Note: The following Common Curriculum Requirements apply to all matriculates beginning in Fall 2025 and replace the previous Common Curriculum and General Education requirements. Students who matriculated prior to Fall 2025 should consult their advisors and refer to archived catalogs that outline the previous Common Curriculum and General Education requirements.
Common Curriculum Course Descriptions and Learning Outcomes
COMMUNITIES (Interdisciplinary)
In Communities, students will examine the relationships and intersections between communities, focusing on how individuals, societies, and cultures connect and collaborate. Students will gain a deeper understanding of the challenges and opportunities an interconnected world presents. Through community-based experiences curated by the instructor, students will critically analyze facets of communities, such as language, labor, family, faith, health, and food, to reveal unique and shared human experiences within and across cultures. Students will be exposed to types of communities and their diverse issues, and explore questions of group identity, belonging, and sense of place.
As a result of participating in COMMUNITIES, students will be able to:
- Describe a selected community issue;
- Analyze how global forces shape local realities;
- Evaluate how identities and cultures, both current and historical, intersect within communities;
- Recognize the value of collaboration across and within communities, and identify the skills needed for effective collaboration.
COMPOSITION (College writing)
In Composition, students will learn to evaluate and produce persuasive writing across various genres and forms. Students will locate, appraise, and integrate source materials in various media appropriate to the writing goals. Classwork will include discussion of the writing, editing, and revision processes. This course will help students develop the skills they need to become successful writers at the university level and within real-world professional contexts.
After completing COMPOSITION, students will be able to:
- Recognize relevant rhetorical contexts for the production and reception of texts;
- Integrate carefully evaluated sources into reports and claim-based essays;
- Produce and revise drafts for grammatical correctness, appropriate audience analysis, engagement with opposing ideas, and clear organization of ideas.
CREATIVITY (Arts)
Creativity and creative production will be explored in the arts through the lens of imagination, self-expression, cultural significance, narrative, and impact on society. We will examine how creativity is integrated into societies worldwide through research, evaluation, inquiry, and interpretation of creative thinking. Works of art and cultural belongings will be examined, as well as marginalized narratives about histories, stories, theories, and cultures beyond the dominant Western perspective. This will include examples from visual arts, creative writing, theater, music, dance, and film, and will consider the role of creativity in other fields. This course includes the opportunity to attend arts events on campus or in your community.
As a result of participating in CREATIVITY, students will be able to:
- Explain and recognize creativity as a process of self-discovery and expression that transcends arts disciplines and media;
- Interpret the symbolic languages of the arts through which creativity is expressed;
- Describe how different art forms fit within a broad social, historical, and cultural context;
- Question aesthetic judgment across a broad range of media and art forms;
- Design presentations(s) or create works of visual art, creative writing, theater, music, dance, and film that demonstrate, assess, and communicate attributes of creativity in select examples and specific works.
DATA and STATISTICS (Quantitative Analysis)
In this course, students will learn how to interpret data by creating, describing, and analyzing charts, graphs, and statistics. Students will learn how to evaluate data quality responsibly, analyze data in context, and communicate their results.
As a result of participating in DATA, students will be able to:
- Construct and correctly interpret data tables that include counts, ratios, proportions, percentages, percent changes, percentage point changes, means, medians, and standard deviations;
- Evaluate quantitative reasoning in news, company, government, and institutional reports, with an awareness of biases, misuses, and misinterpretations of data;
- Construct and correctly interpret graphs of categorical and continuous variables;
- Construct and correctly interpret graphs that display relationships between variables;
- Demonstrate beginner skills in a statistical software program;
- Create a statistical analysis report and summarize the results.
DECISIONS (Social Science)
In Decisions, students use social science research methods to understand and explain decision-making in society. Students evaluate the degree to which decisions are based on sufficient empirical evidence and participate in active learning by making decisions as individuals and in teams. They analyze how multiple factors, such as social contexts, biases, attitudes towards fairness, strategy, ethical implications, and conceptions of rationality, influence both the decision-making process and outcomes of decisions.
As a result of participating in DECISIONS, students will be able to:
- Critically appraise the decisions made by individuals in group settings;
- Recognize and interpret states of mutual interdependence – situations in which one’s own decisions must take into account the actions and decisions made by others;
- Analyze the impact of social norms, cultural differences, and ethical considerations on decisions;
- Use social science models to analyze and explain decision processes.
DISCOVERY (Natural Science)
In Discovery, students will explore and implement the scientific process in the context of a natural or physical science discipline. Students will deepen their understanding of the certainties and uncertainties inherent in the scientific process by evaluating scientific content in a chosen field and discussing recent notable discoveries relevant to the central themes of the discipline. In this course, students will connect the execution of experiments with the use of evidence to evaluate how we arrive at discoveries and establish knowledge about the natural and physical world.
As a result of participating in DISCOVERY, students will be able to:
- Identify and describe central precepts of the scientific method;
- Use appropriate scientific terminology in communication about scientific topics;
- Formulate a unique scientific question based on current events or personal interests;
- Interpret, organize, and present scientific data.
ENVIRONMENTS (Interdisciplinary)
What is our relationship with the environment? This course will examine the impact of
human activity in the non-human world through an interdisciplinary lens. In Environments, students delve into the complex interplay between human societies and natural environments. Students will examine how environmental change is perceived, experienced, and responded to differently across diverse socio-cultural and geographical contexts. Students work to identify actionable ways to participate more ethically in our interconnected personal, local, and global environments.
As a result of participating in ENVIRONMENTS, students will be able to:
- Demonstrate understanding of the varied impacts and responses to environmental change across different countries and regions, considering geographical and sociocultural factors;
- Compare and contrast the experiences of people in developed and developing nations;
- Critically evaluate how human societies mitigate and adapt to environmental change.
IDENTITIES (Diversity)
Courses that satisfy the Identities requirement examine how social categories develop, interact, and shape individual and collective experiences over time. They analyze the historical and contemporary social structures that influence access, opportunity, and everyday life.
After completing an Identities course, students will be able to:
- Define major social identity categories and describe how they intersect;
- Summarize the historical roots and present‑day effects of key social structures;
- Explain how social identities relate to differences in experience, access, and opportunity;
- Identify institutional policies or practices that affect access and participation for various groups.
NARRATIVES (Humanities)
The stories humans tell inform their place in the world. We study expressions of humanity to practice informed citizenship, critical thinking, and cultural awareness. This humanities research methodology course examines which stories get privileged and why; which narratives shape our cultural values; and how we come to learn our cultural and historical traditions. In Narratives, students will learn methods for analyzing texts and artifacts (such as manuscripts, printed and digital texts, works of art, material objects, film & video, oral testimonies, and audio recordings) within their various contexts and will learn how to find and deploy supporting evidence in pursuit of their own research questions.
As a result of participating in NARRATIVES, students will be able to:
- Recognize the many cultural contexts of historical and contemporary narratives;
- Analyze the ways in which sources embed and produce meanings and reflect bias;
- Communicate research findings in a clear, organized manner with appropriate documentation.
VOYAGES (International)
Courses that fulfill this requirement build awareness of global diversity through explorations of the languages, arts, literatures, cultures, or social or economic structures of peoples worldwide. Students cultivate cross-cultural awareness through engaging coursework, experiential learning, and meaningful interactions with diverse communities. World language and some study abroad/away courses fulfill the Voyages requirement. Introductory language courses carry 4 credit hours due to lab requirements.
As a result of participating in VOYAGES, students will be able to:
- Use examples that show understanding of diverse cultures, languages, and customs;
- Demonstrate geographical knowledge related to course content;
- Communicate diverse cultural perspectives on relevant course topics.