FYP Course Descriptions - Fall 2008

Making a Difference: Active Citizenship in a Multicultural Democracy
In this course, participants will explore what it means to be an active citizen in a multicultural democracy, by examining if and how citizens come together to reach collective goals in ways that are fair and just for all. This concern has been with us since our founding fathers attempted to craft a system of government that would ensure that no one faction could champion its interests over the public good. In our conversations, we will look at concerns raised today about potential threats to active citizenship in our democracy such as increases in the wealth gap, racial tensions, declines in civic engagement and a faltering sense of community. Although the course considers the obstacles we face to multicultural democratic action, most of our attention will be on understanding and using the tools of active citizenship in a diverse society. To enhance that understanding and employing the tools of citizenship, all of us will be volunteering in the local community throughout the fall semester. As part of this work, we will explore the role of liberal arts education as a place for positive transformation, both personal and social. Many of our discussions and assignments will center on the role of active citizenship and social justice through history and today with examples coming from the Civil Rights Movement and Hurricane Katrina.

Political Economy and Identity in the Age of Globalization

As people, capital, images, and ideas move around the globe in ways unimaginable even a decade ago, scholars debate the effects of an increasingly interdependent global culture. 'Globalization' is not one phenomenon but many, a set of interlinked social, economic, and political trends with complex causes and uncertain implications for the future. This course seeks to define 'globalization,' and examines the political, economic, and ethical debates that swirl around the term. We will look critically and self-consciously at the ways that globalization shapes individual, national, and transnational identities. We will consider in detail the evolution of a variety of international institutions, including the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, and the International Monetary Fund, and the ways in which they affect the course of world events and the daily lives of people around the globe. Finally, we will examine the ways in which images from commercials, popular film, or news broadcasts bring individuals, groups, and nations to define themselves and others in certain ways, and the consequences of this shaping power, both positive and negative.

Finding a Voice: Creativity, Community, and Performance

Each of us is moved in a unique, individual way by the beauty of the art that we see, hear, or produce, but the meaning we draw from art is shaped as well by the experiences and ideals that we share within communities. In performance, a person draws upon individual creativity and collective knowledge to present sounds/images/words that have the potential to clarify our most deeply held values. In part by regularly becoming performers ourselves, we will explore ways in which we can convey our ideas clearly and powerfully.We will also explore ways in which artistic expression conveys meaning in cultures very different from our own.

The course requires no prior training or proficiency as a performer. We ask only that you be willing to express yourself creatively and to share that expression. The college will be housed in a residence that provides space and opportunity for rehearsal and practice, as well as proximity to SLU’s Fine Arts, Music, and Performance and Communication Arts Departments. Taught by an ethnomusicologist and a historian, who sometimes share the stage as saxophonist and guitarist in a local rock and roll band, the college will seek to foster a community that connects serious academic inquiry with artistic creativity, where students can seek their own voices in an actively supportive environment.

Thoreau Lives!

When Henry David Thoreau published his memoir in 1854 about a year spent living alone and close to the land in a cabin in New England, he probably had no inkling that Walden would inspire the environmental movement of the twentieth century. He certainly would not have predicted the back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s, when young people fled the cities and suburbs to take up a lifestyle of subsistence farming and voluntary simplicity in rural regions of America, including Upstate New York, the North Country: a movement which lives on today as ordinary citizens participate in community supported agriculture, “buy local,” and seek home-grown sources of energy. Nor could he have foreseen that his cranky, individualistic essay, “Civil Disobedience,” would inspire the action and thoughts of political leaders and activists, authors, and citizens across the globe wishing to resist the forces of global capitalism, consumerism, war, environmental plunder, and the fossil fuel-based economy. In this course we’ll begin with a study of Thoreau and then bring him up to date, studying twentieth and twenty-first environmental writers and note how the seeds of that prickly New Englander’s thought continue to bear fruit and offer hope for the future. We will visit with North Country citizens who have found ways to “live deliberately,” as Thoreau wrote, in a culture that tells us it is our patriotic duty to consume and consume and spend and spend. To finish, we will push Thoreau into the future, to ask ourselves, as individuals, how it is that we wish to live, in what kind of community, and in what kind of world.

