Social Change and Development

SCD Minor

SOCIAL CHANGE dominates life in the twentieth century. Rapidly accelerating processes shape our future as nations, as communities, and as individuals. The minor in Social Change and Development is concerned with under standing these changes and their implications. The minor focuses on social processes and social problems as they are embedded in systems, especially the highly interdependent world system. We use this perspective to arrive at critical judgments of possible responses to human problems. We stress historical, comparative, and theoretical understanding out of a belief that to understand the present we must understand the past, and to understand our own lives, and our own society, we must understand the world. Those students who are interested in questions of change, but want to major in a discipline or another interdisciplinary program will benefit from a minor in Social Change and Development.

Minor Requirements

1. SUPPORTING COURSES

Background Courses

Background courses prepare you for our upper level core requirements and are strictly enforced prerequisites.

EITHER ANTHRO-100 Varieties of World Culture

OR SOCIOL-202 Introduction to Sociology,

AND HISTORY-100 History of the Modern World.

Tool Subjects

Tool subject courses are meant to provide you with some useful skills for the future. We require

ENG COMP-105 (Expository Writing)

as prerequisite to our core courses. You will take whatever other tool subject courses the major you combine with Social Change and Development requires.

2. THE UPPER LEVEL CORE COURSES

WE HAVE DEVELOPED THE Social Change and Development CORE and its prerequisites through many years of thought about how to adapt the university’s problem-focused interdisciplinary mission to the goal of producing graduates with superior preparation in the social sciences. Social Change and Development is not merely a jumble of disciplinary approaches, it is a well-conceived integration that can give you a broader and more sophisticated preparation. The Social Change and Development core stresses the following:

Skills

We think you should develop some useful skills, hence our tool subject requirements. Our courses also stress written communication, the paramount skill you will need later, and many of them count as writing emphasis courses.

Critical thinking

In our two upper level core courses (SOC C D-360, SOC C D-361), we constantly stress and try to teach you to be able to judge the usefulness of social scientific understandings. Later, on the job, and as a citizen, you will be barraged by pronouncements and generalizations and must be able to sift and winnow among them. We want to teach you to ask critical questions.

Perspective

We teach you about and want to help you develop "the sociological imagination," an important habit of mind that allows you to place the course of your own life in the context of the rapidly changing society and world in which you live. This means developing a sense of under standing about how societies work politically and economically and a sense about the causes of social change. It also means learning to think historically so that you can understand the present and future from a knowledge of the past.

All students take these courses:
 

• SOC C D-360 Models and Social Change
• SOC C D-361 Historical Perspectives on Social Change.
• SOC C D-333 Social Change in a Selected Area.
• SOC C D-470 Senior Seminar in Social Change and Development. (Not to be confused with the University Senior Seminar -- you must take both.)
• In addition one or two semesters of our one credit portfolio course (SOC C D-302) is recommended, but not required of minors.

THE SOCIAL CHANGE AND DEVELOPMENT MINOR can be combined with many majors. Obvious combinations are with social science majors: history, economics, political science, geography, anthropology, sociology, and psychology. Another popular combination is with history. Many other areas, such as journalism, business, social services, and human development, can be profitably combined with Social Change and Development. See the "Social Change and Development and the disciplines" document on this menu for more explanation.