Liberal Arts

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Liberal Arts Department Mission

The Liberal Arts Department develops aspiring artists + designers as scholars, professionals, informed human beings, and engaged global citizens prepared to flourish in a complex world empowered with skills in critical and creative thinking, problem-solving, as well as communication, rhetoric, and the multiple genres of writing.

Liberal Arts Program Description

Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design is proud of its strong Liberal Arts tradition. About one-third of each student’s degree plan is comprised of courses within the Liberal Arts, which emphasize a broad course of study in a variety of academic disciplines, while providing students with the necessary tools to develop critical thinking and communication skills for their intellectual, creative, and personal growth.

The Liberal Arts curriculum emphasizes critical thinking, academic writing, and creative inquiry. Through an engagement with a variety of academic disciplines, students acquire multiple perspectives for perceiving complexities of thought, contextualizing knowledge, and becoming self-directed learners with the capacity for thoughtful action in the world and in their lives.

Students begin the Composition + Critical thought sequence in their first year, which initially emphasizes the emerging writer’s voice, process, and competencies, but proceeds to a greater focus on academic texts and formal writing skills, culminating in a research project by the end of the second term of the sequence.

Art History is a crucial component of the Liberal Arts curriculum. In the Art History sequence, students broaden their understanding of art through historical, cultural, and stylistic contexts. Art History places a great deal of emphasis on critical thinking and discipline-specific formal writing, providing students with a breadth of coverage and a greater understanding of Art History as an academic discipline.

The Humanities sequence complements the Art History curriculum with a similar interest in historical, cultural, and stylistic contexts, but with a primary interest in literature, philosophy, social movements, and intellectual history.

As part of their Liberal Arts education, students are also required to take courses in Mathematics, Social + Behavioral Science, and Natural + Physical Sciences. Additionally, students may elect to take an additional course in the Humanities or Social Behavioral Sciences, which are topics-based courses.

The philosophy of a Liberal Arts education is to provide students with an intellectual and ethical basis for self-directed learning and active global citizenship. The Liberal Arts Department is committed to supporting the college’s mission, vision, and values as well as the Diversity Statement and the Diversity within the Curriculum clause.

Program Outcomes

• Effective Communication: students employ and develop academic skills of close reading, writing, speaking, interpersonal dialogue, and visual communication to clearly articulate ideas, share information, persuade an audience, and create an argument in a diverse array of media.
• Critical + Creative Thinking: students explore ideas, arguments, quantitative and scientific data, events, and artifacts through the scholarly research process, the analysis and synthesis of multiple perspectives, the exploration and recursive revision of their position, and the examination of its implications.
• Global Consciousness: students examine the diverse social histories, structures of privilege and oppression, and complex ideologies that shape their world.
• Self-Development: students consider the emergence of agency, an integrated sense of identity, social responsibility, and interconnectedness with others through engagement with visual culture, historical narratives, living cultures, personal experience, and shared communal stories.
• Informed Literacy + Citizenship: students acquire the meta-cognitive skills of self-reflection, information literacy, scientific methodologies, visual literacy, and the analysis of rhetorical situations, to contribute to the public good through ethical decision-making, problem-solving, and civic engagement defined by respect, empathy, and humility.

Liberal Arts Program Learning Outcomes Rubric  

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