Student Learning Goals

Below are the departmental learning goals mapped to College-wide goals for student learning.

• Goal 1. Through multi-disciplinary curricular work, students will encounter in a substantive way the patterns of cultural life of a specific Asian culture as well as more general exposure to Asia as a whole. Students will develop the skills to act both sensitively and confidently within an Asian culture. (Ia, IIc, IId, IIIb, IIIc, IVc)
• Goal 2. Students will develop foundations for proficiency in an Asian language as a foreign language to enable them to communicate within the context of an Asian culture.
  • This opens the doors to a cognitive engagement with another culture. (Ia, IIc, IId)
• Goal 3. Students will prepare for an interconnected world in which the communities, cultures, countries, and economies in Asia play increasingly central roles. The program prepares students to understand the mutually constituted nature of the past and the present. (Ib, IId, IVc)
• Goal 4. Students will develop intellectual skills through extended exposure to different cultural systems and the awareness of similarities and differences that comparison stimulates. Students will be able to understand the value of cultural difference, while deepening awareness of the complexity of cross-cultural judgments/critique with respect to ethics and justice, power and privilege. Comparison also yields an ability to interrogate different points of view on matters of significance within the area of study. (Ib, Ic, IIa, IIb, IId, IIIa, IIIb, IIId, IVc)
• Goal 5. The Asian Studies program cultivates an awareness of how disciplinary perspectives shape our understanding through exploring fields of inquiry such as the arts, history, language and literature, politics, philosophy, religion, and sociology. The program encourages students to develop skills in interdisciplinary research and writing focused on the complexity, diversity, and interconnectedness revealed when multiple disciplinary perspectives are conjoined. (Ic, IIa, IIe, IVa, IVb, IVd)