Middlebury College
AC-2: Learning Outcomes

The Program in Environmental Studies
Education Studies
The Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies
American Studies
Sociology/Anthropology

Learning Goals for the Environmental Studies Major:
Content:

Our students graduate with knowledge of the diverse human relationships to the environment, achieved through: breadth, depth, integration, commonality, creativity.

Our students share a common base of knowledge across the humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences.

Disciplinary depth of knowledge is balanced by breadth of knowledge across disciplines. Students integrate knowledge and methodologies across disciplines.

Our students gain a broad and deep knowledge of the American story of human-environment interaction. They also have the opportunity to compare these social and ecological relationships cross-culturally and globally.

Learning Goals for Education Studies include:
To have a foundation in the principles and philosophy of education our minors should be able to understand and apply multiple lenses to examine, debate, and write about critical issues in education policy and practice, that include content and/or discipline specific issues as well as issues of power, privilege, social dominance, and social justice.

Learning Goals for The Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies:
Our courses are interdisciplinary in nature and students examine the questions raised by the scholarship on gender, sexuality and feminist studies; they learn to critically understand how class, ethnicity, sexuality, and other constructions of difference are influenced and informed by gender. We draw upon scholarship from the humanities, the social sciences and the natural sciences to highlight the possibilities of social transformation and change.

Learning Goals for American Studies include:
Students who major in American Studies should be able to culturally and historically contextualize a range of identity categories (e.g., race and ethnicity, gender, disability, sexuality, and class).

Learning Goals for Sociology/Anthropology include:
To complete the major, students choose four electives which respond to the sundry agendas that they bring to SOAN. These include international development and human rights work, environmental studies, primary and secondary schoolteaching, medicine and public health, law and advocacy, psychology and social work. Because SOAN comprises two disciplines and attracts majors with such a wide array of interests, our learning goals must be formulated in broad terms.

We expect our students to learn:

-basic sociological and anthropological concepts;
-the centrality of class, race and gender in most situations;
-the value of comparative analysis;
-the need to evaluate all sources of information critically;
-the value of questioning received wisdom or common sense;
-research techniques that will enable them to pursue their own investigations in whatever field they choose.