Liberal Arts

Liberal Arts

Associate in Arts

In the liberal arts degree program, you’ll discover your academic passions while developing a  broad foundation in the behavioral and natural sciences as well as the humanities.

Program Contact

Trevor Kearns
(413) 775-1264
kearnst@gcc.mass.edu

  • Program Overview
  • Degree Requirements
  • Learning Outcomes
  • Faculty
  • Career Outlook
  • Liberal Arts Options

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Explore and cultivate interests in a diversity of academic disciplines that teach you to access, analyze, generate and share different kinds of knowledge. You’ll take courses in the natural sciences, composition, mathematics, the behavioral sciences and the humanities. Additional elective choices allow you to further explore disciplines or pursue your chosen field in greater depth. With this educational background, you’ll open the doors to more academic and professional opportunities in your future.

60-62

credits

Associate in Arts

Associate in Arts (AA) degrees are typically completed in two (2) years and designed for transfer

Transfer

Guaranteed admission and streamlined transfer to four-year state schools through MassTransfer!

Ethical Reasoning and Action: Students will engage with a diversity of ethical perspectives and apply ethical principles to their actions. As a student you will:

  • consider how diverse individual, collective, and communal perspectives
  • shape your ethical outlook
  • articulate your ethical philosophy
  • apply ethical reasoning and empathy while analyzing and solving
  • problems
  • demonstrate personal responsibility

Communication, Interpretation, and Expression: Students will utilize various modes of communication and listening in a variety of contexts while being responsive to respective personal, cultural, linguistic and social circumstances. As a student you will:

  • communicate with diverse audiences
  • communicate articulately, persuasively, and logically in written and oral modalities
  • listen with skill and intention
  • interpret acts of expression analytically using appropriate contexts or frameworks
  • use a variety of modes of communication such as visual, performative, quantitative, interpersonal and presentational
  • demonstrate effective communication and cultural competence in English
  • explore how different human languages engage different frames of reference and communicative practices

Diversity, Cultural Competence, and Civic Engagement: Students will recognize and explain the value of diverse cultural and individual experiences, perspectives, and identities, and use the cultural literacy and civic engagement skills necessary to be engaged participants in a pluralistic society. As a student you will:

  • display an empathetic understanding of perspectives different from your own as a response to the complexity of the world
  • reflect critically on your own identities, power, and privileges in a variety of contexts
  • analyze events, texts, or creative work through an equity lens
  • explain how systems and policies can and do perpetuate inequity within institutions and across society
  • demonstrate the ability to listen and communicate respectfully with people across a diversity of perspectives
  • describe the mechanisms of social change

Critical Thinking: Students will engage in comprehensive and reflective explorations of issues, ideas, artifacts, and events as a way to formulate opinions, evaluate arguments, and accept conclusions, and to synthesize, understand and interpret information. As a student you will:

  • undertake rational inquiry and create structured arguments using appropriate evidence
  • demonstrate effective use of empirical evidence
  • interpret information appropriately according to relevant contexts
  • criticize and question dominant paradigms using evidence and reason
  • synthesize information and knowledge in a rigorous or formalized way

Creative Thinking: Students will engage in creative, imaginative and innovative processes as a way to understand the value of risk-taking, divergent thinking, inventiveness, and resourcefulness, as well as to explain how aesthetics engage and reflect the human experience. As a student you will:

  • practice divergent or lateral thinking in various contexts and disciplines
  • play with possibilities and develop original ideas
  • develop your curiosity and the skills to pursue it
  • take risks to have new experiences and explore new ideas
  • explore how aesthetics impact your life and human experience in general

Information Literacy: Students will recognize when information is needed and will be able to locate, evaluate, and effectively use the needed information.  As a student you will:

  • recognize that authority is constructed and contextual
  • recognize that information creation is a process
  • recognize that information has value
  • demonstrate effective research practices
  • participate in a scholarly conversation
  • strategically explore your information environment

Scientific Thinking and Quantitative Reasoning: Students will discover, analyze and communicate using scientific methods and quantitative reasoning. As a student you will:

  • apply the scientific method and quantitative reasoning to solve problems and answer questions in a variety of disciplines
  • evaluate, analyze and interpret quantitative data to draw conclusions while recognizing the role of confirmation bias in this process
  • communicate utilizing figures, tables and graphical representations
  • contribute to the creation of new knowledge through scientific or quantitative methods

Sustainability and the Natural World: Students will explore the natural world and the role humans play as members of local and global ecosystems. As a student you will:

  • explore the biological diversity of our planet as well as the complexity and importance of its ecosystems
  • describe the interconnectedness of humanity with the rest of the natural world and the impact that each has on the other
  • apply knowledge of the natural world and human activity to understand environmental problems such as climate change
  • think critically about sustainability across a diversity of cultural values and multiple scales of relevance from local to global
  • demonstrate commitment to solving environmental problems and restoring and protecting the natural world


In addition to our general Liberal Arts degree, GCC offers concentrations of study in Liberal Arts options with graduation requirements that prepare you to major in a specific academic field upon transfer to a four-year institution. Students enrolled in a Liberal Arts option will graduate with the degree "Associate in Arts in Liberal Arts" (your area of study will be reflected in your transcript, not your diploma).

By taking classes in a Liberal Arts option, students complete courses that help develop 100 and 200 course level knowledge and skills in a particular field. If you don't satisfy the requirements of a specific Liberal Arts option, you may still be able to fulfill the requirements of another option, or fulfill the requirements of the Liberal Arts General degree. Students are advised to work closely with their GCC advisor to select the specific courses that will help meet their career or transfer goals.

All of our options are eligible for MassTransfer, which guarantees admission, full transfer of credit, and a tuition discount (each based on final GPA) to graduates who transfer to eligible programs in the Massachusetts higher education system.

Liberal Arts options