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Graduate Program Learning Goals and Outcomes

Learning Goal A: Learning Dispositions

The successful student will demonstrate an inquisitive scholarly identity and attitude sensitive to multiple sites and forms of knowledge, appreciate incompleteness and discomfort, and cultivate the capacity to negotiate different forms of scholarly inquiry, critique, and engagement.

Learning Outcomes:

  1. Recognize and reflect on the production of knowledge in multiple spaces;
  2. Engage dialogically with distinct and/or intersecting intellectual communities to develop the scope of your inquiry;
  3. Cultivate the experience of being inexpert;
  4. Locate yourself within multiple intellectual debates and conversations;
  5. Develop capacity to negotiate intercultural learning spaces.

 

Learning Goal B: Comparative Knowledge and Interdisciplinary Knowledge Practices

The successful student will engage multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary knowledge practices to analyze social and historical phenomena comparatively.

Learning Outcomes:

  1. Develop an interdisciplinary approach to research;
  2. Compare social and historical phenomena in order to yield new insights;
  3. Articulate how the complexities of social differentiation, including sex, gender, sexuality, disability, race, ethnicity, nation, class, et cetera, inform and shape your intellectual projects.

 

Learning Goal C: Creating Scholarship Through Research

The successful student will develop a clear and achievable interdisciplinary research agenda that is original, skillful, significant, and judicious about its stakes and construction.

Learning Outcomes:

  1. Cultivate relationships with mentors, advisors, and colleagues whose expertise or experience can assist in the development of your work, and who will both challenge and support you;
  2. Identify vital questions in your area of expertise and the ethical and practical elements involved in pursuing answers to those questions;
  3. Determine an appropriate scope for your work, given opportunities, resources, requirements, and/or constraints;
  4. Produce new knowledge by working at the intersection of multiple disciplines and interdisciplinary fields;
  5. Articulate an ongoing research agenda in ways that make clear the stakes of your intellectual work.

 

Learning Goal D: Collaboration

The successful student will engage in collaboration, recognizing the opportunities and possibilities it affords, as well as the challenges and limitations it entails.

Learning Outcomes:

  1. Demonstrate familiarity with scholarship and debates on collaboration;
  2. Recognize and reflect on the value, effectiveness, and ethics of collaboration in different settings and situations;
  3. Participate in, develop, and pursue collaborations;
  4. Articulate contributions to a collaborative project accurately and effectively, using means well suited to the nature of the work.

 

Learning Goal E: Teaching

The successful student will understand how to design learning experiences to maximize student learning and how to connect course design explicitly to desired outcomes. The student will develop a sense of teaching purpose informed by transformative pedagogies that problematize social reality and knowledge.

Learning Outcomes:

  1. Use existing scholarship on teaching and learning to develop and adopt teaching strategies that are student-centered, mindful, adaptive, and inclusive;
  2. Design learning opportunities that guide students toward learning objectives (while also allowing for the development of unexpected outcomes);
  3. Host conversations that question and challenge normative discourses

 

Learning Goal F: Cultivating an Audience and a Career Path

The successful student will be able to cultivate academic and non-academic audiences and will communicate complex ideas to both specialists and broad publics clearly and persuasively in order to engage in professional contexts.

Learning Outcomes:

  1. Understand the demands of varied and distinct professional contexts;
  2. Identify career and professional goals and opportunities;
  3. Develop work for publication in scholarly and/or non-academic venues, either independently or in collaboration with colleagues;
  4. Foster and circulate research-based work beyond the academy in ways that make specialized knowledge a benefit to general audiences.