Culture, Art, and Technology
[ Courses]
OFFICE: Pepper Canyon Hall, Second Floor
http://sixth.ucsd.edu/
Program Director
Linda Strauss, Ph.D.
The Sixth College core sequence in Culture, Art, and Technology offers an opportunity for students to explore the ways in which human beings have come to express and shape themselves and their world through their own creations. The core sequence takes an interdisciplinary, integrated approach to the college theme, with students examining a series of problems and issues from multiple perspectives. These issues center on how culture, art, and technology have developed over time in different societies, how they interact with each other, how human beings have used them to address challenges and how their uses have generated fresh challenges by reshaping peoples’ relationships to each other and to their environment. The sequence spans the whole range of human experience, from the prehistoric through the present, ending with a consideration of future possibilities.
The college writing program is imbedded in the core sequence, with writing-intensive quarters in CAT 2 and CAT 3. Students learn to use writing to probe and experiment with new ideas as well as to express themselves clearly and effectively to others in their own voices. The core sequence provides students with instruction and multiple opportunities for practice so they may develop a repertoire of strategies and tools for communication.
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.
The core sequence prepares Sixth College students to become self-motivated, lifelong learners. They will have broadened and deepened their visions of themselves and the world and will have developed an appreciation of the diversity and powers both of ideas and of the social body. Through inquiry into problems and issues of Culture, Art, and Technology, our students will know how to ask and how to go about answering good questions, recognizing that good questions lead not just to answers but to more penetrating, more fruitful questions and approaches to problems, which can then lead in many cases to more effective solutions.
