Knowledge and Skills Areas
GE has ten knowledge and skills areas, described below. In all of your GE courses you will explore content- specific knowledge with faculty experts, developing skills that will serve you at New Paltz and beyond.
Courses in this area will help you refine your ability to communicate with specific audiences within a variety of different rhetorical situations across different writing genres. Although you will continue to develop your written and oral skills in your major, this course is an essential foundation.
At the university level, it is difficult to successfully develop and express your knowledge and ideas without these skills. Beyond the university, these transferable skills are essential for success in the job market and the career world, and overall life-long learning.
ENG 170: Writing and Rhetoric fulfills the Communication – Written and Oral requirement.
GE courses in Diversity: Equity, Inclusion, and Social Justice teach students how to apply social justice frameworks to address how institutional and societal structures lead to inequities across groups and help perpetuate systems of power, privilege, oppression, and opportunity. By learning about the historical and contemporary societal factors that shape the development of identities involving race, class, and gender, you will be better equipped to apply the principles of rights, access, equity, and autonomous participation to future social justice action.
Every School at SUNY New Paltz offers Diversity: Equity, Inclusion, and Social Justice courses.
Mathematics looks for patterns and describes them explicitly, using tools such as equations, graphs and diagrams. Mathematical ideas and techniques impact our lives in many ways. For example, statistics is used to support or refute ideas and models of the world, while geometry is essential to art and architecture, and logic is used in law and philosophy.
Types of mathematics taught in GE courses include algebra/calculus, statistics, geometry, graph theory, and symbolic logic.
The natural sciences use scientific principles and reasoning to explain processes in living organisms and in the physical environment. These range from microscopic organisms to stars and galaxies. In the natural sciences, you will gain an understanding of methods scientists use to develop hypotheses, observe and measure physical and biological phenomena, analyze data, and evaluate evidence. From this study, you will be able to engage in important scientific discourse about human interaction with the physical world.
GE courses in the natural sciences include biology, chemistry, geology, geography, physics, astronomy, and communication disorders, as well as interdisciplinary areas like environmental science and evolutionary studies.
Studying the humanities expands your understanding of the world by exploring individual and group cultural expressions in language, text, or images today and across history. Disciplines in the humanities acknowledge our complexity while developing methods for understanding and analyzing what it means to be human.
A broad array of course offerings fall under the GE Humanities category, including introductions to philosophy and political science, histories of music, theatre, film, and spoken word, and critical surveys of literature from cultures all around the world.
The social sciences explore why and how human beings interact with each other as well as the outcomes of that interaction. The concepts and theories in the social sciences seek to explain the principles of economic, cultural, and social interactions, and how they change over space and time. A GE class in the social sciences may explore values and beliefs, decision-making processes, social and cultural practices, or linguistic structures to better explain human behavior and the human mind. This is a broad field of inquiry that relies on a rich array of methodological frameworks, from the scientific method to quantitative statistical and qualitative interpretive methods.
GE courses in the Social Sciences are available in an array of disciplines, including anthropology, linguistics, economics, psychology, international politics, sociology, communication and media.
GE courses in the Arts engage students in creative processes guided by curiosity, scholarship, and imagination. As you are introduced to creative and critical thinking skills and techniques, you will learn how to think, speak, and write about artistic experiences. This exposure to artistic knowledge is an essential component to understanding the social, cultural, and historical contexts from which they emerge. GE courses in the Arts range from art history and criticism to studio art in multiple media, to music and theatre performance, to explorations of the history of cinema and film.
Courses in this GE area focus on historical, political, social, economic, and cultural developments in the United States. They emphasize diverse experiences of individuals and social groups, and the role of individual experience in U.S. communities and government. Building upon the basic outline of US history taught in New York State high schools, these courses call upon students to develop their thinking through rigorous discussion and debate – skills that are needed for democratic citizenship.
GE courses fulfilling the US History and Civic Engagement requirement may focus on specific eras of American history, or on broader themes in our national discourse. Topics include social inequality, race and racism, government and politics, and education.
What broad trends might one see over the course of human history? How have human beings impacted the environment and climate? What relationship do different civilizations and peoples have toward one another? These are just a few of the wide-ranging and important topics addressed by the World History and Global Awareness category. Whether you take a course comparing the ancient civilizations of China and Greece or one evaluating the impact of global trade in the twentieth century, you will come away with tools to help understand human interactions over historical time and geographical space. One finds World History and Global Awareness classes across the college curriculum, in the Liberal Arts and Sciences, Education, and Fine and Performing Arts divisions.
GE courses in World Languages provide students with elementary to intermediate level proficiency and lay the foundation for higher level language study. Language courses are not only essential for life in an interconnected world, they also enhance our communication skills. When learning a language, we develop our ability to read, write, listen, and speak to others while also expanding our understanding of the culture or cultures in which that language is spoken.
SUNY New Paltz offers a variety of world language classes at beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels, including American Sign Language, Chinese, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Kiswahili, and Spanish.
