Message from Dean Anderson
We are an engaged Education community.
The theme of community engagement—to our students, local community, and the world—is carried throughout the stories we bring you in the 2021 Impact Report.
The College’s mission of teaching, research, and service echoes the reason the University of Illinois was established as a land-grant institution over 150 years ago: to enhance the lives of people in Illinois, across the nation, and around the world through leadership in learning, discovery, and engagement.
Chancellor Jones stated in his 2017 State of the University address, as he launched the campus’ Strategic Plan: “Inseparable from our investments and innovations around diversity will be our efforts to move from being a university with engagement programs to a Publicly Engaged University...we cannot deliver on the land-grant promise of the 21st century if public engagement is not an organizing principle for us as a university.”
Education at Illinois has a long and rich history of engagement with local, regional, national, and global communities. Through our centers, initiatives, and offices, we seek to view engagement through the lens of being a “mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge and resources in a context of partnership and reciprocity.” (Carnegie Foundation, 2006.)
Today, engagement is a core value of the Education at Illinois experience. From hiring our first-ever Director of Public Engagement for the College, to reenergizing a local Freedom School, to launching a new master’s program in Mental Health Counseling, we support faculty, staff, and student engagement in a myriad of ways.
I am extremely proud of our College of Education students, faculty, staff, and alumni’s dedication to public engagement and service. Engagement is woven into the fabric of everything we do in Education, and we are a stronger and more beautiful community because of it.
Yours in Orange & Blue
James D. Anderson
Dean, College of Education
and Edward William and Jane Marr Gutsgell Professor of Education