General Education

The course deals with interactions between science and technology and social, cultural, political, and economic contexts that shape and are shaped by them.                   

This interdisciplinary course engages students to confront the realities brought about by science and technology in society. Such realities pervade the personal, the public, and the global aspects of our living and are integral to human development. Scientific knowledge and technological development happen in the context of society with all its socio-political, cultural, economic, and philosophical underpinnings at play. This course seeks to instill reflective knowledge in the students that they are able to live the good life and display ethical decision making in the face of scientific and technological advancement.

Purposive Communication is a three-unit course that develops students’ communicative competence and enhances their cultural and intercultural awareness through multimodal tasks that provide them opportunities for communicating effectively and appropriately to a multicultural audience in a local or global context. It equips students with tools for critical evaluation of a variety of texts and focuses on the power of language and the impact of images to emphasize the importance of conveying messages responsibly. The knowledge, skills, and insights that students gain from this course may be used in their other academic endeavors, their chosen disciplines, and their future careers as they compose and produce relevant oral, written, audio-visual and/or web-based output for various purposes.