Introduction to History (20001)

General competences

Specific competences

1.      Instrumental skills:

1.1. Oral and written communication suitable for the correct explanation of historical phenomena in the requested academic essays:

-Correction, concretion and accuracy in oral and written presentations.

-Ability to communicate the main ideas in a text.

-Ability to write according to academic standards for resource demonstration and reasoning reliability.

-Ability to formulate and defend the arguments assumed in front of others in a coherent and scientifically-based way.

-Ability to develop and show an analytical mind towards the interpretations made by professors, classmates, and analysed texts and materials.

-Precise and well-documented analytical skills.

-Use of the specialised terminology in the discipline to explain the studied processes and facts.

1.2 Analytical skills:

-Synthesis and inference skills.

-Ability to assimilate and disintegrate the constitutive elements of a text.

-Ability to establish a hierarchical organisation among the distinct elements of a previously determined text.

-Self-initiative and ability to complement given information with basic texts.

-Critical analysis of historical texts skills.

-Ability to distinguish between the explicative elements characteristic of certain historical periods and the links with current reality.

-Skills in analysing complex social realities, both past and future.

-Understanding the value of "thinking historically" the past societies.

1.3. Research skills:

-Controlling the procedures and means characteristic of historical science.

-Ability to carry out a research of specialised information in a variety of contexts (written, audiovisual, Internet).

-Understanding and interpreting primary and secondary documentation skills.

-Selecting and organising information skills.

-Ability to offer the results of the study and/or research in a systematic and logical way.

2.      Interpersonal skills:

-A good flair for group work.

-A cooperative spirit towards improving the results. 

-Self-initiative and responsibility in the context of group work.

-Interacting with professors and with classmates about the development of the autonomous and group work.

-Ability to work in a diverse context and receptiveness concerning diversity.

3.      Systemic skills:

­-Reflecting and learning skills.

-Ability to integrate knowledge and methods from several disciplines.

-Ability to resolve historical matters in different areas (politics, economy, society, culture).

-Ability to apply the acquired theoretical knowledge.     

-Ability to apply common sense to the newly acquired knowledge.

1.      Knowledge of the matters dealt with by historians.

2.      Knowledge of the evidence through which historians reconstruct the past.

3.      Knowledge of the way in which historians interpret this evidence and historical facts.

4.      Knowledge of the different kinds of work that can be required for in "historical" subjects.

5.      Acquisition of the knowledge and skills needed to face History in a reasonable fashion and to wonder historically about the most immediate experiences.

6.      Knowledge of the main transformations in the main human subsistence systems.

7.      Knowledge of the social consequences of the different subsistence systems and of the tools used by historians to measure them.

8.      Knowledge of the systems through which social power and inequality are legitimated.

9.      Knowledge of the usefulness of social categories in historical analysis.

10.  Knowledge of the main systems of political organisation in societies.

11.  Knowledge of different conceptions about the participation humans must have in political organisation, the ideologies used to justify such participation and also how all of this has been reflected in history making.

12.  Knowledge of the historical use of war, violence and repression by power, the ways of understanding it and the ideas used to justify it.

13.  Knowledge of historiography and memory concerning happenings related to war, violence, repression and crime.

14.  Knowledge of the relation between demographic and historical variation.

15.  Knowledge of the reasons explaining the peaks and decline of empires.

16.  Knowledge of the historiographical approaches about gender, sex, and family. 

17.  Knowledge of the different theories about the relation between ethnicity and nationalism.