Spring 2011 IN151 Course Descriptions - see online schudule for days/times
Course: IN 151
Title: The World and US
Instructor: Purna Banerjee, Section 7 & 20
In this section of IN 151, we will explore the major paradigms for questioning and creating self/other relationships, for the purpose of enriching and broadening ourselves as writers, readers and researchers. The course focuses on developing your ability to ask questions, find and use source materials, and to invent and present your own conclusions, understandings, insights, arguments and points of significance. As you learn how to conduct academic inquiry, and to critically read and evaluate texts, you will develop a better understanding of “how you can know.” You will also develop an understanding of “what you should do” by conducting an extended research project. You will focus on the analysis and production of arguments in a variety of media— print, visual, oral, and digital. In the course, you will work both individually and in groups to read, write, and research arguments about issues of local and national importance. This semester, we will explore possible answers to the question “What difference does writing (argument) make?” We shall be focusing in particular on argumentative writing about global issues—gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, class and cultural orientation etc. The expectation is that the your papers will be written in both local and global light—moving from personalized encounters with cultures to analytical and argumentative treatment of topics. You would be encouraged to move across cultures and continents, interrogating and assessing texts that are being generated in transnational societies. The ultimate purpose of theme for this course is inspired by the Millikin University Mission statement that indicates that vows to deliver on the promise of education byencouraging individuals to think and act as ethical leaders and responsible citizens in the global Community.
Course: IN 151, Section 27
Title: Knowledge is Power: But How Can We Know?
Professor: Dr. Carmella Braniger
CWRRII is the second half of the first-year writing curriculum. The course emphasizes learning to research and write college-level research essays. This course focuses on developing the ability to ask questions, find and use source materials, and to invent and present conclusions, understandings, insights, arguments, and points of significance. As you learn how to conduct academic inquiry, and to critically read and evaluate texts, you will develop a better understanding of “how you can know.” You will also develop an understanding of “what you should do” by conducting an extended research project.
This section of IN151 explores various ways of gaining knowledge and considers diverse and even contradictory definitions of what the word means. In our examination, we will consider interdisciplinary research related to multiple intelligences and will focus on the continually emerging scholarship on and practice of Emotional Intelligence (EI). You will have the freedom to choose your own research focus, and will have the opportunity to participate in the Spring 2011 Millikin Celebration of Scholarship.
Course: IN 151, Section 17 & 18
Title: Issues in Contemporary America
Professor: Professor Julie Case
Does fashion really affect our perceptions of body image? How is the recession changing American perceptions of debt? Why does everyone want to be a celebrity? What can Americans do to address climate change? Are married people really happier than singles? How gender- and color-blind are we as a nation? As a continuation of IN 150, this CWRRII course will give you the opportunity to select and examine the issues that you see as the most interesting and pressing in America today. At the same time, it will help you to develop the research, writing, and critical thinking skills that will help you to succeed with college-level research assignments. Using contemporary topics in American society as a basis for writing and discussion, this course will teach you to choose and refine a research topic, to organize and draft your ideas, to integrate and utilize sources effectively, and to develop a clear sense of your own unique writing process.
Course: IN 151, Sections 1 & 4 Honors
Title: Horror in Film and Fiction: Daring the Nightmare
Instructor: Professor Judi Crowe
This course explores the genre of horror in fiction and film, its historical, social, political, and cultural underpinnings, and what is at stake in the genre as a whole in terms of issues of religion, psychology, science, ethics, gender, race, and culture. We will read, examine, and discuss a variety of scholarly, historical, literary, and pop culture sources as well as view films representative of various subgenres (monster, vampire, slasher, psychological, etc.) of horror. Core texts by Noel Carroll and Stephen King offer diverse grounding of a topic that continues to disturb, sometimes disgust, yet ever intrigue us. Indeed, as King points out, we do so like to dare the nightmare....
Course: IN 151, Section 24 & 25
Title: Inventions, Research & Culture
Professor: Dr. Devon Fitzgerald
This section of Critical Writing, Reading, and Research II focuses on the relationships between human inventions and social and cultural change. Students will explore stories, myths and narratives as they research the history of inventions, seeking to understand the role of research in cultural production. Students will collaborate with Dr. Fitzgerald’s IN 251 and EN 301 classes on a blog project covering M.T. Anderson’s Feed.
