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    Mar 28, 2024  
American University Catalog 2015-2016 
    
American University Catalog 2015-2016 [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

Foundational Area 1: The Creative Arts


The creative arts celebrate the human capacity to imagine, to create, and to transform ideas into expressive forms such as paintings, poems, and symphonies. The arts provide us with a rich record of human cultures and values throughout time. They enable us to understand and enjoy the experiences of our senses and to sharpen our aesthetic sense-that human quality through which we comprehend beauty. To appreciate the relationship between form and meaning is to realize that the creative arts, regardless of their medium of expression, share important principles.

Courses in this Foundational Area have varied emphases: the process of creativity, the analysis of the artistic imagination, or the relationship between artists, their works, and the societies in which their works are produced. Students may choose a “hands-on” experience and paint, draw, design, or write a poem. Alternatively, they may study both classic and recent works of literature, art, music, dance, or theatre. All courses in this area challenge the student to understand creativity and the distinctive intellectual process of the human imagination.

The Creative Arts: Goals


  • examine the nature of creativity, especially imaginative and intuitive thinking
  • situate creative works, and judgments about those creative works, in their appropriate social and historical context
  • develop the student’s own creative and expressive abilities, so that the student can better understand the qualities that shape an artist’s work

Wildcard Courses


Wildcards are original, timely courses, affording an opportunity to try out new ideas. New courses are often (but not always) offered as wildcards as a prelude to proposal for a permanent place in the General Education program. Subject to the approval of the General Education Curriculum Committee, wildcards can be offered by any teaching unit. Offerings vary each semester.

Sophomore Seminars


Sophomore Seminars are interdisciplinary or multi-disciplinary courses that integrate approaches and methods from two or more disciplines. Students are exposed to multiple modes of thinking about subjects, concepts, and problems, and engage in evaluating complementary and competing ways of knowing. Sophomore Seminars can be offered by any teaching unit at the 200-level under the GNED prefix, and are specifically designed to meet the learning goals of two or more Foundational Areas. Offerings vary each semester.

Foundational Area 1 Courses