Students sitting down in a circle listening to a professor

The Engagements

The Engagements are the highlight of Arts & Sciences General Education. They comprise a yearlong sequence of courses that celebrate learning while introducing first-year students to the liberal arts and sciences. For those entering the College as a first-year student at UVA, you will enroll in Four Engagements over the course of the year (two seven-week courses per semester.

Small, seminar-style courses that put you face-to-face with many of UVA's leading scholars and teachers, the Engagements are different from your typical first-year classes at UVA. They invite you to ask big questions, and to think and talk about what you know and value. Designed and taught by the College Fellows, the Engagements emphasize varied modes of discussion and individual and group projects in an interactive environment.

In addition to better understanding the purpose and value of the liberal arts, you will learn how to ask vital questions that undergird all fields of study: questions regarding aesthetics, difference, empiricism, and ethics. The Engagements will also prepare you to engage knowledge and learning through methods that are regularly used in college and may be different from your high school experience.

Primer on the Engagements

Engagements Learning Objectives

Students will come to understand the Liberal Arts and Sciences as a capacious and constantly expanding intellectual community, where scholars and students are equipped to frame inquiry, analyze problems, and create knowledge.
Students will be equipped with skills necessary to articulate provisional analyses through four specific lenses (or habits of mind): aesthetics, difference, empiricism, and ethics. They will be able to frame questions with regard to these constructs and engage different subject material across the Arts & Sciences disciplines.
Students will move beyond a dualistic understanding of knowledge (e.g., right and wrong) to think about human knowledge as contextual and relative. Epistemological development is a cornerstone of The Engagements, preparing students for future learning both at UVA and beyond.

Click Each Link Below for Specific Topics Offered in Each Engagement Pillar, or see all Engagements at a Glance

Engagements at a Glance

EGMT 1510: Engaging Aesthetics

A general education should help you explore our world through the lens of human creativity in its many forms. In their shaping of materials, language, space, and sound, artists, architects, writers, and composers reinterpret the world, showing us vital ways of thinking about our present, our past, and the natural world. We will explore how their work provokes our most visceral emotional responses and invites engaged intellectual reflection and interpretation.

EGMT 1520 - Empirical and Scientific Engagement

A general education should help you make sense of the world and cosmos by analyzing observable evidence and using formal and quantitative reasoning. Both within and beyond the university, you will encounter claims about the natural and social worlds and be confronted with situations that require you to evaluate and make decisions based on evidence. Empirical methods are a crucial component to addressing and answering such a broad range of essential questions.

EGMT 1530 - Engaging Differences

A general education should help you examine how people produce, perceive, and negotiate difference. In a pluralistic world, how will we live with one another? Both within the university and beyond, you will encounter a range of ways in which people differ across space and time. While these differences often challenge our capacity to understand one another, engaging difference can provide opportunities for deeper knowledge of human and nonhuman interactions.

EGMT 1540 - Ethical Engagements

A general education should help you reflect upon and deliberate about your lives as ethical agents. Throughout your life, you will encounter questions of right and wrong, liberty and obligation, justice and mercy; you will be responsible for whatever conception of the “good” you use to structure and orient your lives. We will consider how to understand ethical reflection and practice while acknowledging that some differences on ethical questions are irreconcilable.