Course: IN 151, Section 8 & 9
Title: Cod
Professor: Dr. Stephen Frech
This 151 course will continue the work of 150 and ask you to think more demandingly about the origin and purpose of text, the relationship between what a text means and how it means it, and to think about these issues in your own writing. Additionally, as a research focused course, 151 will provide opportunities for you to learn and enhance your skills of academic research and your habits of making not just gathering knowledge.
Mark Kurlansky’s bestseller Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World, as our central text, will change the way we think about history, the how and why histories are written. In a prose style both beautiful and purposeful, Kurlansky tells the story of the codfish industry and the history that it prompts: wars, revolutions, national diets, cultural identities, even the discovery and settlement of America. Part classic fish tale, part food history, part ecological fable, Cod demonstrates the rich hybridization of historical research and imaginative thinking.
Course: IN 151, Section 10 & 11
Title: Environmental Crisis and Environmental Solution
Professor: Dr. Mike George
The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the consequences of which will be felt for decades, is only the latest and most publicized example of environmental crisis. From the loss of habitat to global warming, from an increase in the number and severity of storms to massive mudslides, the environment is responding to the strain under which humans have placed it. This section of IN 151 will explore the environmental crisis and potential solutions to a variety of problems.
Course: IN 151, Section 19
Title: What is an Essay?
Professor: Dr. Vicky Gilpin
Critical Writing, Reading & Research II is designed to position students as successful writers, readers and researchers as they move into advanced coursework. In addition to continuing to develop reading and writing skills introduced in the first semester course, students will be asked to conduct research to participate in academic inquiry. Each student will write a research paper that demonstrates the ability to incorporate resources and contribute to academic discourse and communities. An extended and intensive library research component is integrated into the course. One aim of this course is to provide opportunities for students to consider themselves as novice scholars with voices to add to their fields. Online discussion within the course will allow students to establish and develop different tones for different audiences as well as elaborate upon themes and writings. An exploration of cultural criticism, popular culture, and the concept of the American Dream will be used as a lens to focus students’ ideas about the ramifications of perception and influence.
Approach of this CWRR section: What is an Essay? We will return to this question again and again in this course, as we read essays that explore the richness and variety of this form. Our focus, however, will be on the kinds of essays that people read and write in the university, specifically in regard to cultural criticism and the potential of the American Dream. You will read a number of challenging and provocative texts, written by anthropologists, literary critics, and cultural critics. You will write analytical essays in which you both frame the conversations in those essays and add your voices to them. We will focus on larger questions such as how essays present a lens through which to see the world, and how essayists speak (if not deliberately, then metaphorically) to each other. We will also work on smaller issues of stylistics, as we focus on technique and the ways
writers use language. In addition, we will be using the idea of “the essay” to explore concepts of the American Dream, cultural criticism, and technological influences on globalization and the American Dream. This course is a traditional format enhanced by weekly Moodle participation. You must be present and active in class and online. Our ultimate goal is for you to improve your ability to express complex, original ideas in readable prose. In attaining this goal, you’ll learn what every professional writer knows—that the secret to writing is REVISING.
Course: IN 151, Section 12 & 14
Title: The World is a Text
Professor: Professor Michelle Jewett
In this section, we will discuss, analyze, read and write about familiar and unfamiliar texts from visual and popular culture such as movies and TV, visual art and photography, relationships and music, media and advertising. Using similar types of formal analysis strategies you’ve used in the past to interpret traditional written texts, we will examine the kind of everyday reading you do (often unconsciously) to make meaning of the world. This includes understanding not only what these cultural and visual texts are, but also how such nontraditional texts persuade and make arguments. Students will complete formal and informal pieces of writing based upon their active reading of select cultural texts and write a research paper demonstrating their ability to incorporate resources. As with all CWRRII courses, students will build upon skills introduced in CWRRI, participate in academic inquiry, contribute to academic discourse and communities, and conduct extended and intensive library research.
Course: IN 151, Section 15 & 16
Title: The Politics of American Popular Culture
Professor: Dr. Tony Magagna
The primary purpose of IN151 is to continue developing your critical writing, reading, and research skills (building on the lessons you learned in IN150). In this section of CWRRII, we will explore the “signs” of American popular culture, particularly as they intersect with the contemporary politics of identity. We will take a closer look at the world that surrounds us everyday—the advertising, packaging, film, television, music, web spaces—asking critical questions about why it is the way it is and what it has to say about how we, as individuals and a society, encounter issues such as race, class, gender, and sexuality. We will read articles that explore the mechanics, meanings, and motives of everything from Barbie to the X-Men, from deodorant ads to the latest Hollywood blockbusters, and from texting to Twitter. In the process, we will begin to question, interpret, discuss, and write about how our own lives and identities are shaped—whether we realize it or not—by the forces of popular culture.
