GET Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs)

GET Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs): Definitions + SLOs

Critical Thinking is the systematic examination of relevant information to help one arrive at a reasoned conclusion.  Students will be able to:

1. Identify and explain issues or problems
2. Describe the relevant elements of specific issues or problems
3. Investigate the context surrounding specific issues or problems
4. Interrogate multiple perspectives, including their own
5. Formulate theses or hypotheses
6. Predict implications and consequences
7. Construct well-reasoned conclusions

Ethical Reasoning is reasoning about right and wrong human conduct.  It involves a working knowledge of moral principles, as well as the capacity to assess one’s own ethical beliefs and practices and the implications of ethical decisions for society.  Ethical reasoning is not mere reasoning about how to get what one wants: it involves, in addition, reasoning about what one should and should not want.  Students will be able to:

1. Identify, analyze, and critically evaluate their own values, motivations (including the origins of their own beliefs), and actions towards moral issues in society
   1. Understand various ethical concepts, perspectives, and theories (including but not limited to utilitarianism, deontological ethics, and virtue ethics) and the methods of reasoning associated with them
   1. Acknowledge and account for the values of cultures, identities, histories, and points of view other than their own
   1. Independently recognize ethical issues when they are present in a complex, multilayered (gray) context, and be sensitive to competing values
   1. Apply thorough ethical reasoning to challenging human concerns in their social contexts and consider the interests of multiple stakeholders

Effective Communication is the ability to critically analyze a communications situation and its audience.  The effective communicator then designs and confidently delivers the appropriate message(s) in written, oral, and/or visual form.  Students will be able to:

1. Critically analyze the rhetorical situation
2. Strategically design and construct written and oral messages
3. Choose the appropriate form or channel for communication
4. Deliver messages across appropriate formats or mediums

Problem Solving is the process of designing, evaluating, and implementing a strategy to answer a question or achieve a desired goal.  Students will be able to:

1. Define problems, goals, and constraints
2. Identify problem-solving strategies
3. Propose solutions and hypotheses
4. Examine possible solutions
5. Implement a solution
6. Evaluate outcomes and the chosen problem-solving approach

Well-Being and Life Skills concern appreciation of the factors that bear on mental, physical, and emotional health and the cultivation of the skills required to maintain a level of personal wellness that enables academic and personal flourishing.  Students will be able to:

1. Define personal well-being (as it pertains to mental, physical, emotional, financial, technological, etc., states)
2. Identify factors that influence personal well-being
3. Practice self-reflection regarding personal well-being
4. Plan for methods by which they can positively affect their personal well-being
5. Implement various techniques to positively affect their personal well-being

Social Responsibility encompasses actions wherein individuals participate in activities of personal and public concern that are both individually life-enriching and socially beneficial to the community.  Students will be able to:

1. Connect and extend knowledge (facts, theories, etc.) from one’s own academic study/field/discipline to civic engagement and to one’s participation in civic life
2. Provide evidence of experience in civic-engagement activities and describe what they have learned about themselves as it relates to a reinforced and clarified sense of civic identity and continued commitment to public action
3. Effectively and respectfully express, listen, and adapt to others to establish relationships to further civic action
4. Demonstrate independent experience and show initiative in team leadership of complex or multiple civic engagement activities, accompanied by reflective insights or analysis about the aims and accomplishments of one’s actions
5. Demonstrate ability and commitment to identify and collaboratively work across and within community contexts and structures to collaboratively assess and achieve a civic aim

Social Differences, Cultural Humility, & Justice: the historical, social, political, cultural, and economic contexts that have influenced life in the United States of America (US) are shaped by social differences, including race, ethnicity, class/wealth, gender identity, sexuality, language use, disability, religion, and age.  These social differences not only direct our personal and professional experiences and interactions, but also direct how social institutions (i.e., education, health, criminal justice, religious communities, industry, housing, commerce, recreation, social welfare, and citizenship rights) structure the everyday lives of all those who reside in the US as global citizens.

At the interpersonal level, cultural humility is a critical practice for engaging social difference.  Cultural humility is an ongoing, dynamic process of self-reflection and self-critique that examines personal assumptions, biases, and values based on historical and socio-political structures for a fuller awareness of self and others.

To work towards equity and social justice within local, national, and global contexts, there is also an urgency to move beyond the inter-personal to understand and transform social and structural institutions that also shape social difference.  Thus, while on one hand cultural humility focuses on the interpersonal (individual experiences, cultural identity, shared vulnerabilities, focusing on self-reflection and relational analysis), on the other hand, a social justice initiative requires attention to the structural context (identifying and analyzing social difference and social justice in the context of democracy, justice, fairness, and equity and what they mean within this structure).

 Students will be able to:

1. Discuss definitions of social difference via race, class, gender, sexuality, language use, ethnicity, and disability
2. Explain how intersectional power relationships have been created, maintained, and challenged within their disciplinary areas and social institutions
3. Reflect on how self / professional identity is shaped by social, cultural, ideological, and economic forces both historical and contemporary within society, in general, and within our academic disciplines, in particular
4. Compare how inequitable power influences interpersonal relationships at the personal, local, institutional, national, and global levels
5. Identify how different power relationships structure and perpetuate inequalities within our institutions, both academic and societal
6. Evaluate approaches that center cultural humility and vulnerability that serve to dismantle the imbalances of power with and against the past and contemporary political and economic institutional and social-cultural structures within our disciplines and in society