Value-based education – for all

Based on Christian faith and beliefs, NLA University College shall motivate for personal development and critical thinking, and challenge everyone to engage actively for the benefit of their fellow humans and society, nationally and globally.

This is the cornerstone that motivates the college and its staff: the belief that all humans are created in God’s image and have inviolable value. This inspires a strong engagement and care for the weak and a responsibility for the best possible stewardship of the resources that we have been given.

Value profile

Society needs a visible and participatory academic sector that can provide applicable knowledge as well as critical perspectives. Here, NLA has an important mandate. As an alternative, private, value-based and visionary actor among other Norwegian universities and university colleges, NLA has the opportunity to highlight value awareness and life-stance skills and to contribute to public debate with knowledge that shapes society.

A holistic perspective

NLA University College provides practice-oriented and socially relevant studies in various disciplines, with close follow-up of students as its hallmark and with a holistic perspective on education and training. Consequently, this goes beyond a theoretical understanding of a specific discipline, it also includes an emphasis on the students’ personal development and ethical competence, in the sense of understanding and handling of ethical dilemmas and professional ethics. Moreover, emphasis is placed on training the students’ power of judgement, as a combination of knowledge, practice and value-based choice, that serves individuals, organisations and society at large in the best possible way.

NLA’s value base

In light of its value base, as expressed in the document ‘Vision and Mission’, NLA shall educate its students by seeing each as an individual, teach them to discover their responsibility and provide them with the tools and knowledge to fulfil this responsibility in the best possible way.

Inspired by a belief in and perspective on humanity, this is a continuous element in our teaching and research. Our researchers consider the importance of ethics in education and training and its importance for each individual student.

This inspires a strong engagement and care for the weak, and a responsibility for the best possible stewardship of the resources that we have been given.

NLA provides training that aims to make students work with knowledge and also reflect on their own values. A society without such a perspective risks becoming a society that undervalues human dignity. This is the element that unifies all teaching at our university college – the conviction that each human being has inviolable value.

Through this, the students can make an important difference in other people’s lives. It is also the background for NLA’s motto: Because someone needs you.

Stewardship

A key tenet in Christian ethics is the view of humans as stewards. This entails, for example, that this sense of stewardship serves as a touchstone in the encounter with the climate challenges of our age and in the question of a fair, sustainable and creative distribution of the Earth’s resources.

In light of this commitment to stewardship, marriage, the family and the upbringing of children and adolescents are also societal concerns. NLA wants to highlight the responsibility, right and duty of parents to raise their children and provide them with care.

Sustainable development

NLA wants to contribute to sustainable social development, both through its provision of education and training and the construction of its campuses. Both in Bergen and Oslo, where new campuses will be built in the years to come, the university college will provide a favourable environment for learning and thereby give students an optimal framework for the future. New construction will be environmentally certified according to the BREEAM standard (a standard for environmental profile) with environmentally friendly solutions. It is also desirable to reduce total CO2 emissions through less travel by staff.

Sustainability and environment will also be a key topic for academic development work in most of the university college’s study programmes.