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Courses in this area help students to acquire a broad understanding of the social, environmental, and historical influences that shape us as individuals and affect how we interact with other persons and groups.  

BY THE END OF TAKING A COURSE IN THIS AREA: 

• Culture and Diversity: Students critically analyze how different cultural, intellectual, economic, and/or aesthetic frameworks shape individuals and societies and create  power structures and inequalities. Students critically analyze contrasting viewpoints on people, societies, aesthetics, environments, historical periods, and cultures through engagement with diverse stories, issues, and perspectives that transcend cultures and national borders.
• Reflective Discovery and Analysis of Information: Students locate, generate, identify, interpret, and critically evaluate information, evidence, arguments and ideas, recognizing that authority is constructed and contextual. Students analyze their own and others' assumptions and incorporate reliable and valid information effectively and ethically for an intended purpose.

• Disciplinary Concepts: Students describe the major concepts, language, and theories of a discipline, and use disciplinary concepts and models to explain human behavior

Students will acquire the skills necessary to critically analyze social structures and contrasting viewpoints on people, societies, aesthetics, environments, historical periods, and cultures.

BY THE END OF TAKING A COURSE IN THIS AREA: 

• Culture and Diversity: Students critically analyze how different cultural, intellectual, economic, and/or aesthetic frameworks shape individuals and societies and create  power structures and inequalities. Students critically analyze contrasting viewpoints on people, societies, aesthetics, environments, historical periods, and cultures through engagement with diverse stories, issues, and perspectives that transcend cultures and national borders.
• Cultural Products and Social Structures: Students critically analyze cultural products and social structures to question how values, concepts, norms, biases, forms of expression are created, made use of, and revised. 
• Group Identity: Students identify, critically examine, and recognize the implications of their own and other groups' values, beliefs, norms, biases, narratives, and forms of representation.
• Disciplinary Concepts: Students describe the major concepts, language, and theories of a discipline, and use disciplinary concepts and models to explain human behavior

• Using Sources Responsibly: Students responsibly extrapolate from specific data sets, texts, projections, and documents to build a broader understanding about peoples, societies, aesthetics, environments, historical periods and/or cultures.

Provide civics education in order to promote civic service and civic knowledge—and to prepare students for the duties and responsibilities of citizenship. 

BY THE END OF TAKING A COURSE IN THIS AREA: 

• Democratic Process: Students develop the skills and knowledge necessary to engage meaningfully in the democratic process and to become informed and active society members, capable of working effectively with others to address local, national, and/or global issues, and capable of meaningful engagement in the democratic process.
• Contextual Background: Students develop a historical and contextual  understanding of the United States, including its complex history and civic institutions. 
• Values of Citizenship: Students develop a critical understanding of the social and political values associated with democratic and civic institutions.
• Civic Life: Students understand the diverse ideologies (e.g., cultural, historical, economic, religious, sociological) that shape political systems and civic life. 
• Culture and Diversity: Students critically analyze how different cultural, intellectual, economic, and/or aesthetic frameworks shape individuals and societies, create power structures and inequalities, and offer opportunities for creative and cultural agency. 

Prepares students to critically analyze and engage in social justice issues. Prejudice reduction and collective action are emphasized.  

BY THE END OF TAKING A COURSE IN THIS AREA: 

• Culture and Diversity: Students critically analyze how different cultural, intellectual, economic, and/or aesthetic frameworks shape individuals and societies and create  power structures and inequalities. Students critically analyze contrasting viewpoints on people, societies, aesthetics, environments, historical periods, and cultures through engagement with diverse stories, issues, and perspectives that transcend cultures and national borders.
• Systemic Structures: Students demonstrate a shared understanding of their role in relation to power structures such as institutional and systemic racism, sexism, ableism, heterosexism, classism, linguicism, and ageism.

• Systems of Oppression: Students develop the ability to recognize and critique systems of oppression (i.e. racism, sexism, ableism, colonialism, prejudices, bias, stereotypes) and movements that challenge them, in historical and modern context, as well as in a national and transnational context.

• Social Justice: Students transfer knowledge and understanding into action, exploring how to meaningfully enact social change and social justice.