What Culture Do You Speak? Language and Culture in a Multicultural World

Does how you speak define who you are? Can you understand another culture if you don’t speak the language? If you learn another language, will it change who you are? Is knowing more than one language essential to being a global citizen? By sharing our own experiences of language speaking and learning and by examining a wide range of materials—memoirs, films, new clips, songs—we will approach these and other questions related to language acquisition and intercultural communication. Our discussions will center around topics such as body language, accents and attitudes, how we adjust our speech in different situations, and how cultural givens complicate intercultural communication. This highly interactive course, employing for example lectures, oral presentations, group projects, debates, simulations, role playing, and skits, also will give students the opportunity to learn basic vocabulary and phrases from the many languages taught and spoken here at Saint Lawrence.

Sharing the Continent: Canadian Culture? American Culture?

Our work in this course will focus on the differing national cultures of the two predominantly English- speaking nations of North America: Canada and the United States. Using a comparative historical approach, we will trace the settlement and development of each country from seventeenth-century beginnings to the present. Our prime concern will be the definition and understanding of each nation’s ethos through its differing approaches to Western expansion, governmental structures (presidential versus parliamentary), trade (the fur trade to NAFTA), environmental issues, and health care. We shall visit Canada’s national capital, Ottawa, and the Frederic Remington Art Museum as we compare the cultural experiences of both Canada and the United States, both mythic and real.

Global Questions, Local Activism

Activists are people who seek to transform dominant social structures and create a more just world through collective action. If you are such a person, then Global Questions, Local Activism is for you. In this course, we will explore the relationship between the work of activism and the work of asking critical questions. The journeys of activists often begin by asking basic questions others are afraid to ask. Rosa Parks asked, “Why should some people have to sit at the back of the bus simply because of the color of their skin?” Aldo Leopold asked, “Why should one species dominate the planet at the expense of others?” More recently, the Dropping Knowledge project (www.droppingknowledge.org) produced one hundred questions for our own time, questions such as “Should we have the right to choose where we live?” and “Why do we consider some lives to be worth more than others?” With such questions as models, students will develop their own global questions and engage in activist work that brings their responses to life. Along the way we will read about past and current struggles to address racism, sexism, militarism, economic inequality, environmental degradation, and other forms of injustice that continue to make the need for intelligent, creative activism so pressing.

Plagues and Peoples

When considering definitions of illness or wellness, Westerners since the Enlightenment have tended to assume a distinction between mind and body that people in other cultures do not assume. The “body” becomes an object of study, with all its attendant “symptoms” of “illness” to Western medical tradition. The “mind” is considered separate from “body” and from “brain,” which is an organ of the “body.” Hence we have created a tradition of different practitioners for “physical” and “mental” disorders. In other cultural traditions, one’s “body” is not separated from “mind,” or from the social fabric of daily life that connects an individual to other members of his or her society. In this course, we will study cross-cultural approaches to wellness and illness that focus on concepts of the body, “personhood,” gender distinctions, definitions of “wellness” and “illness,” and the consequences these different belief systems have on approaches to “healing.” To understand these issues we will use several primary examples of different kinds of “plagues” that have affected groups of people and their cultures in profound ways. These include the Black Death in 16th century Europe, Kuru disease in Papua New Guinea and its relationship to Kreutzfeld-Jacob Disease, healing by shamans on three different continents, and radioactive fallout contribution to cultural change in the Marshall Islands of Oceania. Students interested in health sciences or cross-cultural studies of humanity are encouraged to participate. Students who take this FYP must also co-enroll in at least one Natural Science distribution lab science.

