Course Criteria and Learning Goals for General Education Courses in the Arts

The goal of the General Education Arts Courses is to develop in students:

• an informed appreciation of the roles of the arts and humanities
• an understanding of other cultures and times.

Further, the General Education Arts Requirement (GEAR) is to reveal the order, diversity, and beauty of the arts and in so doing enable students to develop a greater understanding and appreciation of the present world as the result of a rich cultural heritage. This understanding and appreciation is critical because citizens should understand artistic processes and be able to engage in intelligent public discourse and debate about the arts. Without this understanding, the people may take their cultural heritage for granted or make incorrect assumptions about cultural artifacts.

The objective of the GEAR is to allow students to understand the nature of the arts through exposure to a single art in a one semester, 3 credit course; therefore, the courses which are available for GEAR must be both intensive and broadly based. Students should acquire factual information about the art under consideration, understand concepts and methods involved, and develop an appreciation of the world of the artist. Students should understand the arts as modes of expression, as sciences requiring technical mastery, and as visual and/or aural languages.

Proposals for inclusion as General Education Arts course should demonstrate how the course will:

• expose students to broad themes and underlying concepts.
• include a study of acknowledged masters and masterworks in order that the student may learn from these masters and catch a glimpse of greatness from an artistic perspective.
• encourage an understanding of historical, literary, visual, performance, and aesthetic paradigms, as the arts are a reflection and refraction of the culture from which they come.
• allow for the recognition and appreciation of something beyond and larger than the student, a skill that encompasses and transcends all disciplines of inquiry
• assess the degree to which its stated Arts General Education objectives are met

Proposals for GEAR courses should include evidence that students will demonstrate achievement of the first objective and one or more of the following:

1. a broad understanding of existing knowledge in the discipline
2. the ability to relate the field of study to the world at large
3. the ability to relate the field of study to other arts
4. the ability to recognize and apply aesthetic standards to an art event or an art object.

1/22/2009