All students graduating with an Individualized MA degree, regardless of concentration, will have
undertaken an interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary area of study and successfully accomplished the
following:
- Identified and mastered the confluence of traditions and disciplines central to their specific
study.
- Placed their learning in an appropriate historical, cultural, and personal context.
- Explored and reflected upon their values, biases, and social, cultural, spiritual, and ideological
roots as these pertain to their area of study.
- Through a personal, social, spiritual, or other practice appropriate to the individual study,
engaged with the world in a way that deepens their understanding of their area of study.
- Completed a final product that demonstrates their mastery of the traditions and disciplines
pertinent to their study, and that creatively integrates and demonstrates their learning, personal
growth, and engaged practice.
With the help of your advisor, you design the work of each semester to address degree criteria as they
pertain to your individual focus. Following the guidelines on the study plan, each semester’s study
plan addresses degree criteria. Packet work during the semester builds towards your individual goals in
the context of these criteria and both you and your advisor’s end-of-semester narrative evaluation
speak to your success in incrementally meeting those criteria. In addition, between your G2 and G3
semesters you submit a Progress Review that summarizes your progress and outlines your further work.
The program faculty evaluate the Progress Review. The faculty’s feedback will indicate what further
work you will need to do to successfully complete degree requirements. By the time you graduate, you
will have fulfilled each of the MA in Individualized Studies Program degree criteria.
There are three
main components of our degree criteria plus an integrative final product. Understanding these
components will help you fulfill our five degree criteria:
Inter and Transdisciplinary Knowledge
- Context: Place your learning in an appropriate context by examining history and culture relevant to
your specific topic of study.
- Epistemology: Examine how knowledge is constructed and experienced in
your area(s) of study, and how you know what you know.
- Mastery: Clarify what academic disciplines and
other traditions flow together in your specific area of study, and then determine what it means to
master the confluence of these disciplines and traditions.
Personal Development
- Awareness: Explore your values, motives, biases, and biographical, social, cultural, spiritual,
political and ideological roots.
- Growth: Reflect on the ways your new learning contributes to your
personal growth and evolving sense of self.
- Integration: Synthesize your evolving self-knowledge with
your knowledge of the historical, cultural and epistemological dimensions of your study.
Transformative Practice
- Action: Live out your area(s) of study through a personal, social, spiritual or other practice
appropriate to that study.
- Focus: Identify the scope of what constitutes an engaged practice in your
specific area of study.
- Reflection: After engaging in a transformative practice, reflect upon the value of this practice, its
ramifications (including ethical considerations), its effectiveness, its potential for further
development, its applications, etc.
Final Product
- Integration of Degree Criteria: The final product must reflect, and communicate, successful completion
of all the above degree criteria through the main body of the thesis itself or through a related essay
(included in the final product binder) regarding the context and process of the work.
- Communication:
The final product is a way to communicate the essence of a project to a wider audience. As such it
needs to be meaningful and relevant to that audience and to be presented in a form that reaches out to
them.
- Assessment: Assesses your project in terms of its contribution to, and its impact upon, yourself,
as well as the larger world.