Individual and Social Wellness

Mental and physical well-being are in part determined by individual behavior, personal choice, and circumstances. Stress, body image, alcohol abuse, fertility control, and AIDS represent a small sample of health issues that face all generations in our society, particularly college students. The course will begin with an examination of students' personal mental and physical health values, and then move to an exploration of how well-being may be influenced by gender, race, class, genetic make-up, and the environment. These themes will become the basis for examining significant health issues including those related to questions of medical ethics. We will discuss some non-western approaches to health and disease (e.g. Traditional Chinese Medicine and Native American healing) within this context. Students will prepare a substantial health education presentation on a topic relevant to high school students. Topics may include STDs, AIDS, alcohol and/or drug use, smoking, teen pregnancy, suicide, depression, stress, body image and eating disorders, and dealing with peer pressure.

Conceptualizing Nature

Blending the theoretical with the experiential, this course is organized around the central theme that the idea of “nature” is one that humans have created. We first explore origin myths and use these myths to locate how peoples perceive and relate to the natural environment. This discussion will be extended to include how our relationship to the natural world is understood through particular types of power and knowledge (e.g., rationalist, scientific, eco-feminist). Secondly, we look at nature as a landscape that is constructed in various ways by people from different social positions: the poet versus the scientist, the native versus the tourist, the tree cutter versus the tree hugger, the snowmobiler versus the cross country skier, etc. Finally, we will contrast the animal rights movement with the many ways in which animals are used—food, pets, lab animals, entertainment—and we will apply a similar discussion to the social construction of animals. The course also has a community service component in which we will construct and maintain local trails. Whenever possible it is our intent to integrate the discussions in the classroom with the experiences of the trail. Moreover, we use a wide variety of pedagogies—excursions into the Adirondacks, GPS and GIS workshops and assignments, writing workshops, and artist bookmaking. We also use a variety of texts, including novels, analytical works, films, and artistic work.

Having an Impact: Leadership, Teamwork, and Motivation

Today’s world is highly dynamic and diverse in nature, requiring adaptive thinking and individuals with the ability to lead amidst change. Today’s world is also highly collaborative, requiring individuals who can work effectively in a wide range of different groups. In this course, we will consider questions such as what makes an effective leader or follower? What does history teach us about leadership? What does science teach us about motivation? What do economic theories teach us about teamwork and group dynamics? We will explore the themes of leadership, teamwork, and motivation from a variety of different perspectives, and we will study these issues both intellectually through readings and movies and practically through participation in activities such as group community service projects.

The Fifties, the Eighties, and Today: American Culture across the Generations

Most members of the American public identify themselves as part of a specific generation, from “the Greatest Generation” who fought World War II, to their Baby Boomer children, to their offspring, Generations X and Y. Each generation seems to consider itself unique, throwing off the cultural and social values of previous decades and focusing on new and pressing concerns, yet each comes to see that certain inherent American—and human—values persist. Through literature, film, and the study of political events, we will examine the social and cultural climates of the 1950s, the 1980s, and the early 2000s, asking you to construct a portrait of your emerging generation.

The Candidates

What are the momentous experiences in life? How do past experiences inform future decisions? Can an individual be an agent of change? This year’s presidential election offers a unique opportunity to ask these questions. The focus of this FYP is to consider the trajectory of a life and its most significant driving forces. We will, as a class, construct answers to these questions for the Presidential candidates. We will work to understand how they became candidates and predict what will most inform decisions they make about social issues such as health care, gay marriage, reproductive rights, and Iraq. Answering these questions about your own life will be used as a model to find ways to answer what counts as a momentous event and the outcomes of those events for a life. In the process, we hope to construct a view of the candidates different from the dominant images offered in the media. We expect an interest in current events, not an extensive prior knowledge. As your faculty, we will bring perspectives from biography, social justice and empirical science.

Reading Contemporary Media

What do we mean when we talk about "mainstream" cultural values? To what extent do the media create and reinforce our understanding of what is "normal," and where must we look for alternative views? In this course, we will study a number of different media (including film, advertising, news media and the web) in our attempt to define the systems that help create contemporary American values, and we will examine evidence of resistance to those values. Through the lens of current cultural theory, we will focus on matters such as presidential politics, gender differences and social class, in order to enhance our understanding of this important shaper of our culture, the mass media.

