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California State University, Chico

Goals & SLOs - Comparative Religion and Humanities

Comparative Religion

Goals & Objectives

Graduates of the CSU, Chico Program in Comparative Religion will:

  • G1. Possess essential knowledge of the historical emergence, cultural contexts, scriptural and oral traditions, teachings, practices, and contemporary expressions of the world’s major religious traditions.
  • G2. Comprehend the component forms of religious life, including ritual, myth, doctrine, philosophy, ethics, and material culture.
  • G3. Understand how religion informs and is informed by other dimensions of human experience and knowledge, such as gender, ethnicity, social organization, politics, economics, and science; and how religions are used both to support and to critique social structures and institutions.
  • G4. Achieve competence in the interdisciplinary, comparative approach to the study of religion, which employs the tools and perspectives of such disciplines as anthropology, sociology, philosophy, theology, ethics, history, psychology, and literary theory.
  • G5. Acquire the skills of critical reading, listening, and reasoning that foster conversation and enrich civil and academic discourse about religion.
  • G6. Develop the ability to communicate effectively in speech and writing in a variety of formats.
  • G7. Master the research skills and methods appropriate to the contemporary study of religion, including library and Internet research.

Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs)

  • SLO1. Students can define and identify the history, beliefs, and practices of major world religious traditions.
  • SLO2. Students understand major critical approaches to the study of religion and can explain how component elements of religion ( myth, ritual, scripture, etc…) function in diverse contexts.
  • SLO3. Students can analyze how religion interacts with other cultural systems (economics, law, public policy, international relations, family structures, arts, medicine, science, etc…).
  • SLO4. Students can engage in and facilitate civil dialogue regarding religious and secular viewpoints and values.
  • SLO5. Students can make clear, well-organized, and substantive written presentations.
  • SLO6. Students can produce a project that demonstrates facility with traditional and electronic religious studies resources and the usage of appropriate scholarly style and citation formats.

Humanities

Goals & Objectives

Graduates of the CSU, Chico Program in Humanities will

  • G1. Possess an appreciation of the nature, scope, and historical contingency of the development of Western and select non-western cultures, including intellectual traditions, the arts and architecture, and language and literature.
  • G2. Understand how the methodologies common to the academic disciplines that comprise the Humanities (including philosophy, religious studies, history, languages and literatures, art, music, and theatre) are effectively employed in the study of texts or other cultural artifacts.
  • G3. Acquire the skills of critical reading, listening, and reasoning that foster conversation and the study of the humanities
  • G4. Develop the ability to communicate effectively in speech and writing in a variety of formats.
  • G5. Develop foreign language reading and comprehension skills at the second semester intermediate level in a modern language or at the second semester beginning level in a classical language.
  • G6. Gain familiarity with the study of humanistic cultural artifacts originating from a foreign culture.

Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs)

  • SLO1. Students can demonstrate factual knowledge of the emergence and development of a set of ideas, an artistic form or medium, or a religious, philosophical, or artistic tradition.
  • SLO2. Students will be able to apply methodological approaches of at least two academic disciplines in the humanities.
  • SLO3. Students will demonstrate the ability to perform a close analysis of or assess a given cultural artifact with reference to standards appropriate to the medium, cultural origin and time period of the work.
  • SLO4.
    a. Students can make clear, well-organized, and substantive written presentations.
    b. Students can make clear, well-organized, and substantive oral presentations.
  • SLO5. Students will be able to read and comprehend beginning or intermediate-level prose in the foreign language.