Students will be able to demonstrate fundamental dispositions and abilities to engage in academic discourse, including analytic and integrative skills, and the ability to formulate, defend, and communicate their own points of view.
- Students are expected to learn how higher learning provides an intellectually exciting and challenging experience. Students should gain intellectual curiosity and be intellectually engaged with academic questions.
- Students should deal in significant ways with questions or points of view about areas of knowledge or controversies within areas of knowledge, rather than simply with the areas themselves.
- Students should engage in a free exchange of ideas involving both discussion and oral presentations. We expect the exchange to be constructive and civil.
- Students should engage in scholarship that is basically the same as that expected in upper level courses, but without required prerequisites. Students should engage in independent and group research.
- Students should think about charting a path through college that prepares them for life.
Students will be able to demonstrate well-developed, confident identities as good writers who can communicate clearly and effectively to an array of audiences for a range of purposes.
- Students should be able to appreciate the similarities & difference between oral and written communication; respond to needs of different audiences; respond to rhetorical situations; use appropriate strategies and conventions; focus on specific purpose; adopt voice, tone, and formality level suited to purpose and audience; and apply technology.
- Students will be able to use writing and reading for inquiry, learning, thinking, and communicating; understand assignments as a process that includes analyzing and synthesizing from sources; develop note-taking systems; integrate own ideas with others; and use appropriate technologies for inquiry.
- Students should be able to understand writing as an open, recursive process; develop techniques for brainstorming; be aware that it takes multiple drafts to complete a successful text; develop flexible strategies for revising, editing, and proof-reading; understand the collaborative aspects of writing process; learn to critique their own and others’ work; learn to balance the advantages of relying on others with the responsibility of doing their own part; integrate technology.
- Students should learn common formats for different kinds of texts; practice appropriate means of documenting their work; and control surface features such as syntax, grammar, punctuation, and spelling, which affect meaning, purpose, and readers’ comprehension.
Students will be able to demonstrate well-developed, confident identities as good speakers who can communicate clearly and effectively to an array of audiences for a range of purposes.
- Students should be able to recognize the need for speaking events and develop an appropriate response. They should be able to assess audience type and need and select a topic and form of address that is suited to their purpose.
- Students should be able to study a topic and organize insights and information according to effective rhetorical methods. They should clearly state their intent, organize the presentation, provide sufficient support, and select words and phrases that accurately represent ideas and feelings suited to the topic.
- Students should be skilled in effective delivery of more formal speeches. They should demonstrate verbal and nonverbal as well as social interaction skills that contribute to the effectiveness in conveying their intended message.
Students will become familiar with at least one additional language so they can readily access perspectives and information from communities other than their own.
- Students will be able to understand sentence-length utterances which consist of recombinations of learned elements in a limited number of content areas, particularly if strongly supported by the situational context.
- Students will be able to handle successfully a limited number of interactive, task-oriented, and social situations.
- Students will be able to understand main ideas and/or some facts from the simplest connected texts dealing with basic personal and social needs.
- Students will be able to meet limited practical writing needs.
Students will be able to navigate information resources using digital and other technology in order to support their studies, and their efforts to communicate their findings persuasively.
- The information literate student determines the nature and extent of the information needed.
- The information literate student accesses needed information effectively and efficiently.
- The information literate student evaluates information and its sources critically and incorporates selected information into his or her knowledge base and value system.
- The information literate student, individually or as a member of a group, uses information effectively to accomplish a specific purpose.
- The information literate student understands many of the economic, legal, and social issues surrounding the use of information and accesses and uses information ethically and legally.