Communication and Inquiry

In keeping with the mission of the university, communication is highly valued at SUA. Communication and Inquiry courses challenge students to understand the complex rhetorical relationships among audience, purpose, and text, and among language, knowledge and power. The courses also introduce students to the collaborative and social aspects of the writing process.

Related to the courses on communication skills is a course on modes of inquiry, which helps students approach the rest of the curriculum with a critical sense of the varying ways that knowledge and understanding are conceived and used by different disciplines. When investigating problems and articulating insights, students are able to choose among and combine different modes of inquiry. They are able to understand the assumptions and limitations that underlie the various ways of inquiring used within disciplines, to see that certain problems require using certain modes of inquiry, to see that intellectual problems often require the use of many modes of inquiry, and to see the delineation and commonalties among them.