PAH 221 - Creating, Imagining, Innovating: Intercultural Approaches for Academic and Career Success

The course helps students to engage deeply with the habits of mind and an expanding set of critical and practical applied humanities skills developed specifically for understanding and improving the human condition. Over the course of the semester we will: (1) read and critically analyze the writing of people from many cultures who have found creative and innovative approaches to a variety of complex challenges, with particular attention to their applied habits of mind; (2) engage in reflective projects that open pathways to developing students' own creativity and imagination for real-world applications of successful habits of mind; and (3) design a project in which students focus on something in the world that requires personal applications of at least three of the habits of mind they have studied. Students will use project management and planning methods to write a project description, carry out an initial pilot version of the project, report on steps they have accomplished, and write a critical analysis of the project.