Interact with the Strategic Plan Framework Below to Learn More About Core Plan Components
Priority Areas of Focus
- Innovating Teaching, Learning, and Student Success: Ensuring that faculty and staff are working together to develop and deliver high-quality, evidence-based teaching, learning, and student services.
- Advancing Research and Scholarship: Supporting and increasing the impact and visibility of scholarly activity across the varied disciplines in BSOS that strives to find solutions to the most pressing issues of our time.
- Building Partnerships: Developing new and supporting existing partnerships, both within and beyond traditional academic boundaries, that enhance our mission-critical work.
Cross-Cutting Themes
- Promoting Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Social Justice: Creating and maintaining an environment where diverse perspectives are valued, inclusive and equitable practices are upheld, and systemic injustices are actively challenged and dismantled.
- Supporting and Recognizing our People: Recognizing that our community members are our greatest assets, we invest in their development and well-being to allow them to thrive.
Innovating Teaching, Learning, and Student Success
The College of Behavioral and Social Sciences prioritizes teaching, learning, and student success as a central part of our mission and contribution to the campus. BSOS faculty and staff are dedicated to innovation and excellence in their instruction and delivery methods. With a broad portfolio of undergraduate and graduate degree programs across the social and behavioral sciences, BSOS offers numerous learning opportunities that cater to the needs and passions of our diverse student body. We have the unique privilege of training the next generation of activists, anthropologists, audiologists, criminologists, counter-terrorism experts, economists, geographers, politicians, psychologists, social data scientists, sociologists, survey methodologists and more.
During the coming years, we will continue to innovate in teaching, learning, and student success by implementing and assessing evidence-based practices in our teaching and learning spaces, including classrooms and clinics, as well as research, internship, and service-learning settings. We will also deliver robust and accessible student-centered support services to meet the evolving academic and career planning needs of our students.
- Drive Academic Innovation: Promote and measure the impact of pedagogical innovation and proactive interventions that drive undergraduate and graduate student success, especially with a focus on erasing gaps in academic engagement and success between groups in the College.
- Accelerate Student Success: Enhance targeted support programs and mentorship opportunities in order to recruit, retain, graduate, and successfully launch diverse undergraduate and graduate students.
- Increase Adaptability: Develop best practices for BSOS departments to deliver optimal instruction and student services (in-person, blended, online) to meet the needs of our heterogeneous student population.
- Promote Continuous Learning: Support the ongoing professional development and training of faculty, staff, graduate student instructors, and teaching assistants across all backgrounds and ranks so they are prepared, confident, and well-supported in their important roles as teachers and mentors to our students.
- Promoting Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Social Justice: Our College is home to faculty, staff, and students with diverse backgrounds and lived experiences. Recognizing the unique perspectives and identities of our community members, we are committed to adapting to meet their evolving needs. Our goal is to empower our instructors to deliver high-quality, student-centered learning experiences to a diverse student body, ensuring equitable and holistic support for all.
- Supporting and Recognizing our People: We owe a debt of gratitude to our faculty, staff, graduate student instructors, and teaching assistants who are trailblazers in teaching, learning, and student success. Our employees are committed to providing meaningful learning opportunities and student services for each BSOS student from initial onboarding to career exploration. By strengthening continuous learning for employees, we support them in this mission.
- Increased retention and graduation rates
- Increased student satisfaction and belonging
- Increased academic engagement and success of students, independent of race/ethnicity, gender, first-generation, or transfer status
- Increased quality of first-destination placement of BSOS alumni
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Advancing Research and Scholarship
We produce research and scholarship that improves the human experience by investigating the social and behavioral angles of major problems facing local and global communities. BSOS disciplines are at the heart of these problems such as climate change, mental health crises, threats to our democracy, social justice, and the intersection of human behavior and artificial intelligence. Consider climate change – it is not enough to study the environmental impacts of global warming, we must understand the political, regulatory, societal, behavioral, economic, and health dimensions too in order to develop sustainable solutions.
