The UW-Parkside Humanities Program
The UW-Parkside Humanities Program offers an exciting major in which students choose – in consultation with program faculty – an array of courses that best suit their interests.
Humanities isn’t grounded in an established body of information that students are expected to master. Rather, it encourages students to ask thoughtful questions and make connections among different categories of knowledge.
Humanities graduates will be extraordinarily well prepared for cutting-edge 21st century careers such as arts management, software and web page development, management, advertising and marketing, teaching, journalism, and the clergy … to name only a few possibilities. Many of today’s most sought-after employers look more for creativity, critical thinking, and superior communication abilities than for skills specific to the workplace.
The Humanities major is also well suited to complement another major, a minor, teacher licensure, or one of UW-Parkside’s many skills-based certificate programs. There simply are no programs at UW-Parkside that would not be enhanced by perspectives and abilities developed in the Humanities Program!
Humanities offers a flexible yet structured curriculum. The core humanities courses introduce students to the foundations of human knowledge and understanding. They develop skills in synthesizing knowledge and expressing ideas. And they expose students to a wide variety of subject areas. Moreover, humanities students benefit from attentive advising and faculty input in selecting electives. Rather than simply allowing students to graduate with a random collection of courses, the Humanities Program guides them through six competency areas that lend coherence to all of their college work:
- Aesthetics
The more we “read” or interpret verbal and non-verbal texts and imagery, the more we refine our abilities to make, articulate, and explicate informed judgments. Aesthetics in general refers to the ability to reflect on the importance of artistic and humanistic pursuits to human existence. - Communication
We must be able to communicate effectively, in a variety of communication situations, using the media of the 21st century, which means being aware of how choices of language, rhetoric, and action affect the ways messages are understood. Effective communication also entails understanding the traditions and purposes of many different modes of expression. - Ethics
Ethics is about the practice of moral judgment, which involves the ability to reflect on what it means to be human, the ability to reflect critically on notions of validity and truth, as well as willingness to explore issues and events from a variety of perspectives. - History
History is about recognizing patterns in past events and seeing their relevance to present-day life, demonstrating how contemporary social issues are rooted in past events and political choices. It’s also about being able to speculate in informed ways about how present-day trends might affect the future. - Critical Thinking
Critical thinking deals with how value systems shape human knowledge. Critical thinking includes epistemology, the ability and willingness to question the nature of human knowledge. - Interdisciplinarity
Interdisciplinarity refers to the ability to make deliberate connections among various academic disciplines; to comprehend and participate in more than one discipline. It’s also the ability to reflect on the nature of interdisciplinarity itself and to articulate the value of an interdisciplinary perspective.
Faculty and staff affiliated with the Humanities Program "think outside the box" by teaching special topics courses, by trying the latest and most innovative teaching methods, by providing opportunities for fieldwork and community engagement, and by organizing exciting campus and community events.
Some recent courses taught in the Humanities Program include:
- Introduction to Humanities: World Cultures through 1500 – taught by John Longeway (Ph.D., Cornell University) of the Philosophy Department
- Infectious Disease and Its Deadly Path – taught by Professor Carmel Ruffolo (Ph.D., Monash University, Australia) of the Biological Sciences Department
- Internet-Education-Democracy – taught by Professor Megan Mullen (Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin) of the Communication Department
- Gender in Modern European Visual Culture, 1900-1945 – taught by Professor Susan Funkenstein (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison) of the Art Department
- Spanish and English in the United States : Intercultural Poetics – taught by Professor Alex McNair (Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin) of the Modern Languages Department
Humanities is a 35-credit major.
Required courses include:
- Six credits of 100-level introductory Humanities courses
- A 3-credit scholarship and methods course
- A 1-credit senior-level capstone course
Electives to equal at least 25 credits include:
- Applied skills courses
- Department-based courses as suited to a student’s program
- Humanities Topic Seminars—specially designed interdisciplinary courses
- Humanities Colloquia – 1 credit courses that focus on a specific event or shared experience (e.g., a trip to a play or museum, reading a novel, investigating a current news event)
- An array of self-paced courses
