General Education Goals: Thinking Critically & Creatively

Rationale

Appalachian’s general education program seeks to cultivate lifelong learners who can understand, question, revise, and generate knowledge through thinking that is both critical in its analysis and evaluation of knowledge and creative in its integration and generation of knowledge. Critical and creative thinkers are conscious of how their own positions as well as the history of ideas influence their thought, and they also adjust their thinking as they interpret, evaluate, and reflect based on increasingly sophisticated intellectual values. Critical and creative thought requires the ability to integrate knowledge from a variety of domains and to transfer knowledge from one domain to another, while at the same time recognizing the distinctiveness and limitations of different methodologies and theoretical paradigms. This ability is best fostered by a combination of disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches to learning and by the employment of a variety of critical and creative strategies, including reading, writing, observing, quantifying, using the scientific method, translating, creating, and performing.

Learning Outcomes

Students will:

IA.	Recognize, differentiate, and effectively employ appropriate and increasingly sophisticated strategies to collect and interpret information;
IB.	Successfully integrate disparate concepts and information when interpreting, solving problems, evaluating, creating, and making decisions;
IC.	Examine and evaluate how their own personal, historical, and cultural perspectives affect the discovery and generation of knowledge;
ID.	Construct persuasive arguments in increasingly complex contexts;
IE.	Apply theories from a variety of disciplines and advance convincing reasons to connect as well as differentiate theories from different domains of knowledge.