New UGER (Fall 2023) - Written, Oral, and Multimodal Communication
Students matriculating prior to Fall 2023 are enrolled in SAGES - the Seminar Approach to General Education and Scholarship. Students matriculating in Fall 2023 and later will be enrolled in a new set of Unified General Education Requirements (UGER), as described below.
Description & Learning Outcomes
Written, oral, and multimodal communication is essential to all academic and civic endeavors. The sequence of courses that satisfy this requirement ensure that students have multiple opportunities to compose texts that will contribute to their academic, civic, and personal growth.
By the end of these experiences, students will be able to
- Identify, analyze, and respond appropriately to the contexts, audiences, and purposes of a variety of writing/communication tasks (rhetorical awareness);
- Apply critical, creative, and analytical skills to describe and evaluate relevant questions or problems (critical thinking);
- Use effective research methods to discover and evaluate credible, relevant, and diverse sources that are appropriate for the writing/communication task (information literacy);
- Contribute to scholarly conversations among diverse people and perspectives (authorial agency);
- Develop successful composing processes, including strategies for reading, responding, drafting, collaborating, revising, editing, and reflecting (composing processes); and
- Compose effective written, oral, and multimodal texts that address the expectations for the task, as appropriate to the genre and discipline (mechanical & stylistic agility).
Requirement for Students
Students must pass the following sequence of courses:
- An Academic Inquiry Seminar (3 credit-hours) during their first year of enrollment;
- Two Communication-Intensive Courses (at least 3 credit-hours each);
- A Disciplinary Communication Course (3 credit-hours); and
- A Capstone Project Course (at least 3 credit-hours).
| Course | Writing/Communication Goals & Expectations |
| Academic Inquiry Seminar (3 cr) | Introduction to academic inquiry; focus on developing effective writing processes & entering academic conversations; majority of instruction addresses writing & communication. |
| Communication Intensive (2 @ 3cr) |
Writing & communication activities are used to explore course topics; focus on refining writing processes & composing research-based arguments; consistent writing/communication instruction. |
| Disciplinary Communication (3 cr) |
Introduction to disciplinary forms of communication; focus on discipline-specific skills/genres & entering disciplinary conversations; intentional writing/ communication instruction. |
| Capstone Experience (3 cr) |
Independent research, scholarship, and/or creative activity; focus on project-specific skills/genres & communicating knowledge to the public; individualized writing/communication instruction. |
| Experience Portfolio | Collection of artifacts that demonstrate development of writing/communication proficiency; includes materials from each writing/communication course in the sequence. |
For Students Who Matriculated before Fall 2023
The Office of Undergraduate Studies has provided the guidance about how you may use courses designed & approved for the UGER to fulfill your current SAGES, physical education, and school-specific general education requirements.
In particular, UGER Communication-Intensive courses "map" onto SAGES University Seminars based on the department offering the UGER CI course. Undergraduate Studies has provided a list of this mapping, for your reference.
For Faculty
For faculty developing writing/communication courses for the new UGER, please visit our UGER Resources for Faculty page.