Darkness Visible: Race, Mental Illness and Cultural Difference

It is hard to make it through a day without being told how much better off we might be if we considered taking a sleeping pill, an anti-anxiety pill or an antidepressant. Understanding our experiences of exhaustion, social awkwardness and alienation as medical problems depends on a whole set of cultural assumptions about what it means to be a healthy and whole human being. The goal of this course is twofold: to reflect on the ways in which culture shapes our understandings and experiences of mental ill-health, and to consider how ways of describing what is mentally abnormal reveal our culturally-rooted notions of 'normalcy'. Some questions we will consider are: Can the diagnoses of mental illness and models of mental wellness which developed in the West be globally applied? What happens when psychological suffering is overlooked because of a lack of cultural understanding, or when cultural difference is interpreted as mental instability? We will read a range of materials that address living with and making sense of mental illness in non-Western contexts including autobiography, works of fiction, ethnographic accounts, therapists' case studies and theoretical texts. Our discussion and exploration of these texts will help us make visible the darkness that too often enshrouds mental illness and racial difference.

The Psychology and Expression of Creativity

What is creativity? In this class, we will explore many historical and current philosophical and psychological theories about creativity’s source and purpose, from Aristotle’s Poetics and Immanuel Kant’s ideas about aesthetics, to Amabile’s social psychology of intrinsic motivation and Csikszentmihalyi’s theory of flow. In addition, we will examine how the limits set by dominant social structures have stimulated empowering cultural and creative expressions of survival and resistance, such as capoeira (an African-Brazilian dance/fight/game) and African-American spirituals. Topics will include the neurobiological correlates of creativity; personality, intelligences, core attitudes and states of consciousness associated with the creative process; and the necessary balance between improvisation and discipline, playfulness and talent in order to create successfully. This course is well-suited for students who are willing to push themselves toward uninhibited creative expression, especially in the areas of movement and rhythm, creative writing, and visual arts, but who are also interested in challenging themselves with rigorous readings in the context of a serious academic exploration of creativity.

Betrothals and Bibliothèques: The Changing Nature of Social Institutions

Reciting vows, setting up a household, raising children. Archiving information, lending books, keeping reading rooms open. They sound completely different – so, why would anyone craft a course that looks at marriage and libraries? Because both demonstrate well the fact that social institutions can and must adapt to the changing world around them. The marriages of your great-great grandparents are as foreign to the marriages that you are likely to enter as the libraries those grandparents visited as schoolchildren are to those that you have known since you were children. In this course, we will examine the changes these institutions have undergone with particular attention to their private v. public nature and to the role that technological developments have played in those changes—from the printing press and industrialization to Google and eharmony.com.

Narratives of Identity: Exploring Class, Gender, Race, and Sexual Orientation through Stories, Film and Art

While society shapes what it means to be of a certain class, gender race, or sexual orientation, we of course also personally define and shape our own identities. One of the important ways we do this is through the stories we tell others (and ourselves) about who we are.

This is a course about storytelling. We’ll begin by examining a wide range of fiction and non-fiction texts, films, and visual art that explore various aspects of identity, and inform our reading and viewing with sociological readings that approach these issues in a more scientific and theoretical way. Then, we’ll experiment with different ways of constructing narratives of our own, both through writing about our own experiences of identity and through a project in which we’ll gather others’ stories about their experiences. Lastly, throughout the semester, we’ll pay special attention to “intersections”, or points at which the aspects of class, gender, race, and sexual orientation meet (and potentially redefine) each other. For example, Wounded, by Percival Everett, the first short novel we’ll read (and a classic Western with a twist, narrated by a young horse trainer) deals with the intolerance of a Wyoming desert community towards “outsiders”, be they blacks, gays, or Native Americans, and the uneasy attempts of members of these three groups even to connect to each other.


