Mission Statement

The Department of Human and Organizational Development is committed to promoting individual, relational, and collective well-being by enhancing the development of individuals, organizations, communities, and societies. We strive to achieve these aims by creating and disseminating knowledge about how people, groups, and systems influence one another.

HOD faculty, staff, and students hold each other accountable to promote:

• People's rights, dignity, learning, and growth;
• Relationships based on caring and respect;
• Communities of inclusion and support; and
• Societies built on democratic participation, justice, and equality.

Program Rationale
We believe in development as the freedom to create and choose among real opportunities for realizing human potential. We also believe that this development is achieved only through the simultaneous and balanced satisfaction of personal, interpersonal, and collective needs. Based on this premise, the department of Human and Organizational Development aims to prepare undergraduate and graduate students for the promotion of human, organizational, and community development through rigorous, critical, experiential, ecological, systemic, and multidisciplinary modes of learning. Instead of concentrating only on single units of analysis, we focus especially on the connections among them. We work to emphasize interpersonal and counseling skills, organizational and small group dynamics, community interventions, applied participatory research, leadership development, consultation, and social policy formation. In keeping with Peabody College's mission to provide research and education that make a difference in the lives of children, youth, and adults in the community, we want to prepare students to become agents of human and organizational development at the local, national, and international levels.

Principles of Simultaneity
Human, Organizational, and Community Development Must Progress at the Same Time
We offer courses, programs, and research opportunities that focus on personal, organizational, and community development as well as personal and organizational effectiveness. Our programs are grounded in a contextual and interdependent understanding of life-long learning, interpersonal and social efficacy, and developmental change in the community.

Teaching, Research, Action, and Critical Reflection Must Progress Simultaneously
We sharpen the qualitative and quantitative analytical skills required for the integration of knowledge stemming from diverse disciplines. We blend intellectual rigor with practical and emotional intelligence for the promotion of effective and ethical interventions. Students in our programs practice what they learn through classroom simulation, internships, practica, and field research. We engage in self-reflection, bring personal experience to the classroom, and foster individual and public virtue in the process. Our students learn to discover and use empirical evidence to support their arguments, interventions, and integrative thought processes.

Principles of Complementarity
Dimensions of Development Must Be Studied as Complements
To emphasize the interdependence of the various domains of human and organizational development, we stress the complementary functions of individual and collective wellness, conflict negotiation and systematic inquiry, and intervention designed to induce both the private and the common good. Our values of liberty, solidarity, and equality complement each other; as do human, social and civic capital and psychological, organizational and community interventions.

Skills and Knowledge in Different Domains Must Be Emphasized
We offer programs that cover the entire range of development, from the micro to the macro sphere in the private and the public sectors. Faculty and students alike strive to strengthen the relationship between their own concentration and other domains through the department colloquium, participation in professional meetings, and a range of special seminars. Development occurs not only in the nodes of human, organizational, and community development, but also in the very links that tie these nodes together.

Principles of Contextualism
Development Must Be Examined in the Context of Globalization
We understand that the balance among values, needs, and social policies change, and with them, our prescriptions for interventions. We monitor changing social circumstances around the globe and study their implications for human, organizational, and community development in local and international contexts. When forces of globalization threaten communal life, we strive to restore it; where globalization advances the common good, we seek to enhance it.

Development Must Be Grounded in the Context of Specific Populations
We recognize that families, groups, organizations, communities, and nations emphasize certain values and needs more than others. We seek to help balance self-determination with respect for diversity and social justice, and individualism with cohesion and solidarity. In our teaching, research, and action, we strive to reinforce equilibrium wherever it is found and to detect lack of equilibrium and teach students to think and act critically and creatively in ways that address the desired balance.