Fall 2009 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 232 - Disability Past and Present
Professors Carolyn Stuart (Education) and Mary Jo Festle (History)

General Studies Distribution: Civilization or Society
Meeting time: 10:30-12:10 TTH

What does it mean to be disabled? How has the meaning of disability changed during different time periods in the U.S.? What factors affect a person's experience of disability? Why would it matter for people - either disabled or not - to learn about these matters? In this course, the answers to these and other questions will be explored. Disability is a complex category, and peoples' experiences with disability have varied a great deal. This course aims to explore that complexity while concentrating on certain ideas, including the social construction of disability and how it has changed over time. A variety of perspectives on disability will be introduced and connections between past and present will be made. Students will be critiquing societal actions and portrayals, including those by cultural authorities and the disabled themselves. Students will complete a significant research project that enables them to learn how the field of Disabilities Studies touches upon a discipline of their interest. The instructors hope to engage students' brains and hearts - to deepen their thinking about this particular interdisciplinary topic, to improve their academic skills, and to stimulate their thinking about the art and business of being human.

 

HNR 277 Civil Rights Movement in Memory and Literature
Professors Janet Warman and Jim Bissett

General Studies Distribution: Literature or Civilization
Meeting: 1:40-3:20 MW

This course will focus on the Civil Rights Movement, when black and white activists used the tactics of direct, nonviolent action to end the system of segregation in the United States. By immersing ourselves in literary and autobiographical accounts of this fascinating historical development - thereby studying it from an explicitly more personal and human perspective than in more traditional scholarly texts - we hope to gain an appreciation for the complexity and ambiguity of this important development in the history of our nation.