What's new in the FYP: The New Student Guide was mailed on May 9th to the Class of 2012.
Dates for Fall 2008 FYP course descriptions Forms for Fall 2008 Class of 2012 Page SLU Songs First-Year Cup Philosophy and Goals Rhetoric & Communication Goals FYP Fall 2007 syllabi FYS Spring 2008 Syllabi Academic Advising Programs The Munn WORD Studio Residence Life Advisor's Handbook Academic Planning and Registration System Academic Affairs Student Life	FYP Course Descriptions - Fall 2008 FYP course preference form Back to forms page Making a Difference: Active Citizenship in a Multicultural Democracy In this course, participants will explore what it means to be an active citizen in a multicultural democracy, by examining if and how citizens come together to reach collective goals in ways that are fair and just for all. This concern has been with us since our founding fathers attempted to craft a system of government that would ensure that no one faction could champion its interests over the public good. In our conversations, we will look at concerns raised today about potential threats to active citizenship in our democracy such as increases in the wealth gap, racial tensions, declines in civic engagement and a faltering sense of community. Although the course considers the obstacles we face to multicultural democratic action, most of our attention will be on understanding and using the tools of active citizenship in a diverse society. To enhance that understanding and employing the tools of citizenship, all of us will be volunteering in the local community throughout the fall semester. As part of this work, we will explore the role of liberal arts education as a place for positive transformation, both personal and social. Many of our discussions and assignments will center on the role of active citizenship and social justice through history and today with examples coming from the Civil Rights Movement and Hurricane Katrina. Political Economy and Identity in the Age of Globalization As people, capital, images, and ideas move around the globe in ways unimaginable even a decade ago, scholars debate the effects of an increasingly interdependent global culture. 'Globalization' is not one phenomenon but many, a set of interlinked social, economic, and political trends with complex causes and uncertain implications for the future. This course seeks to define 'globalization,' and examines the political, economic, and ethical debates that swirl around the term. We will look critically and self-consciously at the ways that globalization shapes individual, national, and transnational identities. We will consider in detail the evolution of a variety of international institutions, including the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, and the International Monetary Fund, and the ways in which they affect the course of world events and the daily lives of people around the globe. Finally, we will examine the ways in which images from commercials, popular film, or news broadcasts bring individuals, groups, and nations to define themselves and others in certain ways, and the consequences of this shaping power, both positive and negative. Finding a Voice: Creativity, Community, and Performance Each of us is moved in a unique, individual way by the beauty of the art that we see, hear, or produce, but the meaning we draw from art is shaped as well by the experiences and ideals that we share within communities. In performance, a person draws upon individual creativity and collective knowledge to present sounds/images/words that have the potential to clarify our most deeply held values. In part by regularly becoming performers ourselves, we will explore ways in which we can convey our ideas clearly and powerfully.We will also explore ways in which artistic expression conveys meaning in cultures very different from our own. The course requires no prior training or proficiency as a performer. We ask only that you be willing to express yourself creatively and to share that expression. The college will be housed in a residence that provides space and opportunity for rehearsal and practice, as well as proximity to SLU’s Fine Arts, Music, and Performance and Communication Arts Departments. Taught by an ethnomusicologist and a historian, who sometimes share the stage as saxophonist and guitarist in a local rock and roll band, the college will seek to foster a community that connects serious academic inquiry with artistic creativity, where students can seek their own voices in an actively supportive environment. Thoreau Lives! When Henry David Thoreau published his memoir in 1854 about a year spent living alone and close to the land in a cabin in New England, he probably had no inkling that Walden would inspire the environmental movement of the twentieth century. He certainly would not have predicted the back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s, when young people fled the cities and suburbs to take up a lifestyle of subsistence farming and voluntary simplicity in rural regions of America, including Upstate New York, the North Country: a movement which lives on today as ordinary citizens participate in community supported agriculture, “buy local,” and seek home-grown sources of energy. Nor could he have foreseen that his cranky, individualistic essay, “Civil Disobedience,” would inspire the action and thoughts of political leaders and activists, authors, and citizens across the globe wishing to resist the forces of global capitalism, consumerism, war, environmental plunder, and the fossil