Arts and Pre-1800s

In addition to the three courses in Culture, every student will successfully complete the following two requirements:

Arts (CPFA)

Students must complete at least one 4-unit course (or a total of 4 units) that treats the theory or practice of the fine arts (designated CPFA).

The purpose of the Core Program Arts (CPFA) requirement is to provide students with opportunities to pursue creative endeavors and study the importance of skillfully and critically responding to the arts and audiovisual culture. These courses are intended to help students understand how creative works are conceived, produced, and disseminated, as well as how they are analyzed and interpreted.

Designation Criteria

Courses satisfying this requirement focus on art-making and/or cultural and historical understandings about creative works of art. In courses meeting this requirement, at least two-thirds of the course must engage with creative production, art criticism, and/or art historical analysis.

Outcomes

Through completion of the Arts requirement students will achieve at least two of the five outcomes listed below:

1. Cultivate artistic literacy through critical analysis, intensive looking or listening, repeated practice, and/or engagement with materials.
2. Contextualize the role of artists and/or theorize creative works in relation to historical, political, social, cultural, aesthetic, and/or economic phenomena.
3. Create works of art including, but not limited to, painting, sculpture, photography, film, interdisciplinary media, installation, performance, creative writing, theater, dance, and music.
4. Develop proficiency in discipline-specific techniques of artistic expression.
5. Establish an artistic voice through experimentation, collaboration, exhibition, critique, and presentation.

Pre-1800s

The purpose of the pre-1800 requirement is to demonstrate to students the importance of the past. Across a wide range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches including those of the Humanities, Arts, and Humanistic Social Sciences the study of the past broadens our awareness of human conditions and experience, enables us to situate the present in an historical trajectory, and provides us with resources for crafting our future.

Designation Criteria

In courses meeting this requirement, at least 50% of the course topics and materials are drawn from before 1800 CE.

Outcomes

Courses satisfying this requirement develop in students two or more of the following outcomes:

1. A critical awareness of how the past informs the present, providing an understanding of the conditions that made possible the break with or the persistence of social structures, organizational hierarchies, artistic productions, or patterns of thought. 
2. A critical awareness of artistic productions, social structures, organizational hierarchies, political economies, or patterns of thought and practices that characterize historical communities and the experiences of peoples of the past.
3. A critical awareness of the past as a resource for imagining new ways of thinking, acting, organizing society, and forming community.
4. The critical skills of impartially, reasonably, accurately, and fairly understanding and representing a variety of ways of thinking and acting and of engaging with unfamiliar worldviews, ideas, and practices, in turn enabling students to responsibly navigate the pluralistic world of the present.