FYS Courses

Section: 25-LEC (6243)
Lecture: Th 4:30 – 7 p.m. | Interdisciplinary Life Sciences Building 301
Instruction Mode: In Person
Meeting Dates: 01/29/2024 – 05/14/2024
Instructor: Richard Otten

This course will aim in illuminating the ways in which we are passive consumers of popular culture and empower individuals to become critical participants. Popular culture is all around us. It influences how we think, feel, vote, and how we live our lives. This interdisciplinary course will introduce students to the study of U.S. popular culture and aims to examine the multiple ways gender has been portrayed in various popular cultural forms.

Through an intersectional and intertextual investigation of television, film , popular music, advertisement, and social media, we will explore how representation as objects, consumers, subjects, creators, challengers, and critics both reflect and produce socio-cultural phenomena and ideas about the proper role of women and men in society. Throughout this course, we will consider the intersections of gender, sex, and race and analyze how they are articulated in popular culture.

Section: 26-LEC (6244)
Lecture: TuTh 1 – 2:15 p.m. | Interdisciplinary Life Sciences Building 301
Instruction Mode: In Person
Meeting Dates: 01/29/2024 – 05/14/2024
Instructor: Jeremy Spahr

The 1980s saw the rise of modern conservatism with the election of Ronald Reagan, the end of the Cold War, and a vast expansion in consumer culture. All of these changes were reflected and influenced by the popular culture of the 1980s in film, television, and music. This course examines the political, social, and cultural changes of the 1980s, and the way these changes were portrayed and even shaped by the popular culture of the decade. Students will choose a historical event from the 1980s and examine how popular culture interpreted the event, often in contrast with the views and valuations of historians.

Section: 29-LEC (6246)
Lecture: TuTh 4 – 5:15 p.m. | Performing Arts & Humanity 234
Instruction Mode: In Person
Meeting Dates: 01/29/2024 – 05/14/2024
Instructor: C. Jill Randles

We are witnessing renewed interest in matters related to spirituality. Concomitant with headlines about war, genocide, environmental crises, and abject poverty is a vibrant dialogue about social responsibility, moral reasoning, ethical action, and the sources of beauty, creativity, and passion that give life a depth of purpose and meaning.

We need people who can lead with head and heart, who can combine the life of the mind with work for the greater good, and who exhibit the skills, knowledge, imagination, and spirit to create an equitable, sustainable, whole, and hopeful world. This calls for a curriculum that explores the scientific, aesthetic, and ethical dimensions of thought and behavior. This course is oriented toward that exploration.

Section: 01-LEC (6264)
Lecture: WeFr 1 – 2:15 p.m. | Meyerhoff Chemistry 256
Instruction Mode: Hybrid
Meeting Dates: 01/29/2024 – 05/14/2024
Instructor: Nandita Dasgupta

This course will have include both in-person and online synchronous classes. Typically the class will meet once a week in person and once online. This course will have include both in-person and online synchronous classes. Typically the class will meet once a week in person and once online. The American Story is not an oft-quoted word in USA. Nonetheless, the phenomenon of poverty is worth exploring especially in the backdrop of the Great Recession that US has recently experienced. With continuing unemployment and increasing costs of living, more and more families have to choose between necessities like health care, child care, and even food. This seminar will examine the nature and extent of poverty in the U.S., its causes and consequences, and the poverty alleviation measures adopted through government programs and policies.

Section: 08-LEC (6125)
Lecture: We 4:30 – 5:45 p.m. | Fine Arts 014
Instruction Mode: Hybrid
Meeting Dates: 01/29/2024 – 05/14/2024
Instructor: Vickie Williams

This course will be taught in a hybrid format with some in-person and online classes. Students will participate in a service-learning experience, which may be online or in-person. Any online classes will be synchronous with attendance expected at the time the course is offered.

Course will explore and mediate the tension between the current climate of school reform and the learning needs of highly diverse students through the lens of multicultural classrooms in diverse schools. In multicultural America, classrooms mirror the diverse nature of children’s backgrounds, cultural experiences, languages, and ways of knowing. This course offers opportunities to learn about the challenges of local schools firsthand and to understand the implementation of federal and local policies aimed at supporting the academic success of all students, regardless of cultural, linguistic, ethnic, or diverse backgrounds. The course will first examine the multicultural nature of society and schools. Then, Brown v. the Board of Education will be revisited as a foundation for understanding the legal, political, and social forces that impact a multicultural education system.

