The General Education Core
General education is the cornerstone of every degree program at Cascadia. In general education courses, students acquire a set of skills that will enable them to access, process, construct, and express knowledge across cultures. Completing the general education core at Cascadia requires a willingness to take risks, an interest in growing and adopting new, more refined points of view, and an awareness of a global context for ideas and facts. General education classes lay the ground work for active, life-long learning and prepare students for future challenges through learning experiences in which they encounter and master their own knowledge and practices that foster their growth.
Foundations for College Success
College Success introduces students to Cascadia’s learning model, helps them to take ownership of their education, and sets them up for academic success. In College 101, each student participates in a group project, completes a guided research project in the university library, writes a tentative educational plan, and practices using a course website to complete assignments and interacts with an instructor and other students. All Cascadia students who complete Foundations for College Success have a minimum of 35 credits of guided practice in achieving the following outcomes.
Learn: Learners will demonstrate that they can find and use a variety of academic resources (including eLearning and library resources) at Cascadia. They will demonstrate ownership of their education and develop an academic plan.
Think: Learners will demonstrate basic information literacy skills and knowledge of particular ways of knowing and reasoning in the different academic disciplines.
Communicate: Learners will demonstrate flexibility in recognizing and expressing concepts in appropriate formats and they will be able to explain how they arrived at their conclusions.
Interact: Learners will demonstrate the ability to effectively collaborate in group activities.
Communication
Every degree at Cascadia is grounded in a set of core courses that emphasize communicating and critical thinking. In the composition sequence of the General Education Core Distribution, learners have a chance to become aware of the ways that culture informs, enriches, and at times limits learning and growth. Students practice argument, problem solving, analysis, and synthesis while they encounter and try out points of view from across the globe and reflect on their own points of view. All Cascadia students who complete the composition sequence have a minimum of 10 credits of guided practice in achieving the following outcomes.
Learn: Learners will become familiar with writing and reading processes and develop a personal process that helps them create successful texts; demonstrate a willingness to take risks and to deepen knowledge about self, others, and the world as it relates to writing and its process; learn to construct meaning from expanding and conflicting information; and meet deadlines and seek help when necessary.
Think: Learners will use a variety of conceptual and theoretical lenses and reflect on how these lenses provide alternative views of the experience and points of view of self, individuals, and groups; critically reflect on their own attitudes, values, behavior, and assumptions as well as those presented to them; and translate content between contexts with an awareness of the impact of different points of view and mediums.
Communicate: Learners will gather information and draft and publish texts that demonstrate inquiry into critical and creative thinking and an awareness of criteria for clear, original communication; communicate interpretations of data and claims and articulate rationales for making decisions about responsible action in the context of community issues and problems; and use technology and methods of discourse as learning tools.
Interact: Learners will share ideas, experiences, and self- assessment processes and listen to those of others; engage in collaborative peer review processes that will reflect their understanding of their experiences, composition practice, and self-assessment; and recognize conflict as a necessary part of discourse and respect individual ways of arriving at answers while critically analyzing models and ways of thinking.
Quantitative or Symbolic Reasoning
The ability to quantitatively and symbolically reason is critical in an ever-increasing complex society. In turn, the General Education Core provides students practice in problem solving and critical thinking using multiple approaches to draw conclusions while communicating their results and interacting with others. All Cascadia students who complete Quantitative or Symbolic Reasoning have a minimum of 5 credits of guided practice in achieving the following outcomes.
Learn: Learners will apply problem solving and mathematical modeling to real situations and take responsibility for accessing and using a variety of sources in learning about mathematics.
Think: Learners will analyze and interpret data or evidence to correctly solve problems through the construction of clear, well-supported arguments that lead to valid conclusions supported by appropriate symbolic reasoning and mathematical models.
Communicate: Learners will interpret complex problems and illustrate solutions using mathematical symbols and formulas that justify mathematical conclusions expressed in written or oral form.
Interact: Learners will engage with complex differences between and among their own cultures and others as manifested through social inequities. As part of this practice, students will recognize and articulate their understanding of diverse perspectives.
Equity, Diversity, and Power
Cascadia College stands for diversity, equity, inclusion, and responsiveness.
