Mission & Vision

Mission, Vision, and Goals

Mission

We connect academic courses with community partners to enhance academic learning, meet community-identified needs, and foster global perspectives through engagement and reflection.

Vision

To create a campus culture that integrates teaching and learning through a commitment to service, civic engagement and positive social change which is highly valued, practiced, assessed, and recognized.

Goals

  • The Creighton campus and community together in partnership share resources, address community-identified needs, and help to educate students to become agents of change and faithful, engaged students. 
  • Every student engages in academic service-learning courses during their time at Creighton.
  • Every school, college and program includes academic service-learning courses.
  • Faculty are recognized and incentivized for teaching service-learning courses, especially in the rank and tenure process.

Guiding Principles

  1. The Office of Academic Service-Learning (OASL) is the primary conduit and center for academic service-learning (AcSL) courses with Creighton partners locally, nationally and internationally characterized by mutuality and collaboration.
  2. AcSL must result in direct or indirect benefits for community partners.
  3. All AcSL courses are established with the input and agreement of all partners, especially for ongoing communication, decision-making and conflict resolution.
  4. Consistent with our Catholic and Jesuit identity, faculty are encouraged to seek community partnerships that embody the Jesuit mission of men and women for and with others and the Catholic Social Teaching principle of a preferential option for the poor and vulnerable.
  5. AcSL is the result of a process including inventory, investigation, preparation, planning, action, reflection, demonstration and assessment.
  6. AcSL is more than simply the addition of service to an academic course, it is the integration of community service into the course so that learning outcomes are achieved as students learn how to contribute to a more just and sustainable world.
  7. AcSL helps students deepen their understanding of disciplinary knowledge in service to the community through reflection resulting in an integrating vision of the world that confirms Creighton’s Catholic and Jesuit identity.
  8. AcSL helps students and faculty at Creighton University reflect on the purpose of Jesuit education through an engagement with transcendent values, including their relationship with God, in an atmosphere of freedom of inquiry, belief, and religious worship.
  9. AcSL nurtures community-based research to enhance teaching, to contribute to the betterment of society, and to discover new knowledge while enabling members of the Creighton University community to stimulate critical and creative thinking and provide ethical perspectives for dealing with an increasingly complex world.
  10. Through AcSL courses, community-based research and community partnerships locally globally, members of the Creighton University community critically examine their own values and attitudes, appreciate the similarities between peoples everywhere, and learn to value diversity.