General Education Program
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Overview
The UC Santa Barbara General Education program serves two broad purposes. First, it helps students develop habits of mind and approaches to scholarly inquiry that are important within all disciplines in the academy: analyzing data, texts, and artifacts; analyzing expectations for written work and engaging in writing designed to meet those expectations; developing qualitative, quantitative, and information literacy in a variety of disciplinary contexts; reading and interpreting print, visual, aural, and digital sources carefully and critically; identifying relevant topics and questions across and within academic disciplines; collaborating with others; and articulating ideas using conventions appropriate to diverse academic disciplines.
Second, UCSB’s General Education program provides students with an introduction to epistemological practices -- that is, ways of knowing and doing -- that span broad disciplinary contexts. Within each GE category, students are exposed to discipline-specific questions for and methods of inquiry, evidentiary practices and processes; possibilities for representation; and conventions of expression (whether numerical, visual, verbal, written, or otherwise).