Center for University Studies and Programs
Learning Goals
The
First Year Learning Goals are designed to encourage students, faculty, and
staff to dynamically claim our own education as we practice ever more effective
forms of learning. Emerging from UW Bothell's central values of transformative
learning, engaged scholarship, and the fostering of an inclusive culture, the
goals are shaped to create the context for understanding the many traditions
that converge here at the university, to support the creation of knowledge, and
to shape new social practices. In the context of progressively more challenging
questions, problems, projects, and standards for performance, we will focus
together on exploring these goals, which culminate in the spring Discovery Core
in which students create a portfolio, engage in research, and participate in experiential
learning.
Inclusive
Practices focus
on how best to deepen the richness of human experience- with its differences of race,
gender, ability, religion, age, language, sexual orientation, and class- by
developing capacities to
- identify our own
and others' ways of knowing- verbal, visual, kinetic, auditory- and make use
of those different capacities.
- understand
relationships between individuals, institutions, and authority.
- >compare and
contrast different cultural voices, traditions, and ways of interacting
with the world.
- exchange ideas with
different communities, both on campus and beyond.
Critical
and Creative Inquiry joins reason and imagination to make, investigate,
critique, and pursue meaning in the arts, humanities, and the social and
natural sciences. It includes the ability to
- employ
different ways of creating, interpreting, and transmitting new ideas, works,
and knowledge in a responsible manner.
- make
effective use of information across print, visual, electronic, and other media to
seek, shape, and evaluate evidence.
- respond,
both critically and creatively, to a variety of texts, questions, and problems
in order to draw informed conclusions
- become
more aware of personal and collective assumptions.
Ethics
and Social Responsibility explores our connections with each other across cultures,
languages, natural resources, and values by learning to
- articulate the
relationships between local, national, and global events.
- understand how
values are shaped and influence decisions.
- analyze the
relationship between knowledge and ethics in specific contexts.
- create connections
between individual and social identities.
Quantitative
and Qualitative Literacies are complementary ways to
understand problems, issues, and questions. These practices foster the ability
to
- design
quantitative and qualitative methods to approach problems and inform
evidence-based responses.
- mobilize evidence across quantitative and
qualitative skills, such as interpreting magnitudes, measurements, statistics, narratives,
ethnographies, and maps.
- understand
how different types of data are generated, their range of precision, validity,
and limits.
- use
symbolic representations- graphs, formulate, words, diagrams, maps, and
equations- to identify, analyze, and communicate relationships among sets of information.
Communication is the process of written,
oral, performative, and multimedia interaction that enables us to share ideas
and practices. This goal includes the ability to
- communicate
persuasively to different audiences with appropriate media.
- practice
writing in its many genres across the curriculum.
- develop
dialogical skills that include listening actively to alternative perspectives.
- understand
relationships between knowledge, power, and communication.
