2018-2019 [ARCHIVED CATALOG]
Humanities Department
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What constitutes a literary education in the 21st century? What critical skills are involved in understanding and processing perspectives emerging from complex local and global landscapes? How do we cultivate and nurture an interest in critical interdisciplinary thinking that challenges and shape us as thinkers and doers? How do the humanities prepare us for living in and thoughtfully engaging with the world?
The Humanities Department invites students to capture these questions, explore them, challenge them, analyze them, and process them through varios lenses. Students are then encouraged to reshape, redefine, and/or reject these questions in favor of their own. They do this through class meetings, individual and collaborative community engagement, special projects, literary and research analyses, and exposure to and processing of stimulating interdisciplinary theory and practice.
Mission Statement
The Humanities Department strives to inspire students to bring to the world community original perspectives, inventive strategies, and knowledge that will contribute to the intellectual and creative spirit of our collective human experience.
What jobs are available for humanities graduates?
- Journalist
- Teacher
- Editor/copywriter
- Public relations specialist
- Nonprofit director
- Researcher
- Grant writer
- Professional fund-raiser
- Translator
- Museum specialist
- Archives management
- Federal, state, and local official
The Undergraduate English Program
The English Program comprises a large portion of the liberal arts core of the university and includes three emphases: literature, writing, and preparation for teaching certification. A Bachelor of Arts degree is offered through the program with a major in English or English/Language Arts (for a 5-12 teaching credential).
The English Program also serves the university by supporting the “W” courses (see “Special Programs”), general undergraduate requirements, the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, and by providing specialized classes in writing.
Program Outcomes
- Understand the history, development, and structure of the English language and know how English language theory relates in practice to the teaching and learning of language, both spoken and written
- Be aware of contemporary approaches to the composition process and be able to demonstrate the knowledge in a variety of genres, as well as connect the knowledge and those skills to the pedagogy of writing
- Know and appreciate the diversity of voices in both Anglo-American and Global literature, as well as be able to apply classical and contemporary critical approaches to illuminate texts for colleagues and students
- Demonstrate strong research, writing, and presentation skills through the production of works suitable for presentation and publication as appropriate to the student’s concentration, including the senior thesis
The History Program
The Heritage University History program trains students to develop the habits of mind that allow them to explore the human experience across time and space, placing the history of the Northwest within the context of global forces that shape contemporary life. Utilizing an evolving set of tools to interpret the past with clarity, rigor, and an appreciation for interpretative debate, the History program fosters a disciplined understanding of the world that demands evidence, sophisticated use of information, and a deliberative stance to explain change and continuity over time.
In keeping with the vision of Heritage University to promote cooperation across cultural boundaries and because historians always study the Other—other cultures, times, places, and people—the History program emphasizes the ability to interpret the past in context, on its own terms. Such interpretation depends on the vast documentary record of the past. Consequently, the History program encourages a critical approach to sources that includes distinguishing between different types of primary and secondary sources, harnessing multiple interpretive tools to make sense of those sources, and maintaining a set of professional ethics and standards that demand peer review, citation, and toleration for the provisional nature of knowledge.
As participants in a profoundly public pursuit, the Heritage History program prepares graduates to practice active and empathetic citizenship and to utilize effective communication to make the past accessible to multiple audiences, including secondary students. This allows them to enter into contentious discussions with empathy and a balanced understanding of multiple perspectives. These skills prepare graduates to serve as models for contemporary social dialogue, engaged citizenship, conflict resolution, and lifelong learning. Furthermore, these competencies are essential to many professions that require complex analytical skills and empathetic communication.
The Heritage University History program offers three degree options and one minor course of study. Students should choose between these pathways based on their anticipated career goals.
BA in History: for students seeking employment outside of the education system or planning graduate studies;
BA in History (5-12 Credential): for students seeking employment as secondary history teachers; or
BA in Social Studies (5-12 Credential): for students seeking employment as secondary social studies teacher in history, civics, economics, and geography; or
Minor in History: for students seeking to complement their chosen course of study and to diversify their career preparation.
Program Outcomes
Upon completion of the Bachelor of Arts in History, a student will be able to:
- Engage in historical inquiry and analysis.
- Understand the dynamics of change over time.
- Interpret materials from the past with precision, detail, and context.
- Recognize the ongoing provisional nature of knowledge, including present knowledge.
- Practice historical empathy.
- Evaluate a variety of historical sources for their credibility, position, and perspective.
- Interpret the past in context; contextualize the past on its own terms.
- Identify, summarize, and evaluate historical arguments.
- Understand the complex nature of the historical record.
- Distinguish between primary and secondary materials and decide when to use each.
- Choose among multiple tools, methods, and perspectives to interpret materials from the past.