fuel-based economy. In this course we’ll begin with a study of Thoreau and then bring him up to date, studying twentieth and twenty-first environmental writers and note how the seeds of that prickly New Englander’s thought continue to bear fruit and offer hope for the future. We will visit with North Country citizens who have found ways to “live deliberately,” as Thoreau wrote, in a culture that tells us it is our patriotic duty to consume and consume and spend and spend. To finish, we will push Thoreau into the future, to ask ourselves, as individuals, how it is that we wish to live, in what kind of community, and in what kind of world. What Culture Do You Speak? Language and Culture in a Multicultural World Does how you speak define who you are? Can you understand another culture if you don’t speak the language? If you learn another language, will it change who you are? Is knowing more than one language essential to being a global citizen? By sharing our own experiences of language speaking and learning and by examining a wide range of materials—memoirs, films, new clips, songs—we will approach these and other questions related to language acquisition and intercultural communication. Our discussions will center around topics such as body language, accents and attitudes, how we adjust our speech in different situations, and how cultural givens complicate intercultural communication. This highly interactive course, employing for example lectures, oral presentations, group projects, debates, simulations, role playing, and skits, also will give students the opportunity to learn basic vocabulary and phrases from the many languages taught and spoken here at Saint Lawrence. Sharing the Continent: Canadian Culture? American Culture? Our work in this course will focus on the differing national cultures of the two predominantly English- speaking nations of North America: Canada and the United States. Using a comparative historical approach, we will trace the settlement and development of each country from seventeenth-century beginnings to the present. Our prime concern will be the definition and understanding of each nation’s ethos through its differing approaches to Western expansion, governmental structures (presidential versus parliamentary), trade (the fur trade to NAFTA), environmental issues, and health care. We shall visit Canada’s national capital, Ottawa, and the Frederic Remington Art Museum as we compare the cultural experiences of both Canada and the United States, both mythic and real. Global Questions, Local Activism Activists are people who seek to transform dominant social structures and create a more just world through collective action. If you are such a person, then Global Questions, Local Activism is for you. In this course, we will explore the relationship between the work of activism and the work of asking critical questions. The journeys of activists often begin by asking basic questions others are afraid to ask. Rosa Parks asked, “Why should some people have to sit at the back of the bus simply because of the color of their skin?” Aldo Leopold asked, “Why should one species dominate the planet at the expense of others?” More recently, the Dropping Knowledge project (www.droppingknowledge.org) produced one hundred questions for our own time, questions such as “Should we have the right to choose where we live?” and “Why do we consider some lives to be worth more than others?” With such questions as models, students will develop their own global questions and engage in activist work that brings their responses to life. Along the way we will read about past and current struggles to address racism, sexism, militarism, economic inequality, environmental degradation, and other forms of injustice that continue to make the need for intelligent, creative activism so pressing. Plagues and Peoples When considering definitions of illness or wellness, Westerners since the Enlightenment have tended to assume a distinction between mind and body that people in other cultures do not assume. The “body” becomes an object of study, with all its attendant “symptoms” of “illness” to Western medical tradition. The “mind” is considered separate from “body” and from “brain,” which is an organ of the “body.” Hence we have created a tradition of different practitioners for “physical” and “mental” disorders. In other cultural traditions, one’s “body” is not separated from “mind,” or from the social fabric of daily life that connects an individual to other members of his or her society. In this course, we will study cross-cultural approaches to wellness and illness that focus on concepts of the body, “personhood,” gender distinctions, definitions of “wellness” and “illness,” and the consequences these different belief systems have on approaches to “healing.” To understand these issues we will use several primary examples of different kinds of “plagues” that have affected groups of people and their cultures in profound ways. These include the Black Death in 16th century Europe, Kuru disease in Papua New Guinea and its relationship to Kreutzfeld-Jacob Disease, healing by shamans on three different continents, and radioactive fallout contribution to cultural change in the Marshall Islands of Oceania. Students interested in health sciences or cross-cultural studies of humanity are encouraged to participate. Students who take this FYP must also co-enroll in at least one Natural Science distribution lab science. Individual and Social Wellness Mental and physical well-being are in part determined by individual