Arts and Humanities

    The Arts and Humanities Department is ASMSA’s largest academic department, with fifteen full-time and three part-time faculty members and over forty courses. Faculty design courses based upon the idea that all knowledge is interrelated. Because of this core philosophy, Humanities courses incorporate learning and skills from other disciplines to build competencies that will allow students to become successful both at ASMSA and in college. Course offerings include English composition and literature; multiple levels of three foreign languages; interdisciplinary history and literature courses; and, many specialized courses including speech, economics, and humanities, and literature electives. In addition to emphasizing interdisciplinary, cross-curriculum learning, the Department of Arts and Humanities has robust course offerings in both visual arts and music. In our visual arts program, courses in art history, drawing, painting, graphic design, photography, two-dimensional media, and three-dimensional media have attracted a wide spectrum of students. In our music program, three for-credit ensembles complement a two-semester music theory course sequence, courses in music history and musical cultures, and individual instruction.

     The philosophy of the Department of Arts and Humanities has developed from three key beliefs. First, team organization and teaching is superior to the isolated, solitary classroom. Second, Socratic seminars, in which the questions are as important as their answers, are preferable to lecture-based teaching. Third, the most effective way for students to demonstrate mastery of concepts and skills is by varied means of assessments ranging from research papers to debates, from student-produced films to game simulations, from student-led art installations to premieres of new musical works, from in-class essays to historical re-enactments, while including traditional text-based content exams.

     The culminating event for those students interested in the liberal arts and fine and performing arts is the Arts and Humanities Symposium each May with surrounding concerts, gallery showings, and creative writing readings, events that offer opportunities for individual work and spirited competition in the arts and humanities. Students earn considerable hours of concurrent college credit work through the Department.