Yasmine Ziesler, Program Manager for General Education and Liberal Studies

In Yasmine’s view, all work at CCV comes back to the core mission of the new Gen Ed program, “to develop engaged, self-directed, and collaborative learners.” For the past two years, Yasmine has been chairing CCV’s redesign of its General Education Program. The program details were finalized by PMC this spring and approved by CCV’s Academic Council, and new students will begin the curriculum this fall.

Some of the highlights of the new general education curriculum according to Yasmine include the deliberate structuring of skill development across the curriculum. The program begins with courses developing “core competencies – in writing, critical thinking, technological problem-solving, quantitative reasoning, and communication” to those introducing students to the “strategies of inquiry” across academic disciplines, to the more advanced “integrative approaches” of courses, including a new “sustainability and global perspectives” requirement and CCV’s capstone course, Seminar in Educational Inquiry (SEI). “One of the most affirming outcomes of the Gen Ed redesign was that, after researching best practices nationwide, we found CCV has long had many of these in place. The Dimensions and SEI courses are the cornerstones of the strong foundation that the CCV general education program provides for students’ lifelong learning.”

When not working on Gen Ed, Yasmine can be found in the Burlington site office, where she leads the site’s coordinator team, coordinates the social sciences curriculum, and advises students in human services and criminal justice. She also serves as a representative to the VSC general education planning group and CCV’s data development team, which is hard at work developing a framework for understanding how students make progress through their academic programs.

Yasmine studied cognitive science and Russian as an undergraduate student and earned a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from Boston University studying the socialization of Korean children living in the United States. “More than anything else, I have always been fascinated by how people learn, whether it is learning a language, a culture, or anything else. CCV is an invigorating place for me to be precisely because I am surrounded by an entire community that cares deeply about this question and its practical application for students.”

Yasmine is pictured next to artwork produced and donated by students in CCV-Burlington stained glass faculty Terry Zigmund in response to the events of September 11, 2001.