General Education: Strengthening intellectual, creative and professional lives
Mission Statement
The General Education Program is one of the primary sites for realizing Cal Poly's vision of a comprehensive polytechnic education. The program promotes an understanding and appreciation of the foundational disciplines that ground all intellectual inquiry. It enriches the specialized knowledge acquired in a major program with an understanding of its scientific, humanistic, artistic, and technological contexts. The program imparts knowledge and transferable skills, fosters critical thinking and ethical decision making, supports integrative learning, and prepares students for civic engagement and leadership.
General Education Breadth Requirements
California State University CSU Executive Order 1065
Cal Poly's General Education Program has been designed to complement the major program and electives completed by each baccalaureate candidate, to assure that graduates have made noteworthy progress toward being truly educated persons. These requirements are designed to provide the knowledge, skills, experiences, and perspectives that will enable CSU students to expand their capacities to take part in a wide range of human interests and activities; to confront personal, cultural, moral, and social problems that are an inevitable part of human life; and to cultivate both the requisite skills and enthusiasm for lifelong learning. Faculty are encouraged to assist students in making connections among disciplines to achieve coherence in the undergraduate educational experience Courses approved for GE Breadth should be responsive to the need for students to have developed knowledge of, or skills related to, quantitative reasoning, information literacy, intellectual inquiry, global awareness and understanding, human diversity, civic engagement, communication competence, ethical decision-making, environmental systems, technology, lifelong learning and self-development, and physical and emotional health throughout a lifetime.
LEAP Essential Learning Outcomes Framework
Each CSU campus is required to define its GE student learning outcomes to fit within the framework of the four Essential Learning Outcomes drawn from the Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP) campaign, an initiative of the Association of American Colleges and Universities:
- Knowledge of Human Cultures and the Physical and Natural World
- Intellectual and Practical Skills
- Personal and Social Responsibility
- .Integrative Learning
Within the LEAP framework, Cal Poly has expanded its focused learning objectives that students should achieve through the General Education Program:
- Aesthetic Appreciation/Creative Thinking
- Critical Thinking
- Integrative Learning
- Physical-Psychological Health
- Scientific, Mathematical Understanding, Problem Solving
- Disciplinary Knowledge
- Writing Proficiency
- Cultural Diversity/Global Understanding
- Oral Communication
- Ethical Reasoning