The mission of the College of Arts and Humanities is “to create global citizens equipped to assess received opinion, make independent judgments, and value the transforming power of the imagination.” The new Global Engagement Requirement extends the college’s long-standing commitment to international education, and is part of a larger effort to enhance cross-cultural learning for all our undergraduate majors.
The Global Engagement Requirement encourages students to take the first step toward global citizenship: knowledge of the culture of another country. We believe that learning another language and studying abroad for an extended time are the best ways to understand and appreciate how other people think; what they value; how they live their lives as individuals and as a society; and how they view themselves and the larger world. By asking students to see the world from inside another culture, the Global Engagement Requirement enables them, in turn, to understand their own culture more broadly and more clearly.
Students will:
- Improve language competency in speaking, listening, reading and writing.
- Interpret issues and situations from more than one cultural perspective.
- Demonstrate increased comfort and willingness to engage in cross-cultural exchange and resist the propensity for stereotyping.
- Articulate an understanding of another culture in global and comparative perspective.
- Articulate the changes in their perceptions of themselves and their home culture that have emerged from studying about or in another culture.
