seeking out and elevating historically underrepresented narratives within the broader narratives of our disciplines.

EMU Core Student Learning Outcomes

EMU Values Outcomes

EMU Values Outcomes link to our university verse, Micah 6:8. What does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?

  • Power & Equity (Do Justice): Students will analyze power and identity in systems and cultures through the lenses of anti-racism and anti-oppression to promote justice and equity. 

  • Environmental Sustainability (Love Mercy): Students will explain the significance of environmental sustainability and the interconnectedness between the natural world and human thriving. 

  • Intercultural Understanding (Walk Humbly):  Students will demonstrate skills in cultural self-awareness and perspective-taking in intercultural contexts.

  • Faith & Meaning (With God): Students will articulate their understanding of the meaning of their lives and significance of their choices as a result of studying ethics, Christian scripture, and Anabaptist Mennonite beliefs in practice.

Professional and Social Development Outcomes

Professional and Social development outcomes support practical and intellectual skills for wise, engaged professionals and community builders.

  • Communication: Students will apply effective communication skills by gathering, interpreting, critiquing, and presenting information from diverse sources.

  • Innovative and Applied Learning: Through integrative reflection, students will design creative solutions and responses to real-world challenges and situations.

  • Integrative learning: Students integrate broad knowledge of human culture and the natural world with concerns that transcend disciplinary boundaries.

  • Reflective Collaboration: Students will reflect on their growth as persons in diverse communities and their ability to collaborate constructively with others.