behavior, personal choice, and circumstances. Stress, body image, alcohol abuse, fertility control, and AIDS represent a small sample of health issues that face all generations in our society, particularly college students. The course will begin with an examination of students' personal mental and physical health values, and then move to an exploration of how well-being may be influenced by gender, race, class, genetic make-up, and the environment. These themes will become the basis for examining significant health issues including those related to questions of medical ethics. We will discuss some non-western approaches to health and disease (e.g. Traditional Chinese Medicine and Native American healing) within this context. Students will prepare a substantial health education presentation on a topic relevant to high school students. Topics may include STDs, AIDS, alcohol and/or drug use, smoking, teen pregnancy, suicide, depression, stress, body image and eating disorders, and dealing with peer pressure. Conceptualizing Nature Blending the theoretical with the experiential, this course is organized around the central theme that the idea of “nature” is one that humans have created. We first explore origin myths and use these myths to locate how peoples perceive and relate to the natural environment. This discussion will be extended to include how our relationship to the natural world is understood through particular types of power and knowledge (e.g., rationalist, scientific, eco-feminist). Secondly, we look at nature as a landscape that is constructed in various ways by people from different social positions: the poet versus the scientist, the native versus the tourist, the tree cutter versus the tree hugger, the snowmobiler versus the cross country skier, etc. Finally, we will contrast the animal rights movement with the many ways in which animals are used—food, pets, lab animals, entertainment—and we will apply a similar discussion to the social construction of animals. The course also has a community service component in which we will construct and maintain local trails. Whenever possible it is our intent to integrate the discussions in the classroom with the experiences of the trail. Moreover, we use a wide variety of pedagogies—excursions into the Adirondacks, GPS and GIS workshops and assignments, writing workshops, and artist bookmaking. We also use a variety of texts, including novels, analytical works, films, and artistic work. Having an Impact: Leadership, Teamwork, and Motivation Today’s world is highly dynamic and diverse in nature, requiring adaptive thinking and individuals with the ability to lead amidst change. Today’s world is also highly collaborative, requiring individuals who can work effectively in a wide range of different groups. In this course, we will consider questions such as what makes an effective leader or follower? What does history teach us about leadership? What does science teach us about motivation? What do economic theories teach us about teamwork and group dynamics? We will explore the themes of leadership, teamwork, and motivation from a variety of different perspectives, and we will study these issues both intellectually through readings and movies and practically through participation in activities such as group community service projects. The Fifties, the Eighties, and Today: American Culture across the Generations Most members of the American public identify themselves as part of a specific generation, from “the Greatest Generation” who fought World War II, to their Baby Boomer children, to their offspring, Generations X and Y. Each generation seems to consider itself unique, throwing off the cultural and social values of previous decades and focusing on new and pressing concerns, yet each comes to see that certain inherent American—and human—values persist. Through literature, film, and the study of political events, we will examine the social and cultural climates of the 1950s, the 1980s, and the early 2000s, asking you to construct a portrait of your emerging generation. The Candidates What are the momentous experiences in life? How do past experiences inform future decisions? Can an individual be an agent of change? This year’s presidential election offers a unique opportunity to ask these questions. The focus of this FYP is to consider the trajectory of a life and its most significant driving forces. We will, as a class, construct answers to these questions for the Presidential candidates. We will work to understand how they became candidates and predict what will most inform decisions they make about social issues such as health care, gay marriage, reproductive rights, and Iraq. Answering these questions about your own life will be used as a model to find ways to answer what counts as a momentous event and the outcomes of those events for a life. In the process, we hope to construct a view of the candidates different from the dominant images offered in the media. We expect an interest in current events, not an extensive prior knowledge. As your faculty, we will bring perspectives from biography, social justice and empirical science. Reading Contemporary Media What do we mean when we talk about "mainstream" cultural values? To what extent do the media create and reinforce our understanding of what is "normal," and where must we look for alternative views? In this course, we will study a number of different media (including film, advertising, news media and the web) in our attempt to define the systems that help create contemporary