Global Miami Plan Foundation Category Descriptions

Students in a tai-chi class in McGuffey.

Global Miami Plan Foundation Category Descriptions

MPF I—Composition

College Composition focuses especially on helping students learn and apply rhetorical knowledge, methods, and strategies. Students analyze and construct arguments using rhetorical inquiry; understand, refine, and improve their composing practices; develop critically aware strategies for reading and interpretation; and explore and use alternative modes of exploration and expression. A key purpose of this foundation is to teach students to deliver writing in a variety of contexts, including digitally networked environments. The essential skills students develop in composition courses help them in their academic work at the university but also in their civic, social, and professional endeavors.

MPF IIA—Fine Arts

Offerings in this section prepare students for global engagement as practitioners, creators, advocates, and patrons of the arts. The courses foster the pursuit of creative and scholarly inquiry by extending artistic traditions, while embracing a culture of innovation and change.

MPF IIB—Humanities

Courses in the humanities contribute to the advancement of cultures. These courses engage students through scholarly investigation of ideas, texts, and people who shape or have been seen to shape human cultures. Students develop skills in literary, historical, cinematic, philosophical, and linguistic analyses while exploring their own place and potential influence in the world. Promoting creative thinking, critical reasoning, and ethical understanding, humanities courses enable students to interpret local and global issues from diverse perspectives and develop respectful and effective ways they might respond to these issues.

MPF IIC—Social Science

Courses categorized as social science investigate human behavior, social relationships, and/or the interactions of people with their cultural, social and political environments. Students in social science courses examine a variety of social phenomena including specialized human communities, political processes and structures, interpersonal and intercultural relationships, economic behaviors, psychological phenomena, and the relationships that discrete human populations have with other subnational, national, or international entities.

MPF IIIB & C—Global Courses and Clusters

These categories comprise courses or a series of courses focused on themes or issues relevant to the globalized society in which we all live, asking us to situate subject matter and skills relevant that subject in terms of their global implications. Through their work in G-Courses or G-Clusters, students develop and exercise the ability to communicate and act respectfully across linguistic and cultural differences; explore and understand their place and influence in the changing world; determine and assess relationships among societies, institutions, and systems in terms of reciprocal – though not necessarily symmetrical – interactions, benefits, and costs; describe the development and construction of differences and similarities among contemporary groups and regions; and identify and analyze the origins and influences of global forces.

All MPF IIIB Global Perspectives courses must meet the goal:

  1. to develop and exercise the ability to communicate and act respectfully across linguistic and cultural differences,

    and at least 2 of the following goals:

  2. Explore and understand place and influence in the changing world.
  3. Determine and assess relationships among societies, institutions, and systems in terms of reciprocal – though not necessarily symmetrical – interactions, benefits, and costs.
  4. Describe the development and construction of differences and similarities among contemporary groups and regions.
  5. Identify and analyze the origins and influences of global forces.

MPF IVA—Biological Science

Biological sciences involve the study of living organisms, including their origin, compostiion, function (molecular, cellular, and organismal) diversity, classification, ecology, evolution, and behavior. Life forms studied by biologists include Eukarya (animals, plants, fungi, and protists), Bacteria, Archaea, and viruses.

MPF IVB—Physical Science

Physical Science comprise the disciplines that study the nature of energy and the inorganic world. It is traditionally subdivided into four general areas: chemistry, physics, astronomy, and earth sciences.

MPF V—Mathematics, Formal Reasoning, Technology

All courses in this area involve mathematical reasoning. This reasoning could either be problem solving and pattern finding at the inductive level, or formal and abstract reasoning at the deductive level, or a combination of both forms of arguments. In all courses, students’ abilities to develop logical arguments are strengthened and improved. The courses may also provide opportunities for the students to explore the role of formal reasoning in history, society, and the modern world, and to reflect upon its use in formulating well-founded, ethical decisions.

  • Technology Requirement: Courses in the technology group should introduce the technical professional’s methodology, including the evaluation of empirical data, problem recognition and definition, and the application of scientific principles. Although skills are included, the primary emphasis should be on developing an awareness of technology’s impact on society.
  • Mathematics Requirement: Courses in this group should introduce logical and systemic methodology used by mathematicians to examine and explore concepts, such as quantity, space, probability, structure, and the study of motions and shapes of physical objects. Courses may include theoretical or applied studies of statistics, calculus, arithmetic, algebra, geometry, and trigonometry.
  • Formal Reasoning Requirement: Courses in this group should provide a formal introduction to logic and methodologies used in deriving conclusions. Students will explore concepts of truth, proof, meaning, and their role in informing and influencing our perceptions, imagination, thought processes, and learned experience. Courses may also include studies of the use of language and reasoning to develop the “what” and “how” of artificial intelligence.

Cultures Requirement (for students entering before Fall, 2015)

These courses use the United States and/or other regions of the world as points of departure to encourage students to view the diversity of societies and the issues raised by their diversity. Diversity is broadly defined and may include disability, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, religion, language or class, but is certainly not limited to these groups. In addition to acquiring knowledge about cultural diversity, students will examine the nature of societies’ ideas concerning others, how ideas about others are developed, the significance of these ideas when interacting with others, and the importance of analysis and evidence when making judgments.

Historical Perspective (for students entering before Fall, 2015)

Courses that meet this requirement explore particular historical contexts to help students expand their understanding of how we humans have acted and could act, of how we made decisions in different situations, and how we can interpret the same event in different ways.