Our College is home to an international community of experts across numerous departments, programs, research centers and initiatives. Although external funding is just one indicator of our success and impact, over the last three years, BSOS faculty and staff generated an average of $59 million annually in external funding from prestigious entities including the NIH, NSF, NASA, and DHS. In addition, our experts produce data, findings, technology, interventions, and recommendations that guide a wide range of professionals toward effective life-changing solutions.
Over the coming years, we will strategically invest in research facilities, technology, and infrastructure so that BSOS can continue to help solve the most important and challenging issues of our time. Now, more than ever, it is critical that we bring attention to the work that we do, strengthen and expand our research footprint, and continue to develop practical applications and policies that bring about meaningful change.
- Recruit and Retain World-Class Researchers: Create an environment where all PTK and TTK faculty can thrive in their scholarly pursuits through effective onboarding, career development, and promotion.
- Invest in IT and Computing Support: Support and expand faculty and staff capacity by improving hardware, software, and cloud support for research projects with complex computing needs.
- Enhance Facilities for Research Activity: Expand research impact by modifying and building labs and clinics to create flexible and high-quality research spaces for faculty, staff, and students.
- Engage BSOS Students in Research and Scholarship: Increase undergraduate and graduate student exposure to and participation in social and behavioral sciences research and scholarship, especially with a focus on eliminating the participation gap for underrepresented groups in the College.
- Expand Awareness of BSOS Research: Implement a communications and marketing strategy to highlight the contributions of BSOS researchers using various channels to reach campus, local, state, national, and global audiences.
- Promoting Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Social Justice: We will continue to enhance the application and generalizability of our research and scholarship and address issues of inequality and injustice by diversifying our community of faculty, staff, undergraduate and graduate students.
- Supporting and Recognizing our People: In order to produce cutting-edge research and scholarship, it is critical we enhance our facilities, improve IT resources, and strengthen grant writing and other training. These investments unlock the capacity of research teams to conduct impactful research.
- Increased research impact measured through varied indicators
- Increased grant submissions and awards
- Increased diversity of researchers and areas of scholarship
- Increased satisfaction and successful retention of our outstanding researchers
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Building Partnerships
The College of Behavioral and Social Sciences has built and nurtured meaningful partnerships with diverse entities across the local community, the country, and the world. These academic, research, and clinical collaborations include relationships with higher education, government, private and public sector employers, foundations, and other community partners. As an example, our College brings together leading scholars from diverse disciplines to support, produce, and promote population research, which is crucial to supporting an equitable, sustainable, and well-informed society. Collaborating across borders is also critically important as our world faces multifaceted global challenges, such as social inequity, gun violence, mass incarceration, opioid addiction, and terrorism. Consider threats to democracy – it is important that we partner locally, nationally, and globally to understand how factors including disengagement, misinformation, and political violence are eroding trust in democracy.
Over the coming years, we will focus on strengthening and broadening our partnerships even further to serve our students and our local and global communities. Drawing on our proximity to Washington, D.C., and our field work across the globe, we will continue to expand our partnership outreach and civic engagement.
- Advance Research and Clinical Partnerships: Expand collaborations with academic, governmental, non-governmental, community, philanthropic, and corporate partners by strengthening connections and highlighting expertise in BSOS.
- Partner to Advance the Public Good: Identify pressing societal issues where BSOS can make an important contribution through coordination with external entities and the UMD Center for Community Engagement (CCE).
- Strengthen Educational Partnerships: Increase access to and awareness of experiential learning opportunities for students and foster a pipeline of diverse professional talent across a wide range of industries.
- Mitigate Barriers to Collaboration: Simplify processes for external partners to engage with BSOS in educational and research settings.
- Promoting Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Social Justice: We will prioritize partnerships that tackle grand challenges such as health disparities, social stratification, economic inequality, racism, gender inequality, incarceration and victimization, to name a few.
- Supporting and Recognizing our People: Our dedicated faculty, staff, and students are essential in building and maintaining meaningful long-term partnerships. The College is committed to providing BSOS community members doing this work with the tools they need to share their talents with the world.
- Increased community-engaged teaching, learning, and research partnerships
- Increased dissemination and visibility of BSOS world-class research
- Increased public visibility of partnerships, including media coverage
- Increased faculty and staff satisfaction with partnership infrastructure and support
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