Learning Goals and Objectives

Learning Goals

1. Ability to read, and think critically, and to write well.
2. Ability to analyze texts.
3. Familiarity with persuasion, argumentation, and rhetoric as they appear in literary as well as non-literary texts
4. Familiarity with literary and critical theories
5. Familiarity with the work of writers, literary styles, genres, forms and periods
6. Familiarity with library and online research.

Learning Objectives

Our objectives represent the teaching aims of the faculty in English. They may be mapped onto courses, pending an individual instructor's approval. All instructors are free to determine which of these objectives is consistent with their particular course content and pedagogical approach.

1. Undergraduate literature
2. Undergraduate creative writing
3. Undergraduate publishing studies
4. Graduate literature
5. Graduate creative writing

1. Learning Objectives in UG literature
   
   1. Students should demonstrate an ability to write critically and analytically.
   2. Students should demonstrate familiarity with issues of literary style.
   3. Students should demonstrate familiarity with issues of critical theory.
   4. Students should demonstrate familiarity with issues of literary genre and poetic form.
   5. Students should demonstrate familiarity with issues of literary history.
   6. Students should demonstrate a deep engagement with the work of a single significant author.
   7. Students should persuasively employ primary and/or secondary sources, with proper acknowledgment and citation, as they contribute to a critical essay’s thesis.
   8. Students should demonstrate familiarity with the history and structure of the English language.
   9. Students should demonstrate familiarity with texts in their cultural context.
2. Learning Objectives in UG Creative Writing
   
   1. Students' work should demonstrate clarity of expression.
   2. Students should demonstrate an ability to understand and express ideas through or in dialogue with literary forms.
   3. Students should be conversant with the structural concerns related to beginnings, middles, and ends.
   4. Students' work should demonstrate a sophisticated awareness of syntactical possibilities.
   5. Students' work should employ elaboration: taking an initial idea and building on it, through examples, metaphors, and other literary tropes.
   6. Students' work should demonstrate a tone of authority, a voice that invites the reader to listen and attend respectfully.
   7. Students' work should demonstrate originality–the ability to entertain unconventional speculations or formal innovations.
   8. When critiquing their own or each other's work, students should be conversant with the fundamental terminology of the craft appropriate to the genre.
   9. Students' work should demonstrate a grasp of character, motivation, and credible dialogue.
3. Learning Objectives in Publishing Studies
   
   1. Students should be able to trace the history of the book and of book publishing from the ancient world to modern publishing.
   2. Students should demonstrate the ability to edit, copyedit, and proofread manuscripts.
   3. Students should be able to prepare a comprehensive marketing plan for a book idea of their own development, specifying how each element that is appropriate is tailored to their book idea.
4. Learning Objectives in Graduate Literature
   
   1. Students should demonstrate an ability to write cogently and persuasively about literary texts.
   2. Students should demonstrate familiarity with one or more literary traditions, periods, or genres.
   3. Students should demonstrate an understanding of one or more diverse critical perspectives available in the field of literary studies.
   4. In research papers, students will demonstrate the ability to engage with and, ideally, to contribute to relevant current scholarship.
   5. Students should demonstrate deep engagement with and understanding of the work of a single significant author.
   6. Students should demonstrate an interpretive engagement with the ideologies in a literary text.
5. Learning Objectives in Graduate Creative Writing
   
   1. Students' work should demonstrate knowledge of the strategies and forms of poetry, along with their recurrence in literary history.
   2. Students' work should demonstrate facility with such poetic elements as prosody, diction, persona and an understanding of lineation, stanza pattern, and rhetorical strategy.
   3. Students' work should reflect a developed sense of character, plot, narrative, theme, and voice.
   4. Students' work should employ the conventions and possibilities of the personal essay, the memoir, and the philosophical meditation, among other literary forms.
   5. Students' work should reveal an understanding of credible character and plot structure within the context of the stage.
   6. Students' work should demonstrate originality–the ability to entertain unconventional speculations or formal innovations.