Undergraduate Courses

Costume Design for the modern stage and the history of fashion. Three hours of practical laboratory a week.

This course is designed to be accessible and approachable for people who will be future teachers of elementary school mathematics. It is also intended for people who want to broaden their knowledge in mathematics and experience it as a relevant, challenging, and enjoyable field. It is not intended for math majors. It will be taught as a problem-based course, that allows for students to explore and develop new ideas, and apply them to real life situations. The course builds on intuitive understandings of fundamental ideas of counting and chance and moves gradually to more formal knowledge of combinatorics and probability concepts and techniques. The learning experiences offered throughout the course are designed to facilitate student interactions and active role in the learning process.

Liberal Arts Core/MAP Equivalent - satisfies the requirement for Quantitative Reasoning

Aimed at students who expect to read and interpret, rather than conduct, statistical analyses, this course is designed to help students become better and more critical consumers of quantitative evidence. Using research studies discussed in the popular media and focused on currently debated questions in education and social policy, the course covers key concepts in quantitative reasoning, basic statistics, and research design. Research readings will focus on topical issues regarding early childhood and K-12 education and other social policy issues that affect children.

Liberal Arts Core/CORE Equivalent - satisfies the requirement for Quantitative Reasoning

Aimed at students who expect to read and interpret, rather than conduct, statistical analyses, this course is designed to help students become better and more critical consumers of quantitative evidence. Using research studies discussed in the popular media and focused on currently debated questions in health and human development, the course covers key concepts in quantitative reasoning, basic statistics, and research design. Research readings will focus on topical issues regarding food and nutrition, exercise, sleep, education, and child development.
Liberal Arts Core/CORE-MAP Equivalent - satisfies the requirement for Quantitative Reasoning only for students whose Program of Study does not include a Statistics Course-see your Advisor for more information.

Students study creativity and the science of engaging learning environments and use their findings to brainstorm low-cost solutions for improving classroom atmosphere. Students generate Do It Yourself" ideas that teachers can use to transform the physical space of their classroom on a budget to help students enter the proper mindset for learning. Students aggregate and edit their ideas into an eBook as an inspirational resources for teachers around the country.

Prepares students to navigate today's world of professional music performance. Topics include setting career goals, defining success, finding and creating performance opportunities, grant writing, creating publicity materials, auditions, day jobs, freelancing, and how to manage money, time, and stress

“Creative Coding” is a practice-based course designed to teach basic programming skills in the context of critical and cultural media studies and the digital humanities. The course requires no prior programming experience, simply a willingness to explore code at a more technical level with the aim of using computation as an expressive, analytical, critical and visualizing medium. Students will learn basic coding techniques such as variables, loops, graphics, and networking, all within a larger conversation on the social, cultural, and historical nature of code and coding practices.

This course is designed for students interested in learning about using creativity and future studies in formal and informal educational settings. Students explore technological progress and notions of futurism to better prepare students for a fast-paced world. The course offers an opportunity for students to create tangible and useful educational material and to exercise their creativity muscles in educationally significant ways.

What is the value of an idea? How do we frame ideas to convince others of their value? Students explore methods of fundraising for educational projects, including grant writing, crowdfunding, and community engagement; analyze successful grant proposals, Kickstarter campaigns and events; and discover ways technology has enhanced small-scale fundraising. Students craft their own fundraising pitch around a new creative product, project or need. This course offers a fun and engaging way to gain experience in educational fundraising—a crucial skill for any future educator.

Students serve as a production team that will create, rehearse, produce, and perform a culminating musical presentation at local venues. Such site may be schools, Senior Citizens Homes, Health Care Facilities, Community Centers. Students will assume the roles played by all personnel involved in putting on a performance, as well as becoming familiar with repertoire *music, lyrics, and dialogue) suited to the abilities of the performers.

Course explores the question of what is creativity through a set of practices that can be integrated into professional and personal lives. Students will answer this question through an exploration of three themes: creativity and identity (everyone has creative potential), rules and limits (do they limit and/or foster creativity), imagination and possibilities for action. At each course meeting, students will highlight creative thinking tools, exercises, and strategies to think through various challenges in their particular fields.

