Courses

What are you an expert in? How did you achieve that expertise? How can you use that process to develop your expertise in any area? Learning how to learn is a fundamental piece of developing any expertise, whether it is expertise in sports, music, academic, or time management. In this interdisciplinary course we will explore the underpinnings of expertise-building by examining how the brain acquires, stores, and integrates new knowledge. By the end of the course, you should be able to: (1) describe the neurobiology of how the brain encodes, stores, and retrieves information, (2) predict how changes to neural systems can affect their function, and (3) connect the neurobiology of how people learn to specific learning strategies. To build your expertise in these areas, we will be weaving together knowledge from three disciplines: neurobiology, cognitive psychology, and education research. For the final class project, we will work together as a class to develop a way to share this knowledge (your new expertise) with others. 

How does your coffee get from there to here? Why is wine so much more expensive than beer? And what about all those stories of child labor in chocolate supply chains? In this course, we’ll discuss these issues and more via the lens of sustainability, broadly conceived, with a focus on how food and beverage can bring people together – or drive them apart. We’ll look at cultural ideas about food, follow a few food items around the world, and discuss farmer's markets, Fair Trade, and other proposed solutions to social, economic, and environmental inequality. By the end of the course, you’ll have tried some of those foods, thought more about food and community, and will come away with a better understanding of just how complicated it is to get food from farm to table. 

TBA

This class considers how contemporary Indigenous people in the United States work to represent themselves, their histories and their lands through literature and other forms of storytelling. We will learn how, given the legacy of colonialism, Indigenous self-representation and storytelling is a complicated process of sharing and protecting that can be a form of activism, agency, and healing. We will consider the importance of identifying who is telling stories Indigenous experience and consider how we can collectively work to amplify contemporary Indigenous self-representation and storytelling. Our class will focus on selected literary texts by contemporary authors, primarily focusing on Deborah Miranda’s short 2013 mixed-genre novel Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir. We will also consider storytelling and self-representation of Indigenous experience through other storytelling mediums such as social media, visual art, dance, and place-making. The class will draw on the process of dialogue, or coming together to listen across our own stories, perspectives, and experiences, as we think about the broader topic of self-representation through storytelling. 

TBA