Learning Goals

Studio Art Courses:  Student Learning Objectives

I. CONTENT

  • Produce artworks with media and techniques that support developed ideas and well researched concepts.
  • Identify the rich contributions of artists from diverse cultures and times.
  • Connect a diversity of artistic practices to historical and contemporary works and research.
  • Consider how social identity and position have influenced and/or limited access, exposure and status within visual culture.

II. CRITICAL THINKING

  • Understand and articulate how an artist’s mental model and positionality influence how they make meaning from visual stimuli.
  • Examine how personal and collective experiences can influence artists’ visual perceptions and aesthetic choices.
  • Consider how individual and group perceptions and backgrounds influence aesthetic choices when making artworks and interpreting others’ artworks. 
  • Critique artworks, including the ability to respectfully give and receive constructive criticism while also practicing active listening skills.

III. PRESENTATION

  • Create a portfolio that meets current disciplinary standards and practices.
  • Present one’s works using appropriate language, documentation, writing, or installation methods.
  • Develop a body of art and a corresponding artist statement for a public exhibition.
  • Consider the role of diverse audiences in the making and public display of artwork

 

Art History Courses:  Student Learning Objectives

I. GRASP OF CONTENT; SKILLS IN VISUAL LITERACY AND PERCEPTION

  • Familiarity with artists, works, movements, and historical/cultural contexts foregrounded in our Art History courses.
  • An understanding of principles of composition, including color, shape, linear configurations, etc., with an awareness of the psychological impact of visual form.
  • An understanding of the rhetorical functions of imagery, both historically and in contemporary culture, with particular attention to how visual rhetoric serves to reinforce or to challenge systems of power.

II. CRITICAL THINKING AND READING SKILLS

  • The ability to distinguish fact from conjecture and interpretation.
  • The ability to assess the validity of theories and arguments.
  • The ability to analyze the ways in which differing arguments and viewpoints (of artists, patrons, and historians/critics) reflect different and often unequal social positioning in relation to systems of class, race, gender, sexuality, and other forms of social identity; to evaluate such arguments and viewpoints, and to formulate individual, well-informed perspectives.
  • The ability to approach issues from multiple critical perspectives, and to appreciate the reasons for more than one point of view.

III. RESEARCH SKILLS

  • The ability to find information on any given topic, and to be discriminating about the source and quality of that information.
  • The ability to distinguish between what one brings to a topic and what comes from other sources, and to make proper acknowledgment of those sources.

IV. WRITTEN AND ORAL COMMUNICATION SKILLS

  • The ability to formulate clear arguments, supported by evidence.
  • Control of the elements of grammar, syntax, word choice, and punctuation.
  • The ability to write skillfully for a broad range of audiences, both academic and general, using the appropriate voices, formats, and levels of formality.
  • Articulate oral communication.