The EDP requirement is intended to help students begin developing skills and knowledge to successfully navigate living in an increasingly interconnected, complex, and diverse world. The 150-series requirement grounds students in the needed cognitive tools and background to critically analyze their evolving positions in society so they can pursue further study and seek out their careers more intentionally. In fulfilling the EDP requirement, students learn how local and global systems of power, privilege, and inequality are created and maintained. Additionally, students learn how individuals, communities, and societies/cultures are impacted by these systems and explore strategies for equitable change.
Learn: Students acquire and construct knowledge regarding local and global systems of power, privilege, inequality, and cultural diversity.
Think: Students use varied approaches to think critically about and reflect on both their personal views and assumptions, as well as other viewpoints, related to power, privilege, inequality, and cultural diversity.
Communicate: Students discuss course content as it relates to power, privilege, inequality, and cultural diversity
Interact: Students engage with complex differences within and between their own and other cultures in relation to power, privilege, inequality, and cultural diversity.
Humanities
Languages, literature, the arts, and philosophy are essential cultural expressions of being human. Underlying these subjects are ideas such as aesthetics, ethics, symbolism, and creativity that vary across times and cultures. Through the humanities, learners participate in others’ subjective experience of reality and convey their own.
Learn: Learners will acquire, create, demonstrate, and apply knowledge by investigating and synthesizing ideas, themes and processes within and related to Humanities disciplines to realize themselves as imaginative risk-takers, problem-solvers, global citizens and autonomous life-long learners.
Think: Learners will refine knowledge through analysis, evaluation, experimentation, and innovation, working with ideas and artifacts that already exist and bringing new ideas and artifacts into existence to enrich our understanding of humanity.
Communicate: Learners will consider their own and others’ perspectives and contexts, recognize formal and informal conventions of disciplines, genres, and cultures, seek original thoughts, and articulate knowledge via their own messages.
Interact: Learners will respectfully engage viewpoints, interpretations, and sources that embody global diversity, creating a community of inquiry that values ambiguity to expand our collective knowledge of the human experience in all its forms.
Natural Sciences
Science literacy provides a foundation for informed citizenship in our increasingly technological society. Learners practice, communicate, and apply science in order to understand the natural and physical world and the consequences of human activity within it.
Learn: Learners will employ scientific approaches to explain natural phenomena; they will generate knowledge by making and assessing controlled observations, formulating testable predictions, and evaluating verifiable data.
Think: Learners will use components of the scientific method to generate and modify hypotheses through critical analysis of data and information; they will evaluate known and needed information as a process in problem-solving; they will assess and respond to current global issues in the context of evidence-based conclusions.
Communicate: Learners will articulate scientific concepts clearly and correctly through a variety of media (oral, written, visual, and graphical); learners will concisely organize and present evidence and data; learners will actively listen and respond to communication with peers and instructors in a respectful manner.
Interact: Learners will work responsibly and effectively in groups to accomplish tasks, analyze data, and solve problems; they will engage with their peers to use multiple perspectives to explain scientific applications; they will connect learning and their interactions with the natural world; they will evaluate the global, environmental, and human contexts of scientific concepts.
Social Sciences
The social sciences expand learners’ understanding of the nature and behavior of individuals as well as their interaction and organization in multiple cultural contexts.
Learn: Learners will engage in experiential activities to acquire, construct, demonstrate, and apply social scientific knowledge in a variety of contexts; they will complete required work and identify opportunities to expand knowledge, skills, and abilities.
Think: Learners will acknowledge the complexities of specific social issues and analyze underlying assumptions and multiple perspectives on those issues. They will identify and evaluate evidence to draw conclusions about human behavior; they will distinguish between social scientific and other ways of knowing; and they will combine or synthesize course material in original and exploratory ways to apply that information to hypothetical or real-world situations.
Communicate: Learners will use oral and written communication to raise and explore important questions in the social sciences; learners will use disciplinary knowledge, texts, technology, and language to gather, process, present, and reference information.
Interact: Learners will demonstrate the ability to work collaboratively in groups and translate those skills to interactions with others; they will identify ways in which disciplinary, ethical, and professional standards shape social scientists’ interactions with society; they will identify and reflect on differences between individuals, groups, communities, or societies and how those differences shape interactions, perspectives, and outcomes.