B.S. Communications
Upon graduation, students will be able to demonstrate their achievement of the following goals and their accompanying set of learning outcomes.
Goal 1: Understanding of Discipline
Students are able to recognize and appreciate core principles of the discipline. This includes an appreciation of the depth of the discipline (beyond our three concentrations), the intersections between our concentrations, and an ability to recognize presence/non-presence of disciplinary ideas in everyday life.
Related Learning Outcomes:
- Identify the specific history and fundamental theories of the discipline of Communication.
- Recognize current communication issues and trends.
- Define and identify key communication concepts.
Goal 2: Creative and Critical Thinking
Students are able to assess a communication situation and develop appropriate solutions that address the key aspects of that situation. This includes articulating the definition of the situation and justification of decisions made throughout the process.
Related Outcomes
- Apply critical and analytical thinking to communication problems.
- Devise creative and original solutions to communication problems.
Goal 3: Performance Skills
Students are able to demonstrate key skills that are considered central to professional practice, regardless of field of specialization. Students should be able to provide examples of work completed that demonstrates application of these skills.
Related Outcomes
- Write professionally in forms and styles appropriate for the intended audience and purpose.
- Demonstrate effective behavior in group settings.
- Employ effective verbal and nonverbal communication skills in professional and personal contexts.
- Apply tools and technologies appropriate for the communication profession in which you work.
Goal 4: Personal and Professional Identity
Students are able to convey a professional demeanor in a variety of contexts. This includes assessing situations and adjusting behaviors appropriately. In addition, students are able to self-assess their own behaviors/products and are able to gauge the quality of their own performance based on professional standards. Student decisions and descriptions of behaviors should be grounded in a ethical practice and respect for diversity.
Related Outcomes:
- Demonstrate a recognition and appreciation of diverse cultures in a global society.
- Endorse and commit to practicing principles of ethical communication.
- Reflect and assess communication competence in relation to self and others.
B.A. Media Studies
Program Goal 1: Provide an understanding of media as an ecological system.
- Students will demonstrate broad awareness, meaningful comprehension, and application and evaluation of the central arguments that make up the foundation of Media Studies. They will do this by reflecting and reporting on their own use of media and the role media plays in their lives and in our culture and discussing, writing and debating the central arguments in a variety of formats (media journals, papers, roundtable debates).
- Students will demonstrate an understanding of the history of media (which includes a necessary understanding of the history of media technologies) and the evolution of the mediated environment. Students will conduct an historical survey of media, conduct diachronic analyses of a variety of mediated forms, complete uses and gratifications self-studies and successful completion of media history exams.
Program Goal 2: Think and write critically within the discipline of Media Studies.
- Students will demonstrate critical thinking and writing by identifying and evaluating media theories and media research methods in scholarly texts (journal articles, case studies).
- Students will explore persuasive properties of sign systems--verbal, visual and aural--by producing written analyses of texts that incorporate these sign systems in various combinations.
- Advanced students will identify and analyze essential arguments in scholarly works by reading, discussing and writing about these arguments and applying these arguments across disciplines and perspectives.
Program Goal 3: Understand the dynamic relationship among media, culture and society.
- Students will demonstrate an understanding of media’s role in the construction of self, race, gender and class by reading texts on related topics, engaging in dialogue and debate about these constructions and written analyses of subject texts.
- Students will demonstrate an understanding of the impact of economics and media ownership as a determining force on the construction of mediated meanings by recognizing and evaluating media ownership systems.
- Students will demonstrate an understanding of media’s capacity to reflect and/or maintain ideological foundations that unconsciously structure societal norms by analysis of the personal, social and political discourse that surrounds and informs media scholarship.