Criterion One: Mission and Integrity Core Component 1c: Understanding of and support for the mission pervade the organization.

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	To collaborate in urban issues and education Our School of Education [SOE], which takes the lead in its commitment to advancing UMKC’s mission in urban education, requires that its students receive their student teaching experience in one of the SOE’s nine urban partner school districts. SOE’s signature program is UMKC’s Institute for Urban Education [IUE], the first undergraduate program of its kind in the United States, which prepares teachers for the unique challenges and opportunities found in urban schools. Each year, 20 students enter IUE’s class cohort. Beginning in their first year, IUE students are assigned to an urban classroom where they work with students, teachers, administrators, parents and UMKC faculty. In this environment, which allows for adequate time to develop and practice teaching and student-interaction skills, our students are prepared to teach in urban schools. IUE students participate in service learning projects in the urban core, attend educational and social events with IUE’s Kansas City area partners, and interact with their urban students, learning more about them and their communities through social activities and planned outings. The IUE’s undergraduate education curriculum through our School of Education [SOE] relies heavily on the partnership of the College of Arts and Sciences for teaching IUE’s general education classes, required for graduation from the program. (IUE is also discussed in other Criteria chapters.)
As its involvement with the IUE indicates, the College of Arts and Sciences takes UMKC’s mission very seriously and incorporates our urban mission across a range of programs: Since 1999, the Department of Geosciences has sponsored the Advanced Certificate Program in Geographic Information Systems [GIS] This information technology facilitates thematic mapping and spatial analysis and has been used by UMKC students and faculty in urban planning, crime location analysis, public information analysis, and mapping the relationship between illnesses and the environment, such as the spatial patterns of chronic allergies and heightened levels of ground-level ozone in the atmosphere. Center of Applied Environmental Research Offered since the 1980s, the Gerontology Certificate Program of the Department of Sociology enhances the career prospects of those in sociology, psychology, nursing, dental hygiene, public administration, law, pharmacy and education who are preparing to work with the elderly. The Department of Economics’ Center for Economic Information [CEI], established in 1994, has its own staff serving clients as small as a fire district and as large as the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. CEI typically uses geographic information systems, economic and demographic statistics, and econometrics to conduct surveys for clients. One of CEI’s biggest projects has been the GIS-based survey of housing conditions on more than 100,000 properties in several cities on both sides of the state line dividing the Kansas City metropolitan area. (CEI is also described in Criterion 5.) The Urban Studies Program, an interdisciplinary program leading to a Bachelor of Arts degree, requires all urban studies majors to complete six hours of internship in the community. Among the nearly two dozen nonprofit organizations and local governments that have agreed to offer internships are the Kansas City, Missouri Planning and Development Department; Independence, Missouri’s Economic Development Council; Kansas City Community Gardens; Bridging The Gap; Riverside City Hall; Lee’s Summit Planning and Development Department; Twelfth Street Heritage Development Corp., and reStart Inc., an area organization working with the homeless. All of our interns work with the poor and underprivileged or are part of economic development or environmental projects that improve the city and urban life by focusing on such things as alternative types of transportation, organizing inner-city neighborhood associations, and recycling waste in the Kansas City metropolitan area. Our University’s urban commitment is further expressed by the College’s Department of Communication Studies, which is home to the Kansas City-area Urban Debate Program [DebateKC]. This program, which contracts with three metropolitan school districts (Kansas City, Mo.; Kansas City, Kan. and Turner, Kan.), provides Debate and Student Congress programs to approximately 25 urban area middle and high schools. In 2008-09, more than 1,500 urban (largely minority) students participated in DebateKC programs. UMKC strives to offer the broader community a number of other resources that add to the educational and cultural resources in the Kansas City area. This includes the UMKC Sutton Geosciences Museum, which is located in 271 Flarsheim Hall and is free and open to the public six days a week. Since 1972, the Department of Geosciences has exhibited thousands of rare specimens of minerals, gems, ores and fossils in the museum. The museum’s collection also provides mineral kits for classroom use. Another resource that UMKC offers to the community is the Toy and Miniature Museum, located on the UMKC campus in the turn-of-the-century, 38-room Dr. Herbert Trueman Mansion. The museum, which has the largest collection of 19th and 20th century toys, finescale miniatures and marbles in the Midwest, offers visitors one of the finest Scale Miniature collections in the world. As described in its mission statement, the museum was founded “to educate, inspire and delight adults and children through the Museum’s collection and preservation of toys and miniatures.”
The Miller Nichols Library on the Volker campus houses the UMKC Marr Sound Archives. Established in 1987, the Archives has grown from an initial gift of 20,000 sound recordings to a collection of 320,000 recordings of jazz, blues, country, soul, popular music, classical work and opera; historic voices and authors reading their own works; and vintage radio programs. The Archives holds a wide range of historic formats including LPs, 78s, 45s, 19th century cylinders, transcription discs, instantaneous-cut discs and open-reel tapes. The Archives’ collections provide a rich resource for UMKC and area students, as well as international research scholars of music, history, and American/global popular culture. The Archives also maintains a number of online exhibits that showcase historic recordings and archival collections.