Undergraduate Courses

In this course students examine the legal and ethical issues confronting public
schools; explore various legal principles and their application; and analyze current school practices from the standpoint of potential legal controversies, including the ability to recognize “preventative law” situations. In addition to identifying pragmatic approaches to the law, students engage in academic discourse involving issues of social justice and the democratic underpinnings of education.

Innovative solutions in education are emerging from the private sector every day. Business ventures from Teach for America to Khan Academy are changing the way teachers are prepared, the way students learn, and the way institutions use data. These ideas are started by “social entrepreneurs,” people who try to improve lives through solutions that have a market and customers. Students in this course learn about social entrepreneurship, how to identify critical issues in the education-related space, and how to develop their own entrepreneurial solutions accordingly.

The course will examine historical perspectives on the relationship between public schooling and the promotion of democratic ideals. Students will explore some of the central goals and purposes of American public education over the past two centuries, and the historiographical debates about those goals and purposes. In the second half of the course, students will the relationship between schooling and civic education, and between schooling and specific communities, in order to ask whether the goals of schooling might promote or contradict the goals of particular groups who seek to benefit from public education, and ways in which education does not promote democratic ideals.

Liberal Arts Core/CORE Equivalent - satisfies the requirement for Society & Social Sciences

This course considers the role of education as a social institution and the ways in which it fosters, prevents, and maintains social inequities in the U.S. We examine the structural and cultural ways in which schools have played a role in building and sustaining social hierarchies and shaped the character of our society. We explore how schooling socializes students differently based on their real/perceived culture, race, class, gender, sexual identity, and immigrant status and how that leads to differential outcomes for different groups. Students explore the origins, development, and current state of social theory and practice/research on education.

This practice-based course provides students with an opportunity to learn about the education consulting profession. The first module provides a critical overview of how consultants work with schools, districts, universities and nonprofit organizations to assess educational challenges. The second covers multiple applied research methods, including design thinking, individual and focus group interviews, and secondary data analysis. During the third module students consult for a school, district or nonprofit organization, getting first-hand experience in the profession.

This course for Education Studies majors provides academic credit for internships in fields related to education. The course is intended to help students: acquire valuable experience and exposure to real-world issues in careers in the field of education; develop basic professional skills identified as especially important by employers; assemble a portfolio of materials useful for future job search; and develop networking relationships within the education
field.

The course provides an in-depth examination of the affordances & limitations of educational technology in enhancing the teaching & learning of secondary school mathematics. It focuses on the use of handheld & computer technology, & introduces web-based mathematical software, dynamic software, graphical tools & other software that can be successfully incorporated in the middle & high school mathematics classroom. The course offers opportunities to engage in, design, & critique technology-enhanced mathematical activities that aim at developing understanding of school mathematics.

This course is designed to introduce the student to contemporary practices of creating and presenting electroacoustic music from the practical perspectives of analyzing works and understanding current technologies and aesthetic paradigms. In addition to musicological issues, composition will be placed in the wider context of contemporary art and New Media practices. This is a composition class that uses a music appreciation format to teach music creation today.Practical compositional lectures by Michal Rataj will focus on the analysis of a few key works, each dealing with specific aspects of music and technology and individual compositional approaches. Eric Rosenzveig will present theoretical classes providing an overview, background and competing theories from the varied perspectives of the artist, philosopher, technologist, musician and composer. We will try and look at the question “why” in addition to “how” to make a new work. We'll listen to many shorter works in class, to provide context to our discussions.

Analytical and theoretical concepts required grasping the aesthetic development of electronic and computer music compositions. The course emphasizes analysis and historical understanding of techniques of production and compositional ideas.

Through discussions with guest performers, students study the conceptualization and production of live electronics performance pieces. Individual proposals for several pieces are created, followed by a final live performance project, in which live electronics are an integral part of the concept.

This course focuses on electronic music synthesizer techniques. Concepts in the synthesis of music, including generation of sound, voltage control, and treatment of sound and tape techniques. Included is a short synopsis of the history and literature of analog electronic music. Students complete laboratory tasks and compositions on vintage synthesizer modules and create one or more final projects that demonstrate(s) the application of these concepts.

This is a multidisciplinary course in which students with previous experience with analog and digital electronics create a novel hardware--based electronic musical instrument, controller, effects unit, or other device related to their interests in music and audio. Student projects may be analog, digital, or a hybrid, and should be unique in some way from devices currently in the commercial marketplace. Students present their designs and functioning physical prototypes with the class as they evolve throughout the semester for feedback.

This course will focus on the lyrical pronunciation rules for American and British English. Students will be required to demonstrate mastery of these rules through transliteration of song texts into the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and in performance of assigned repertoire.

Students will acquire a basic framework for understanding the discipline of entrepreneurship & how to apply it to the music industry. The course is organized around the creation, assessment, growth development, & operation of new & emerging ventures in the for-profit music environments. Key concepts will be explored using the case methods.

This course will investigate the dominant critical perspectives that have contributed to the development of Environmental Communication as a field of study. This course explores the premise that the way we communicate powerfully impacts our perceptions of the "natural" world, & that these perceptions shape the way we define our relationships to & within nature. The goal of this course is to access various conceptual frame woks for addressing questions about the relationship between the environment, culture & communication. Students will explore topics such as nature/wildlife tourism, consumerism, representations of the environment in popular culture & environmental activism.

Introduction to the art and science of cuisine characteristics of selected world cultures through lectures, demonstrations, hands-on preparation, and field trips.

Students who plan on pursuing careers in the media (professional and academic) will be faced with difficulty choices that carry with them potent ethical repercussions, choices that practical training does not properly equip them to approach in a critical and informed manner. The purpose of this course is therefore twofold: 1) to equip future media professional with sensitivity to moral values under challenge as well as the necessary skills in critical thinking and decision making for navigating their roles and responsibilities in relation to them; and 2) honing those same skills and sensitivities for consumers of media and citizens in media saturated societies.

Fame, notoriety, renown – the desire to be recognized & immortalized is the most enduring & perhaps the most desirable form of power. Culture, commerce, politics, & religion all proffer promises of fame – whether for fifteen minutes or fifteen centuries. This course will investigate this subject by asking, what is fame? Why do people want it? How do they get it? What can they do with it? In other words, what kind of good is fame? Drawing on texts from history, ethnography, theory, literature, philosophy, & contemporary media, this course will reflect on the ethics, erotics, pragmatics & pathologies of fame.

Fame—celebrity, notoriety, renown—confers both recognition and immortality.
It is the most enduring and desirable form of social power; a uniquely
human ambition and a central force in social life. Culture, commerce,
politics, and religion all proffer promises of fame, whether for fifteen
minutes or fifteen centuries. Drawing on texts from history, anthropology,
sociology, literature, philosophy, and contemporary media, this course
will reflect on the ethics, erotics, pragmatics and pathologies of fame. We
will compare fame to other forms of recognition (reputation, honor,
charisma, infamy, etc.), and look at how fame operates in various social
and historical circumstances, from small agricultural communities to
enormous, hyper-mediated societies such as our own. How does the fame of
the oral epic differ from the fame of the printed book or the fame of the
photograph? We'll consider the enduring question of fame as it transforms
across space, time, social boundaries, and technological conditions.

Examination of the complex relationships between family & school systems, with a special focus on low-income urban communities as they relate to child development. Topics explore the roles culture, immigration, & racial/ethnic diversity play in establishing effective partnerships between families & schools.