Debates about the role of crime in the media have been among the most
sustained and divisive in the field of communications, and they are
dependent on a foundation of equally divisive debates about “media
influence.” This course will broaden this discussion to consider the
culture of crime in relation to conventions of news and entertainment in
the mass media, and its larger social and political context. Topics will
include crime reporting, the role of place in crime stories, the aesthetics
of crime, moral panics and fears, crime and consumer culture, and the
social construction of different kinds of crimes and criminals.

The cultural context of crime in relation to conventions of news and entertainment in the mass media. Topics include competing theories of criminogenic behavior, news conventions and crime reporting, the aesthetics and representation of crime in the media, the role of place in crime stories, moral panics and fears, crime and consumer culture, and the social construction of different kinds of crimes and criminals.

Examines a variety of speech communities and linguistic codes within contemporary American society and their relationship to language use and learning in schools. Black and Hispanic English vernaculars receive special emphasis. Group projects focus on actual investigations in the area of sociolinguistics and language teaching/learning.

Critical making is hands-on hardware practice as a form of reflection and analysis: a way of thinking through what (and how) computing and digital media mean by understanding how they work, building on the literature of media studies and the digital humanities. By turning from software to hardware, to the physicality of computation and communications infrastructure, we will take objects apart, literally and figuratively, and in the process will learn to interpret and to intervene -- using prototyping, reverse engineering, hardware hacking and circuit bending, design fiction, electronics fabrication and other approaches -- in the material layer of digital technologies.

This course will introduce students to critical video—the use of documentary, ethnographic, and research-based video to investigate and critique contemporary culture. The class offers students a theoretical overview of documentary video, a set of conceptual tools to analyze video, and an introduction to the practice of video production for small and mobile screens. Students will apply texts on video’s history, culture and distribution, as well as on the ethical challenges of video production, to their own research-based video project. No prior experience in video production is required.

This course explores the multi-faceted nature of New York City as a cultural and economic hub for food and media. Food is never just something we eat, but in New York City food has taken on an increasing prominence in public life. Food shapes communities and is an increasingly important marker of social and cultural identities. Media of all types fuel and shape our connections to food. Tastes are defined; diets and food habits are promoted and demoted; food fortunes and food celebrities are made. How has New York City become so important to the business of taste? What goes on behind-the-scenes? Topics include: Food-related publishing and broadcasting; green markets, food trucks, and systems of supply and distribution; marketing; Chinatowns, diversity, fusion, and identity. Open to majors and non-majors including special students. Classroom instruction is supplemented by site visits, guest lectures, and field research.

This course explores the multi-faceted nature of New York City as a cultural and economic hub for food and media. Food is never just something we eat, but in New York City food has taken on an increasing prominence in public life. Food shapes communities and is an increasingly important marker of social and cultural identities. Media of all types fuel and shape our connections to food. Tastes are defined; diets and food habits are promoted and demoted; food fortunes and food celebrities are made. How has New York City become so important to the business of taste? What goes on behind-the-scenes? Topics include: Food-related publishing and broadcasting; green markets, food trucks, and systems of supply and distribution; marketing; Chinatowns, diversity, fusion, and identity. Open to majors and non-majors including special students. Classroom instruction is supplemented by site visits, guest lectures, and field research.

This course explores the multi-faceted nature of New York City as a cultural and economic hub for media and the arts, arguably the cultural capital of the world. Classroom instruction is supplemented by site visits, guest lectures, and field research to develop an appreciation of the ways that media and the arts have shaped the work and leisure of life in New York City for the past one hundred years. How did New York City become such a focal point for the creative industries? What goes on behind-the-scenes? Topics include: Time Square and live spectacle, the Broadway theatre, Madison Ave and modern advertising, the museum of New York, galleries, artists, and the art market, the Harlem Renaissance, alternative media and Bohemian arts.

Whether large, small, wide, high-definition, public, personal, shared, or handheld, screens are one of the most pervasive technologies in everyday life. From spaces of work to spaces of leisure, screens are sites for collaboration, performance, surveillance, and resistance. This course traces the cultural history of screens from a range of forms - from the panorama to the cinema, from the radar system to the television, and from the terminal to the mobile device - to provide a way of thinking about the development of the screen as simultaneously architectural, material, representational and computational.