American values, and we will examine evidence of resistance to those values. Through the lens of current cultural theory, we will focus on matters such as presidential politics, gender differences and social class, in order to enhance our understanding of this important shaper of our culture, the mass media. Darkness Visible: Race, Mental Illness and Cultural Difference It is hard to make it through a day without being told how much better off we might be if we considered taking a sleeping pill, an anti-anxiety pill or an antidepressant. Understanding our experiences of exhaustion, social awkwardness and alienation as medical problems depends on a whole set of cultural assumptions about what it means to be a healthy and whole human being. The goal of this course is twofold: to reflect on the ways in which culture shapes our understandings and experiences of mental ill-health, and to consider how ways of describing what is mentally abnormal reveal our culturally-rooted notions of 'normalcy'. Some questions we will consider are: Can the diagnoses of mental illness and models of mental wellness which developed in the West be globally applied? What happens when psychological suffering is overlooked because of a lack of cultural understanding, or when cultural difference is interpreted as mental instability? We will read a range of materials that address living with and making sense of mental illness in non-Western contexts including autobiography, works of fiction, ethnographic accounts, therapists' case studies and theoretical texts. Our discussion and exploration of these texts will help us make visible the darkness that too often enshrouds mental illness and racial difference. The Psychology and Expression of Creativity What is creativity? In this class, we will explore many historical and current philosophical and psychological theories about creativity’s source and purpose, from Aristotle’s Poetics and Immanuel Kant’s ideas about aesthetics, to Amabile’s social psychology of intrinsic motivation and Csikszentmihalyi’s theory of flow. In addition, we will examine how the limits set by dominant social structures have stimulated empowering cultural and creative expressions of survival and resistance, such as capoeira (an African-Brazilian dance/fight/game) and African-American spirituals. Topics will include the neurobiological correlates of creativity; personality, intelligences, core attitudes and states of consciousness associated with the creative process; and the necessary balance between improvisation and discipline, playfulness and talent in order to create successfully. This course is well-suited for students who are willing to push themselves toward uninhibited creative expression, especially in the areas of movement and rhythm, creative writing, and visual arts, but who are also interested in challenging themselves with rigorous readings in the context of a serious academic exploration of creativity. Betrothals and Bibliothèques: The Changing Nature of Social Institutions Reciting vows, setting up a household, raising children. Archiving information, lending books, keeping reading rooms open. They sound completely different – so, why would anyone craft a course that looks at marriage and libraries? Because both demonstrate well the fact that social institutions can and must adapt to the changing world around them. The marriages of your great-great grandparents are as foreign to the marriages that you are likely to enter as the libraries those grandparents visited as schoolchildren are to those that you have known since you were children. In this course, we will examine the changes these institutions have undergone with particular attention to their private v. public nature and to the role that technological developments have played in those changes—from the printing press and industrialization to Google and eharmony.com. Narratives of Identity: Exploring Class, Gender, Race, and Sexual Orientation through Stories, Film and Art While society shapes what it means to be of a certain class, gender race, or sexual orientation, we of course also personally define and shape our own identities. One of the important ways we do this is through the stories we tell others (and ourselves) about who we are. This is a course about storytelling. We’ll begin by examining a wide range of fiction and non-fiction texts, films, and visual art that explore various aspects of identity, and inform our reading and viewing with sociological readings that approach these issues in a more scientific and theoretical way. Then, we’ll experiment with different ways of constructing narratives of our own, both through writing about our own experiences of identity and through a project in which we’ll gather others’ stories about their experiences. Lastly, throughout the semester, we’ll pay special attention to “intersections”, or points at which the aspects of class, gender, race, and sexual orientation meet (and potentially redefine) each other. For example, Wounded, by Percival Everett, the first short novel we’ll read (and a classic Western with a twist, narrated by a young horse trainer) deals with the intolerance of a Wyoming desert community towards “outsiders”, be they blacks, gays, or Native Americans, and the uneasy attempts of members of these three groups even to connect to each other.
Contact Us Dr. Catherine Crosby-Currie Associate Dean of the First Year 168 Whitman Hall St. Lawrence University Canton, NY 13617 Phone: 315-229-5909 Fax: 315-229-5709 Email us here Back to FYP homepage Back to SLU homepage