Four Core Principles of the UF AAS Program
 & Student Learning Outcomes

AASP BYLAWS

The four core principles of the AAS Program combine excellence in scholarship with experiential learning. This structure honors the applied roots of African American Studies and recognizes the broad range of perspectives in the African Diaspora.
AASP's four principles are:

• Interdisciplinarity: This principle encourages a broad base of disciplinary theories, methodologies, and methods. This approach allows each faculty member to begin from their own position of expertise and systematically tie their work to other necessary areas of social science and humanities.
• Community-based learning: This focus honors the applied, experiential, and activist model from which Black Studies programs originally developed. Pedagogies of community service-learning and advocacy scholarship are central to the engaged nature of the program.
• African American experience in a transnational context: With this program foundation, the faculty grounds our main study in the United States, but also understands the imperative to connect the U.S. experience to those of Africa and the wider African Diaspora.
• Critical thinking, writing, and research presentation skills development: The AASP faculty introduce students from all disciplinary areas to African American intellectual history, critical theory, and professional development. Students who enroll in our courses or graduate with an AASP minor will be well versed in the scholarly skills needed to succeed in the next levels of research, teaching, and service in the field.

Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs) in the AAS minor allow UF students to:

• use interdisciplinary study to explore human variance of identity and experience while investigating complexities of human connection in history, culture, and the sciences (content knowledge)
• broaden the understanding of social and human ecological systems through systematic training in the research process, specifically theory, method, and analytical discussion of special problems in African American Studies (critical thinking) 
• enhance verbal and written communication through training in cognitive reasoning, analysis, affective attitudes; synthesize interdisciplinary information to communication individual and group evaluation of content, structure, and sources; engage in field or community-based work to apply principles of the interdiscipline (critical thinking and communication)