Fall 2007 Courses

Courses for First-Year Students

GST 110  The Global Experience
Professor Steve Braye

Green Day's words, "Don't want to be an American Idiot," reflected contemporary America in important ways.  Yet how do we avoid this fate, being an American Idiot?  In this interdisciplinary seminar, we will think beyond the media, for ourselves, examining and re-examining our beliefs and assumptions in significant ways.  We will use our time together to get outside the lines, to question our views of the world in new and challenging ways.  What are your views on contemporary slavery?  Are we implicated in the death of Sudanese in the Sudan?  What do we think about such global issues, and, more importantly, how do we decide what to think about these issues?

So often, we concentrate on what we know, the accumulation of material, rather than the perspectives we bring to this material.  No matter how old we are, we tend to see things the same over and over, forgetting to recognize how different people, or just different perspectives, can lead us to enact different realities.  This course will challenge us to achieve something better.  We can gain new perspectives that enable us to change both the world around us and ourselves.  We can examine new ways of thinking and see what these ways can offer us.  Finally, we can decide what we want to accomplish in our world and use these ways of seeing to help us develop innovative ways of acting in the world. 

Team-Taught Course for second-year students

HNR 272: Literary Journalism
Professors Tom Mould (Sociology) and
Brooke Barnett (Communications)
Meeting time: Tuesday-Thursday, 12:25-2:05

General Studies Distribution: Society or Expression (including Literature requirement)

Literary journalism involves employing fiction techniques when writing non-fiction stories. The effect is extremely compelling and has resulted in some of literary history's most memorable accounts, including a look at the sharecropper experience after the depression, a ride on a bus with a writer and his acid-dropping friends and the discovery of government-funded weapons used to massacre an entire village. In this class you will study the masters who started the movement as well as current writers, and in the end produce your own piece of literary journalism.

HNR 233 - An International Perspective on Substance Abuse: From Data Collection to Prevention and Intervention
Professors Resa Walch (Health and Human Performance) and
Jan Mays (Math)
Meeting time: Mondays and Wednesdays, 3:35-5:15

General Studies Distribution: Society or Math/Science (non-lab science)

While much scientific literature exists on substance abuse, interpretations of this literature to the general public are often oversimplified and inaccurate. The most effective safeguards from personal and societal disruption due to substance abuse are reliable scientific research and data collection, accurate interpretation of information, accessible and accurate education and ongoing research that addresses the myriad of controversial issues related to abuse, addiction, treatment, laws and public policy. This course will focus on investigating and exploring substance abuse issues both in the United States and abroad and teaching the skills to look critically at relevant research and how statistics can be used and abused in debating controversial issues. We will concentrate on abuse, addiction, prevention, treatment, policy strategies and continued good scientific inquiry.

Courses for upper-class students

Upper-level GST seminar, GST 420, Religion and Science
Professor Jeffrey Pugh
Meeting time: Tuesday-Thursday, 10:30-12:10

Have you wondered how people can believe in God today? Do religion and science have any common ground for discussion about meaning and purpose in human life? How are our images of God connected to the scientific findings of any given age? Does the present age offer us any path that overcomes the Enlightenment model of science and religion as enemies, without common ground? If you have wondered about these questions and felt that the divide between science and religion was too vast to bridge, then this course will provide an opportunity to think about these questions in new and creative ways. This course will explore the intersection between religion and science from ancient metaphysics through Galileo to modern Chaos theory in order to see if new paradigms are emerging that might address centuries old antagonisms between the scientific and religious communities.