Section: 15-LEC (6261)
Lecture: TuTh 11:30 – 12:45 p.m. | Sherman Hall 011
Instruction Mode: Hybrid
Meeting Dates: 01/29/2024 – 05/14/2024
Instructor: Joanna Gadsby, Katy Sullivan

This course will have include both in-person and online synchronous classes. Typically the class will meet once a week in person and once online.

This course introduces students to the reflective discovery and critique of information, the understanding of how information is produced and valued, and the use of information in creating new knowledge. Through guided discussion and hands-on activities, students will explore issues related to privacy, censorship, digital activism, as well as how issues of gender, race, and class affect information access and creation. Students will develop the skills necessary to ethically and effectively use information to make decisions, solve problems, and communicate their views. In the process of exploring the information cycle and their own information seeking and consumption behaviors, they will develop strategies to better find, evaluate, manage and cite information.

Section: 25-LEC (6263)
Lecture: TuTh 1 – 2:15 p.m. | Fine Arts 018
Instruction Mode: In Person
Meeting Dates: 01/29/2024 – 05/14/2024
Instructor: Ciara Christian

This course is designed for people who have a deep interest in issues related to race, social justice, power, privilege, oppression, intercultural dialogue, and the ways such issues influence our leadership abilities and interests. By focusing on how we think and talk about social justice broadly, including race and other intersecting social identities in the United States, students will deepen their understanding and simultaneously learn techniques to engage in constructive conversations and critical dialogues across differences. Students will simultaneously develop skills for facilitating and leading difficult dialogues in ways that help them become more inclusive leaders and active contributors to a diverse and inclusive campus community.

Section: 01-LEC (6262)
Lecture: TuTh 1 – 2:15 p.m. | Math & Psychology 105
Instruction Mode: In Person
Meeting Dates: 01/29/2024 – 05/14/2024
Instructor: Jodi Kelber-kaye

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Section: 02-LEC (6520)
Lecture: TuTh 11:30 – 12:45 p.m. | Janet & Walter Sondheim 105
Instruction Mode: In Person
Meeting Dates: 01/29/2024 – 05/14/2024
Instructor: Christopher Murphy

This course investigates gender-based harms, including harassment, intimate partner abuse, and sexual coercion and violence, through the diverse disciplinary lenses of psychology, sociology, social work, history, biology, information technology, art, and media studies. We will explore the multi-faceted nature of gender-based harms and create action-based opportunities for students to use their individual strengths and academic interests to make positive social change in their personal lives and communities. We will combine traditional academic content with opportunities for students to develop skills for healthy relationship building–platonic, romantic, sexual, and everything in between.

Section: 01-LEC (6557)
Lecture: MoWe 1 – 2:15 p.m. | Janet & Walter Sondheim 406
Instruction Mode: In Person
Meeting Dates: 01/29/2024 – 05/14/2024
Instructor: Michael Canale

Introduction to Disability Studies is a three-credit course designed to introduce the foundations of Disability Studies. This course is designed to understand the history of disability, categorization of disabilities, communication, and behaviors needed to apply the inclusion of disabilities in your work and personal interactions. Additionally, the course will provide you with resources for further study of equity, inclusion, and accessibility.

Section: 06-LEC (6236)
Lecture: TuTh 5:30 – 6:45 p.m. | Sherman Hall 151
Instruction Mode: In Person
Meeting Dates: 01/29/2024 – 05/14/2024
Instructor: Janet Gross

Popular songs around the world spring from outrage about social conditions in a particular time and place. In FYS101 Protest Songs of Resistance we will investigate diverse contemporary and historic examples of songs used in various countries to protest or resist existing social conditions. We will explore readings on social movements and Smithsonian Folkways Recordings of protest songs from dozens of countries. Students will choose the specific country’s songs and social unrest to research in order to produce original critical and creative essays as well as presentations to enlighten the class. Students may also produce their own original protest songs about contemporary issues in the U.S. or abroad.

Section: 07-LEC (6521)
Lecture: TuTh 4:30 – 7 p.m. | Fine Arts 215
Instruction Mode: In Person
Meeting Dates: 01/29/2024 – 05/14/2024
Instructor: Brian Souders

This course is designed for students who are interesting in developing and growing intercultural communications skills within the U.S. American context. The course will be divided into three main components: foundations of identity and culture, applications of those skills to real-world contemporary issues with a focus on the interconnectedness of local issues to global issues (e.g. social justice, environmental sustainability, globalization, and immigration), and practicing those skills in a collaborative, immersive environment with students from an international partner institution. Through reflection and understanding our own identities and their role in local and global issues, students will develop an awareness of their role in their own communities and an interest in becoming an engaged citizen in the world around them. They will practice techniques that will be applied at both levels and serve them in their future social and professional lives.