The College: Overview
Burlington College is an independent, progressive, liberal arts college located in Burlington, Vermont, offering two-year Associate and four-year Bachelor of Arts degrees, as well as several professional certificate programs. The College, originally called the Vermont Institute of Community Involvement, is a non-profit institution that is fully accredited by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges.
Our founders' intention was to create an undergraduate institution firmly rooted in concern for individual students and their interaction with the community. The College continues to offer rich and diverse opportunities for students to participate in arts related events, the natural environment, and civic and humanitarian projects.
The College's mission affirms the innate dignity of every human being and gives direction to a program of education that addresses learners as individuals and helps them increase their awareness, knowledge and competence. Students are actively engaged in planning and implementing their education in an atmosphere of open communication and shared responsibility. This collaborative approach is valued by our students, many of whom are balancing their need for higher learning with the demands of family and work.
Creative adaptation of strong liberal arts curricula in Humanities, Fine Arts and the Social Sciences has led to the focused development of majors in Transpersonal Psychology, Cinema Studies and Film Production, Legal and Justice Studies, Inter-American Studies, Writing and Literature and many other majors. Students carry out service to the community as an integral component of their education at Burlington College, and the Institute for Civic Engagement was inaugurated in 2005 to better enable the College to research, educate, publish, and take action on issues of importance to Vermont and the wider world.
The College has, from the outset, developed a distinctly social, community-based mission and shared governance system that sets it apart from most colleges and universities. An alternative institution committed to individualized education, the College has a pedagogy based on mutual respect, small classes, dialogue, and experiential learning.
Burlington College treats students as individuals – individuals with important contributions to make to the intellectual spirit of the College community. Working in discussion-centered classes that usually range from eight to fifteen members, students come to know each other and themselves very well as they balance academic rigor and mutual support while being challenged to discover what truly matters to them. In this stimulating environment, classes can take on lives of their own as students direct the discussions and instructors become equal participants in the learning process.
The respect students are given in the classroom is reflected in the College's non-grading evaluation system. At the outset of each course or other learning activity, student and instructor negotiate a learning contract that sets expectations as well as specific learning goals. At the end of the semester, both student and instructor provide written evaluations of progress made toward these central goals. The evaluation period becomes not a harried time of cramming for exams, but a time for reflection on what one has learned. It empowers students to honestly assess their own learning, rather than passively waiting for grades.