Inter-disciplinarity is itself a way of knowing that leads to innovation. We believe that Students can be trusted with the responsibility of taking ownership of their education. This means they should not be treated merely a consumers, or even as an interested group of stakeholders , but as full active participants in the creation of curriculum, the governance of the program, and the revisions and transformations of its educational methods and structures. The responsibility of faculty and staff is, on the one hand, to facilitate and guide this process, and on the other hand, to inspire, listen, learn and ultimately to join with the students as collaborating members of a democratic learning community. Since CHID has no permanent full-time faculty and only very limited administrative staff, the student community has become the core of our institutional identity.
Education is a dialogical process within a learning community.
Students learn about themselves and the world they live in through a reciprocal exchanged and interactions with others. CHID tries to provide a wide array of forums and collaborations in which students can articulate their commitments and test their projects, and encourages them to take on roles as peer advisors and peer facilitators of group discussions. For CHID the ideal of experiential learning has two primary forms. Critical thinking and self understanding is tied to Knowledge of the world. Our aim is to encourage students, staff and faculty to get outside of themselves, to gain a perspective on their own world by entering, imaginatively or actually, the worlds of others, to see themselves from the other side of the boundaries of the world they normally inhabit.