Culture, Art, and Technology

[ courses ]

Pepper Canyon Hall, Second Floor
http://cat.ucsd.edu/

All courses, faculty listings, and curricular and degree requirements described herein are subject to change or deletion without notice. Updates may be found on the Academic Senate website: http://senate.ucsd.edu/catalog-copy/approved-updates/.

The Sixth College Core Sequence on Culture, Art, and Technology (CAT) gives students an opportunity to learn about the conventions of academic writing and to consider the factors that lead to technological, cultural, and artistic change. 

The sequence consists of three quarters of lecture—fall, winter, and spring—with accompanying discussion sections. Writing instruction is integrated into the curriculum and is not offered as a stand-alone course in Sixth College.

Each quarter we offer a selection of interdisciplinary courses, which take varying approaches to culture, art, and technology.

  1. Fall (four units): the past of culture, art, and technology. These courses focus on critical reading and questions like “What constitutes a text?” or “How can an artifact or source be analyzed?” or “Why is the same object of study approached differently in different fields?”
  2. Winter (six units): the present of culture, art, and technology. These courses emphasize constructing arguments, both explicit and implicit. (Note: students must have passed the Entry Level Writing Requirement to take this class.)
  3. Spring (six units): the future of culture, art, and technology. These courses are devoted to developing the skills to produce an independent research project.

Students in CAT learn through a combination of lectures, discussions, questions, readings, guest speakers, hands-on activities, writing assignments, and multimedia projects. Sixth College offers a learning environment that extends beyond the classroom and emphasizes teamwork, critical thinking, close reading, pattern recognition, and creative approaches to problems, drawing on models and methods from a variety of fields.