Learning Outcomes
MLO 1: Understanding Global Systems and Structures
Through a transdisciplinary framework, students analyze our highly integrated world by identifying persistent patterns across time and space, recognizing the interrelated dimensions of any issue. Students demonstrate knowledge of global political, economic, social, and geographic systems including through their interdependencies and sustainability challenges. Attention is paid to historic and contemporary interconnections and power imbalances. Students demonstrate competence in a problem-based approach that places global issues along a global-local continuum, recognizing the local implications of global processes, and how localized movements shape global change.
MLO 2: Critical Thinking
Students demonstrate competence in flexible thinking and interrogate taken-for-granted assumptions about the workings of power and related social, legal, economic, and political concepts. Students develop an understanding of social positioning and how it is reflected in our worldviews, ideologies, and cultural biases, and how addressing multifaceted issues in the real world calls for multiple analytical perspectives. Students apply a global studies approach that is most valuable when deployed in the places where different political, economic, cultural, and legal elements of global systems interact. Students understand and evaluate structural inequalities as central features of the modern world, including ongoing colonialism and imperialism.
MLO 3: Personal and Social Responsibility
Students engage in ethical reasoning informed by a global studies ethos of centering marginalized voices, and a belief that analyses of global processes should always take into account the people, communities, and environments who ultimately feel the impact of those processes, even when impacts are unintended or unforeseen. Students practice personal and professional values that can strengthen community relationships and contributions. Students adopt a global imaginary that appreciates that what happens in one part of the world affects and influences what happens in other parts of the world. Students form research questions that engage the local-global continuum, critically challenge the status quo, reflexively account for positionality, and recognize the ethical dimensions of any issue. Students apply knowledge and skills to practical approaches and recommendations to address global problems.
MLO 4: Transdisciplinarity, Methodologies, and Diverse Ways of Knowing
Students develop competency in holistic approaches that help make sense of a complex, interconnected world through a transdisciplinary study inclusive of marginalized worldviews and histories of unequal power relations. A global transdisciplinary framework takes a critical, problem-based approach that sees across and beyond Western disciplines in order to understand the interrelated dimensions of any issue.This framework is inclusive of thematics such as: race and ethnicity, class and inequality, gender and sexuality, poststructural theory and social construction, the cultural turn, postcolonialism and cultural imperialism, nationalism and identities, and the decentering of the nation-state. Students develop competency in a range of methodologies that are deeply intersectional including feminist, critical race, postcolonial, and indigenous methodologies.
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