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• Read actively and deeply.
• Select and close-read thought-provoking passages.
• Pursue implications of language and plot use in specified historical and political contexts.
• Read/consider scholarly arguments with openness to new, different, and even contradictory ideas.
• Use exploratory and explanatory, formal and informal, writing strategies to develop and share ideas.
• Discuss the basic elements, structures, and effects of literary forms.
• Discuss how literature works as a form of social exploration, critique and production.
• Inhabit a variety of perspectives when engaging with, interpreting and creating the stories that constitute a worldview.

• Explain the necessity of unlearning Eurocentric, racist, and heteronormative modes of understanding and explaining the history and current state of our world;
• Comprehend the role literature plays in revealing, grappling with, and producing the ethnic, racial, socioeconomic, religious, gender-based, and other hierarchies that shape our world – and the role those contexts and hierarchies play in shaping literature;
• Comprehend how marginalized populations have challenged these hierarchies through literature;
  Understand the importance of being an empathetic reader, listener, responder, and global citizen with an appreciation for difference;
• Reflect thoughtfully on complex issues facing twenty-first century society and use literature to consider and propose new ways of addressing those issues and creating a more just world;
• Convey the ways that literature can provide unique access to understanding the experiences of societally marginalized groups;
• Explain the connection between historical constructions of identity-based differences and contemporary violence against a wide range of marginalized groups;
• Understand the nuances of and problems inherent within “traditional” literary canon formation;

In addition to these, Social Justice-BIPOC courses help students:

• Understand how constructions of race and racism have shaped cultural, ethnic, racial, national, socioeconomic, and other hierarchies that dominate our world;
• Use their knowledge of literature by BIPOC authors to consider and propose new ways of understanding and tackling issues facing BIPOC populations today that result from colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade, and other oppressive systems.

• Recognize, read, and utilize the major forms and genres that constitute literature in English.
• Utilize the techniques of reading and writing, of interpretation, analysis, theory, and literate expression, which constitute English Studies
• Foster their own writing practice.
• Experiment with and study form at multiple levels.
• Understand how various forms/genres function as distinct ways of knowing that engage with and/or critique other ways of comprehending phenomena.
• Comprehend how and why literature in its various forms affects us.
• Understand how these forms are implicated in and speak to their own historical moments as well as how their meanings and uses change over time and speak back to the forces that shape them.
• Engage intelligently and sensitively in social discourse of all kinds.
• Develop a variety of methods with which to engage, interpret and create the stories that constitute a worldview.