IGE Global Humanities Minor
Mission: Prepare students to lead globally conscious, socially responsible, productive, satisfying,and ethical lives in a changing diverse world.
Vision: The Global Humanities Minor trains students to become global citizens who employinterdisciplinary methods of analysis as the foundation for critical thought and action to effectively navigate and create positive change in global systems.
Description: The most powerful forces of our age - the internet, the global economy, the environment, etc. - are global forces that cannot be understood through a single perspective.Twenty-first-century life and work thus require knowledge and skills that transcend geographical anddisciplinary boundaries. Responding to these demanding circumstances, the Global HumanitiesMinor prepares students to succeed by utilizing multiple cultural and disciplinary perspectives toanalyze the shared global issues and systems that will shape their lives. These issues include:international commerce, transborder migrations, cross-cultural communications, globaltechnological revolutions, and a shared climate crisis.
How We Teach – Teamwork, Active Learning, and Professional Skill Development
All IGE courses are taught using advanced high impact practices and active learning. Each day in class, students participate actively in their own learning as professors prompt students to apply new knowledge to materials and data from around the world. Students compare and analyze the interconnections between different cultures, economies, historical events, and social, political, and environmental systems. In turn, through activities that demand intensive collaboration, research, and dialogue about global subjects, students develop skills vital to their future of work and life, including: teamwork, analysis of global social patterns and systems, cross-cultural understanding and dialogue, application of ethics in diverse geographical, cultural, and historical contexts, historical and social consciousness, effective oral and written communication, and critical thinking.
- Global Awareness - Students will develop an interdisciplinary framework for analyzing global problems, power structures, and processes of globalization.
- Historical Social and Multicultural Understanding - Students will recognize the integrity of different cultural systems. They will evaluate and compare diverse historical, social, and cultural expressions, and analyze how they shape global institutions, practices, beliefs, and values.
- Effective Communication - Students will articulate ideas on global issues clearly and persuasively in written, oral, visual, and digital modes of communication.
- Aesthetic Understanding - Students will articulate the value of art as a means of enhancing and enriching human experience. They will interpret the significance of works of literary, visual, architectural, spatial, musical, and dramatic art from different perspectives.
- Information Literacy -Students will critically evaluate and integrate diverse sources of information. They will use them effectively and ethically to pursue research and analysis on the basis of evidence and reasoning.
- Critical Thinking - Students will evaluate information and underlying premises, construct arguments, and draw conclusions based on sound and accurate evidence and reasoning.
- Articulation of Values: Students will define and articulate their own values as global citizens and critically examine the implications of their own actions and speech.
- Integrative Learning - Students will integrate knowledge across multiple perspectives, disciplines, frameworks, and courses, and between academic, personal, and community life. They will analyze the connection between local and global events, issues, and systems.
Unit Requirements
- IGE 1200 Faith, Passion, and Power: The Saga of the Ancient and Medieval Worlds - 1A and 3B when paired with 1100 (or 3B when taken solo)
- IGE 2350 Rival Empires: Representation and Resistance - 3A
- IGE 2250 The Stranger: Encountering Difference and Creating Coexistence - 4A and American Institutions or 3B and American Institutions
AND
- IGE 2150 Sustainable Tomorrow: From Industrialization to Ethical Environmentialism. - 4A and American Institutions or 3B and American Institutions
OR
- IGE 2600 Digital Culture, Race, and Ethnicity - 6
Select at least one IGE course:
- IGE 3200 Mad Scientists and Aliens: Science and Technology in Popular Culture - 3C
- IGE 3300 Demons, the Undead, and the Monstrous Other - 3C
- IGE 3500 The Creative Process: Innovation and Transformation - 3C or 4C.
- IGE 3600 UFO, Illuminati, and Other Conspiracy Theories - 4C
Non-IGE
Select from courses below to complete electives
- 3343 - Arts of Korea (3)
- ENG 3011: Literature, Power, and Politics (3)
- ENG 4740: Chinese Civilization and Culture (3)
FAQ
The Global Humanities Minor is intended to compliment diverse majors across campus through its cultivation of “big-picture” thinking, its focus on teamwork and the transferable skills that employers desire, and its conscious integration of diverse polytechnic disciplines.
By adding a Global Humanities Minor to majors in STEM fields (as well as to other majors such as Hospitality Management and Agriculture), students demonstrate key skills that will make them more competitive in their fields. While it benefits all majors, the Global Humanities Minor is of particular interest to STEM majors at 六色网. The acronym STEM has now been largely replaced by STEAM, a shift celebrating the renewed emphasis of the value of the arts and humanities for the sciences. Students who adopt the Global Humanities Minor signal to employers that they have strong competence in humanities skills and global awareness, making them true STEAM graduates.
Moreover, fields such as engineering have advocated a “T-shaped approach” to education. In this model, the vertical line represents the core of the engineering degree which must be closely integrated with the horizontal line that represents a strong Liberal Arts foundation. A Liberal Arts foundation bridges academic subjects such as literature, philosophy, mathematics, and social and physical sciences (as distinct from professional and technical subjects) to develop advanced skills in “ethics, global knowledge, intercultural literacy, and strong communication and [collaboration].”
The skills students develop through the Global Humanities Minor give them the flexibility and broader ability to navigate an increasingly unpredictable and global world of work. Students in STEM fields who wish to have the full range of their polytechnic skills evinced on their transcripts can pick up the minor at any point in their career at 六色网.