2019/11/24

The 1st Kyoto Academia Seminar was held on Wednesday, October 30th. The event was attended by about 40 participants, ranging from university to corporate personnel, who were encouraged to think about how KUFS’s new approach to education through “community engagement” (collaborating and cooperating with local communities) should be.
The purpose of this seminar is for people of different social groups to learn and think about how to foster future generations with creative and imaginative abilities in order to build sustainable societies. Lectures on the first day of this series were given by President Takeshi Matsuda, Shinsuke Hamada, Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Service Innovation Studies of Meiji University, and Wakako Oshima, CEO of Asteri Co., Ltd. The audience was invited to exchange opinions in the panel discussion that followed, on the topics of “teaching young people with wisdom and the willpower to take action” and “role sharing between academia and business industries and grasping their needs,” and reached a mutual understanding on the importance and potential of community engagement.

President Takeshi Matsuda on KUFS’s approach to community engagement
From the perspective of fostering human resources as an institution of higher education, President Takeshi Matsuda spoke about their desperate motives of why KUFS established its community engagement program. The three motives are 1) people (students and faculty), 2) ideas (school philosophy), and 3) the times (changes in social environments due to the emergence of artificial intelligence). In addition, the kind of graduates KUFS aims to produce through its multilingual foreign language education, liberal arts, and community engagement initiatives called the “PAX MUNDI Project”, are 1) citizens who think independently and take action, 2) wholehearted and broad-minded world citizens, 3) conscientious people whose behaviors are consistent with their words, and 4) people who practice lifelong learning.

Back