Program Goals

 The overarching goals of the Master of Arts in Oral Traditions program are:

• Create learning experiences that afford opportunities to investigate orality as it creates and transforms meaning;
   

• Cultivate speaking, listening, and performance skills and applications required for developing expertise in the oral traditions;
   

• Examine oral traditions from a socio-historic and anthropological perspective as a means for investigating the evolution of orality/oracy;
   

• Investigate how oral traditions function to transmit ideas and ideologies, convey cultural values, impart knowledge and information, preserve social history, establish codes of conduct, and facilitate healing;
   

• Promote diversity and multi-cultural understanding through oral traditions;
   

• Explore the developmental relationship between oral language and reading proficiency;
   

• Analyze the implications of written language as text, and documentation, and evaluate their impact upon orality and meaning-making; and
   

• Facilitate the design of mentorship experiences and research projects in the field of oral traditions that promote a broader, deeper and more robust understanding of the role that oral traditions plays in the evolution of culture.
   

Colleagues are required to complete an integrated Plan of Study that includes cohort and online dialogue, a mentorship, and a culminating project. Study is generally completed within twenty-two months, with Colleagues meeting one weekend (Friday evening and Saturday) per month during the academic year and one week each summer.