加州州立大学北岭分校

The Master of Arts degree in Humanities is designed for midcareer professionals and other lifelong learners who are interested in the nature and foundations of ideas, are curious about different worldviews and their origins, and seek to understand these through the lenses provided by the range of disciplinary fields in the humanities. We live in a society in which competing worldviews bombard us, and given the current state of the world, there is an urgent need for adults to reflect critically on their own worldviews, as well to recognize and understand the worldviews of others.

Thus, it is a central goal of the program to guide students through critical reading, discussions and reflection regarding both older and more contemporary treatments of ideas, values and worldviews to appreciate how these underlie current thinking—evident in practice and policy—across areas of our lives. Students in the cohorts will share their perspectives, their thinking and their developing insights through research, discussion and writing.

The program is interdisciplinary, as are the humanities. Its treatments address and include—explicitly or implicitly—all disciplines represented in the various departments and programs in the College of Humanities.

Student Learning Outcomes

• Understand the origins and transformations of worldviews (“big ideas”) as they move through different social, historical and cultural contexts.
• Discover how ideas and values from the past inform our present expectations, practices and policies, both explicitly and implicitly.
• Analyze and develop the skills to “step out of” one’s worldview and question assumptions about self, society and others.
• Refine skills in critical thinking, reading, speaking and writing across a variety of disciplines in the liberal arts.
• Refine the skills of close, context-sensitive reading that makes visible the form, structure and rhetorical function of texts and artifacts in a variety of genres and media.
• Develop the skills to apply the theory and methodology appropriate to the liberal arts.