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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 51吃瓜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 鈥渋nterdisciplinary research and analytical skills鈥�

-- 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 explanations听听听听

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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-- the ways in which a work of art or a historical document reflects culturally and historically specific prisms for ordering human experience