Common Curriculum for Leadership and Global Citizenship

The Common Curriculum provides academic breadth with a set of intellectually rigorous and challenging courses that foster skills and attributes associated with leadership and global citizenship. A leader and global citizen needs to be able to communicate with and cultivate compassion with those outside their own majors, disciplines, professions, communities, and
cultures and to make connections between their own livelihoods and expertise and the experiences and knowledge of others. The purpose of the Common Curriculum is to ensure that all University of Connecticut undergraduate students are literate in different ways of knowing and many kinds of knowledge beyond career preparation, and they enter society and their professions with a strong sense of moral, ethical, and social responsibility. Ideally, the Common Curriculum does not stand alone but instead provides a foundation for future learning of students in their majors and future careers. It is vital to the University’s mission that a balance between professional and general education be established and maintained in which each is complementary to and compatible with the other.

The Common Curriculum prepares students to tackle 21st-century challenges by allowing them to combine coursework across a variety of disciplines to expand their worldviews, enhance their range of skills, and develop into critical, creative, emotionally intelligent, and interdisciplinary thinkers. The program also allows them to dive deeper into areas of interest outside of their majors. The Curriculum is designed to help students learn how to learn and to

• Be versatile in a rapidly changing world;
• Combine knowledge in innovative ways;
• Apply learning strategies to new contexts, including their major;
• Explore local and global patterns and the interconnectedness of intellectual work; and,
• Appreciate how we need each other to tackle today’s challenges.