Curricular Outcomes
In one of those necessary moments of trying to be more programmatic — that is, trying to remind ourselves why we do what we do in order to prompt ourselves to double-check and/or refine what we do when we teach — the folklore faculty were asked to come up with outcomes for the undergraduate concentration in folklore studies. I think we did reasonably well at the abstract level:
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An understanding that culture is a dynamic process that is the result of anything from a small group to transnational networks of individuals each of whom acts as a receiver and transmitter of information that both shapes how they see the world and is in turn shaped by the world as they experience it
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Any understanding of culture must be founded on a commitment to openness that may itself be impossible to achieve but is a worthwhile goal in itself.
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That understandings are to be communicated in appropriate forms to the context, and that all understandings (findings) are momentary for the investigator and for the larger scholarly and/or scientific communities and/or publics in which they find themselves. Science is an ongoing dialogue with itself about the nature of reality and the nature of humanity within that reality.
Now we need to follow through at the level of the concrete: assignments we build into our courses, how we are going to evaluate those assignments, and how we are going to assess our own efforts with regards to these matters.