View the full-size general education graphic (PDF).
The 10 outcomes (and exciting topics you could study):
You’ll explore big questions and build connections outside of the traditional curricular boundaries. Interested in scandalous art? Transnational perspectives on gender, sex, and race? Power and privilege? Disability justice? These are some of the diverse topics, themes, and perspectives you can dive into.
The 10 outcomes fall into two categories—Foundations, and Perspectives. For each outcome, choose courses based on your academic interests, as well as your personal and professional development goals.
Foundations Outcomes
During your first year, your courses will focus on four Foundations outcomes. You’ll take one course in each outcome for a total of 12 credits. You’ll learn about the Lesley culture, as well as explore critical problems and enduring questions.
1. Analysis: Build critical skills for evaluating information from various sources.
2. Communication: Produce effective written, spoken, and visual texts and media.
3. Collaboration: Work productively with others, manage conflict, and take on different roles within diverse groups.
4. Quantitative Reasoning: Create and examine arguments using quantitative information from many sources.
Perspectives Outcomes
Next, you’ll fulfill each of the six Perspectives outcomes with courses totaling 27 credits. You’ll have course options that address each outcome as you continue to build upon the outcomes from the Foundations courses.
5. Ethical Reasoning, Social Action, and Civic Engagement: Examine the ethical consequences of personal and professional decisions, and take action to create change.
6. Examining Power & Inequity: Critically examine systems for power and bias.
7. Local and Global Connections: Analyze and form connections among self, community, language, and culture in our globalized world.
8. Create, Perform, Design: Create original work to express, inquire, or inspire.
9. Human Relationships to the Natural and Physical World: Examine the physical world and the complex relationships between humans and nature.
10. Inquiry Methods: Explore how knowledge is created in different traditional fields of study.
Applications Course
To complete your general education program, you’ll take one interdisciplinary, project-based course (3 credits) on a critical issue to help you reflect on the 10 outcomes and apply them to real-world problems.
Your path to a unique degree plan.
Throughout this reimagined general education curriculum, you can get creative and choose courses based on learning outcomes and your goals, rather than simply checking boxes in each subject area. The new curriculum also integrates coursework in our two undergraduate schools—our College of Art & Design with 9 art & design majors, and our College of Liberal Arts & Sciences with 25+ majors in psychology & applied therapies, education, business, social work, the sciences, and more—for greater collaboration and opportunity to pursue a degree plan and career path that is uniquely yours.
