Intended Learning Outcomes
Students will demonstrate:
- the ability to identify political problems, familiarize themselves with existing scholarly research and discussion of political issues and problems, understand, criticize and apply existing research and design and conduct additional research to further understanding of the causes and/or possible solutions to political problems. Students should be equipped to analyze critically the process by which systematic knowledge is produced as well as the content of that knowledge.
- familiarity with diverse perspectives as they are used to identify, understand, and address political issues. By “diverse” we mean both domestic and international differences which may be geographic, ethnic, racial, gender-based, cultural, and even temporal.
- the ability to write clearly about political issues, including the ability to access and assess the wide range of information sources available and use these appropriately to make assessments and support arguments.
- the capacity to be knowledgeable, thoughtful and effective citizens. The department wishes to foster students’ active and critical engagement with politics and public policy making, whether as professionals or as citizens. Civic literacy necessarily engages students in questions of private and public values as well as the more empirical issues of governance and decision making.
2013