- Recognize the value of conflicting narratives and evidence.
- Devise research strategies to answer significant questions about the past.
- Generate significant, open-ended questions about the past to promote discussion and research.
- Locate a variety of sources that provide evidence to support an argument about the past.
- Develop a methodological practice of gathering, sifting, analyzing, ordering, synthesizing, and interpreting evidence.
- Craft historical narrative and argument.
- Generate a historical argument that is reasoned and based on historical evidence selected, arranged, and analyzed.
- Write effective narrative that describes and analyzes the past.
- Understand that the ethics and practice of history demand recognizing and building on other scholars’ work, peer review, and citation.
- Practice historical thinking as central to engaged citizenship.
- Engage a diversity of viewpoints in a civil and constructive fashion.
- Work cooperatively with others to develop positions that reflect deliberation and differing perspectives.
- Apply historical knowledge and analysis to contribute to contemporary social dialogue.
- Defend a position and respond to questions in public.
In addition to the Program Learning Outcomes detailed above, the BA in History (5-12 Credential) program and the BA in Social Studies (5-12 Credential) program are closely aligned with the 2015 standards established by the Washington Professional Educator Standards Board and tested by the West-E subject-area test in History (5-12) and Social Studies (5-12) respectively.
The Humanities Program
The Humanities Program offers courses in world languages, Native American and indigenous studies, history, humanities, philosophy, and religion. Thus, like the English program, the Humanities program contributes to the university by providing many of the General University Course Requirements, especially those that contribute to the general education goals in communications skills, critical thinking, multicultural awareness, ethics, and humanities. The program thereby helps students acquire the knowledge, skills, and abilities needed to become effective participants in the political and cultural life and leadership of their chosen communities.
In addition, the Humanities program offers Associate of Arts degrees in both Humanities and American Indian Studies.The Bachelor of Arts degree in American Indian Studies or American Cultural Studies, provide opportunities to explore the arts, language, linguistics, history and culture, through various socio-political and historical lenses. These areas of focus provide excellent support for practical careers involving multicultural skills, as well as offer graduate studies a critical overview of fields such as linguistics, museum science, professional writing, library science, history, American studies, and Ethnic studies.
Program Outcomes
Students will:
- Exhibit critical thinking skills in diverse oral and written contexts
- Develop a multicultural awareness in the contexts of language, the arts, community practices, and belief traditions
- Acquire the knowledge and abilities needed to become an effective participant in the political and cultural lives of communities, assuming leadership roles in many cases
- Identify different values and world views, with an emphasis on understanding relationships among government, religion, art, and science, and among individuals, society, and the global community
- Produce critically reflective, well-supported, organized, and clearly articulated research papers using both primary and secondary sources
- Recognize the connection among values, beliefs, and cultural forms, and among humanity’s economic, social, and environmental sustainabilitie
World Languages
The Heritage would language courses include American Sign Language, French, Latin, Sahaptin and Spanish.
In Spanish, a dual-track program is offered that allows non-native Spanish speakers and native Spanish speakers to gain proficiency with structure, form, history and culture of the Spanish language and provides the ability to converse in a variety of academic and non-academic settings. An emphasis is placed on attaining fluency in Spanish. Non-Spanish speakers are requested to enrol in SPAN 101 - SPAN 102 and Spanish- speaking students are requested to enroll in SPAN 205 - SPAN 206 .
The Graduate English Program
The English Graduate Program offers several degree paths for students seeking additional study of literature, language. and writing. Students may pursue a Master in Teaching English/ Language Arts 5-12. Multicultural English Literature and Language, M.A., Organizational Leadership, Specialization in English Language and Literature, M.Ed. with additional certificates, English/Language Arts Certificate, Multicultural Literature, Writing and Rhetoric, Applied Linguistics. Consider carefully which path would best suit your goals.
Program Outcomes
- Understand the history, development, and structure of the English language and know how English language theory relates in practice to the teaching and learning of language, both spoken and written
- Be aware of contemporary approaches to the composition process and be able to demonstrate the knowledge in a variety of genres, as well as connect the knowledge and those skills to the pedagogy of writing
- Know and appreciate the diversity of voices in both Anglo-American and Global literature, as well as be able to apply classical and contemporary critical approaches to illuminate texts for colleagues and students
- Demonstrate strong research, writing, and presentation skills through the production of works suitable for presentation and publication as appropriate to the student’s concentration, including the master’s thesis
Degrees and Programs Offered
The Humanities program offers courses to complete the following degrees and programs:
ProgramsAssociate of ArtsBachelor of ArtsMaster in TeachingMaster of ArtsCertificateNon-DegreeCoursesAmerican Cultural StudiesAmerican Sign LanguageCommunicationsEnglishPage: 1
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