Global Studies Learning Goals

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The Global Studies Department's entire curriculum is grounded in a clear set of learning goals.  We engage in regular assessment work, both formal and informal, in order to determine how well we are helping our students meet these goals.  The following six general learning goals were adopted by the department in 2006:

Academic program culminating in senior project: Students will develop the ability to carry out interdisciplinary research in Global Studies that is informed by theories of global political economy and transnational cultural studies; by coursework focused on distinct geographic/cultural and thematic areas; by their training in comparative and transnational research methods; and by the experience of off-campus study. In mapping out the shape of their particular global studies major, students will demonstrate a high level of agency and responsibility for their educations. They will demonstrate competence in writing and oral presentation through the project.

Positionality and ethics: Students will engage in a sustained process of self-reflection designed to locate themselves as active members of the global community and recognize the ethical responsibilities that derive from their particular social locations.

Relationality: Students will develop a complex understanding of the relational nature of all global processes.

Historicity: Students will develop a complex understanding of the ongoing changes associated with contemporary globalization as products of long-term historical processes.

Globality and Locality: Students will develop the ability to situate local processes in the context of ongoing global flows of capital, labor, images, identities, ideas, technologies of violence, diseases, pollutants, etc. Students will understand how popular struggles for economic and social justice both contest and reconstitute configurations of global power embodied in supranational institutions of global governance.

Critique: Students will develop the ability to interrogate the dominant disciplinary, political and cultural categories used to frame global processes.

Praxis: Students will learn how to identify the larger structures in which they are embedded, utilizing critical theoretical and methodological approaches from Global Studies, and to act upon those structures purposefully, ethically and reflexively to help advance social change.