Goals and Learning Outcomes
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Knowledge, skills, and competences graduates will acquire
Literature and History will reinforce competencies that are critical for all ÍøÆØ³Ô¹Ï students and help strengthen bedrock skills imparted through its Core Humanities programs, FYS and SYS. Those skills include:
- the ability to think critically and to analyze problems and issues from multiple perspectives
- skills in communication and presentation, including the ability to form and present complex arguments and analyses in writing
- foundational research skills, including the capacity to employ various forms of citation, compile bibliographies, assess and evaluate primary and secondary sources, and to identify materials key to a research project
- the ability to think across disciplines and geographic areasor what is commonly termed “interdisciplinary research and analytical skillsâ€
- enhanced skills in reading and writing English through continual,intensive essay assignments and engagement with complex literary and historical texts in English.
- the ability to sift through and evaluate contradictory evidence and to make arguments using citations, concrete examples, and explanationsÌýÌýÌýÌý
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Literature and History will also impart a series of skills specific to the disciplines in which it is rooted:
- the capacity to frame questions that multiply rather thanrestrict the interpretations that might be applied to a text or to the past
- the ability to focus on moments of contradiction and confusion in a text,or in the historical record,that might encourage competing perspectives and opinions
- the ability to applythe varied ways of approaching a textor the past and to understand the distinct methodologies associated with these disciplines
- the ability to grasp and deal with works of art that reflect on or embody multiple, competing perspectives
- familiarity with the problems that inform any effort to transform immensely complex past realities into more ordered historical narratives, arguments, and analyses
- the ways in which a work of art or a historical document reflects culturally and historically specific prisms for ordering human experience.