Courses

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.

• Department: Teaching and Learning

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.

• Department: Teaching and Learning

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.

• Department: Music and Performing Arts Professions

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.

• Department: Music and Performing Arts Professions

This course explores the playful elements in personality, culture and the arts, through vocal and movement improvisation, song, mask work, exploration and creation of ritual, story writing and telling, and investigation of the clown/fool/trickster. Students examine theoretical interpretations of play in performance studies, child development and Drama in Education practices. Students discover and analyze the meaning of creative play in their personal development as artists and teachers, through exploration of humanizing principles that unite aesthetics and education.

• Department: Music and Performing Arts Professions

Are modern generative AI systems capable of true creativity or are they simply stochastic parrots, unthinkingly repeating sequences in their training data? We begin with an examination of human creativity and the science of human cognition, followed by an accessible review of the inner workings of modern generative transformer models with a focus on pattern recognition and creative pattern expansion. The course concludes with group and individual projects applying new knowledge and skills to creative tasks.

• Department: Administration, Leadership, and Technology

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.

• Department: Teaching and Learning

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.

• Department: Media, Culture, and Communication

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.

• Department: Media, Culture, and Communication

Crisis intervention is an increasingly critical competency for all student affairs professionals. This course seeks to help students understand crisis interventions at various scales and provides response strategies and preventative measures for higher education practitioners. Students think critically about the various impacts that crisis has on institutional stakeholders and explore crisis management systems in higher education, such as student health centers, campus safety, and town and gown relationships.

• Department: Administration, Leadership, and Technology

Design and implementation of decision-making guidelines in order to utilize outcome effectiveness and efficiently studies to establish, implement, and evaluate the effectiveness of patient or client protocols. The student will use a case report as a vehicle for identifying clinical problems, assessing measuring devices, and collection and interpreting data to aid in clinical decision-making.

• Department: Physical Therapy

Students will integrate knowledge in physical therapy with statistics and research design to critically analyze current physical therapy literature. Each student will be able to develop a research plan with a given topic.

• Department: Physical Therapy

Students develop skills for parenteral and enteral nutrition (nutrition support), factoring in inflammatory metabolism, indications, calculations, formulas and solutions, feeding access, complications, and ethical considerations, along with professional practice issues and the regulatory status of nutrition support products.

• Department: Nutrition and Food Studies

The principles of evidence-based practice are essential for ethical and effective decision-making in the clinical setting. In this course, students build and grow their skills in obtaining and evaluating research by learning about different research designs, strategies, and related concepts including reliability and validity. Students ask and answer clinically relevant questions as informed, active consumers of the research literature and practice communicating their findings in a clinically accessible manner.

• Department: Communicative Sciences and Disorders

This course will enable the student to utilize critical inquiry by applying the principles of scientific method to read and interpret professional literature. The student will apply the principles of clinical decision-making in the delivery of patient or client care to include: identification of problem, collection and interpretation of data, formulation of hypothesis, collection of data, interpretation of findings, acceptance or rejection of hypothesis, determination of clinical decision, deliberate action, and reevaluation of actions. The final outcome of this course will be a Review of Literature.

• Department: Physical Therapy

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.

• Department: Teaching and Learning

Exploration of the relationships between the study of language and such phenomena as culture, social class, and community. Examination of such problems as the effects of mass communication and urban society on the individual and his use of language. Consideration of the social and pedagogical implications of the use of different dialects of teachers.

• Department: Teaching and Learning

Critical making is hands-on hardware practice as a form of reflection and analysis that draws on the literature of media studies and digital humanities. We turn to the physicality of computation and communications infrastructure, taking objects apart both literally and figuratively to understand how they work. In the process we learn to interpret and intervene in the material layer of digital technologies, using prototyping, reverse engineering, hardware hacking and circuit bending, design fiction, electronics fabrication, and other approaches.

• Department: Media, Culture, and Communication

Critically investigates the personal and systemic politics of leadership within the complex cultural landscape of public education. Scrutinizes the power dynamics that are intentionally present and their shaping educational practices and policies. Offers a deep dive into frequently conflicting expectations, vested interests, and contextual concerns that various communities introduce into education. This course encourages students to challenge normative assumptions, engage with critical theories, and develop strategies for more equitable and inclusive leadership.

• Department: Administration, Leadership, and Technology

This course will explore the intersections between critical pedagogy, contemporary art, and public pedagogy. Based on readings in education and cultural theory, as well as case studies and presentations by artist and educators, students will explore education as a creative act and means of social transformation in formal and informal learning settings. Students will analyze their own teaching and learning and connect theory with practice through opportunities to work with local cultural organizations.

• Department: Art and Art Professions