Course: IN 151, Section 22 & 23
Title: American Immigration and Ethnicity
Professor: Professor Andy Matthews
This version of IN151 will look at the two periods of greatest immigration to the U.S.: the late-19th-early-20th century, and the period of a century later up to today. We will consider some of the historiography about both periods, addressing issues such as the changing make-up (and self-understanding) of immigrant populations, evolving ideas about race and ethnicity and what it means to be “American,” the changing role of immigrants in the U.S. economy, nativist resistance to immigration, immigration in public policy, etc. To flesh out the experience and contributions of immigrants and migrants, legal and illegal, we will look at a couple of novels from the early 20th century (Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers, set among Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side and dealing with a young woman’s struggle to break with traditional gender roles, and Thomas Bell’s Out of This Furnace: A Novel of Immigrant Labor, set among Slovakian steel mill workers near Pittsburgh) and a journalist’s account of Mexican workers’ experience both in Mexico and in the U.S. (Ruben Martinez’s Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail). The research paper will address some aspect of immigration and race/ethnicity.
Course: IN 151, Section 21 & 26
Title: Effecting Social Change
Professor: Dr. Anne Matthews
Millikin asks its faculty and students to reflect on three interrelated questions: Who am I? How can I know? What should I do? As we focus on our role in effecting social change, this version of CWRR2 will seek ways to answer all three questions. Students will develop research projects that will integrate self-awareness, problem-solving, and commitment to community.
Course: IN151 Honors, Sections 2 & 3, Honors
Title: Visual Rhetoric: Seeing is Believing, How Visual Images Persuade Us in Everyday Life
Instructor: Michael O'Conner
This IN151 honors course centers upon visual rhetoric, with an emphasis on the oral and written traditions from which visual rhetoric sprang. Visual communication and literacy, and their rhetorical power, is at the core of the visual culture we live in today. In this course we will cover the backgrounds of western oral and written rhetoric along with the history of publishing, both print and virtual, in western culture. Next, we will transition into how 21st century technologies have allowed for any educated individual to become a persuasive publisher in both written and visual media. After being exposed to a wide range of issues in this subject, students will select and focus upon a particular area of visual rhetoric in which to do individual research. The approach will be through a series of lectures and demonstrations based on required readings and hands-on computer laboratory sessions. Using the pedagogical principles of active and collaborative learning, students will explore, interpret, and evaluate visual communication from a historical and an interdisciplinary perspective that includes linguistics, psychology, aesthetics, art criticism, and mass communication. The final products of the course will be a traditional research paper that is expanded into an extensive "visual" research project.
Course: IN 151, Section 6
Title:
Professor: Professor Judy Rooney
Critical Writing, Reading & Research 2 is the second semester component of entry-level rhetoric designed to increase the depth and breadth of student writing, reading, and researching. The focus will be on producing writings of improved quality based on analysis and synthesis of reading and researching. Students will be expanding their research and writing skills acquired in the first semester, culminating in a research paper that evidences their abilities to identify, research, and expound on topics of interest in their fields and reflective of current societal trends. Significant time will be dedicated to intensive library research and writing. The course will focus on making these students investigative and successful researchers, ready to master various writing tasks in current and future college courses.
Course: IN 151, Section 5
Title: The Media: Gender, Violence, and Emotions
Professor: Dr. Peiling Zhao
As a second part of the first year writing program, Critical Writing, Reading, and Research II will continue to fulfill its learning outcome goals:
• read critically to comprehend, analyze and evaluate texts;
• write polished, informed essays for personal, public and/or specialized audiences;
• conduct research to participate in academic inquiry; and
• reflect formally on engagements with critical reading, writing and research to acquire, examine and present self-awareness about those engagements.
To achieve these goals, this course invites you to critically read, analyze, and evaluate arguments on the Media from various perspectives such as gender, violence, and emotions. Through reading and practicing various types of arguments-- definitional, categorical, causal, resemblance, criteria/ evaluation, and proposal arguments, you will learn how to write informed and polished research essays for public audience. Through the extensive research
Course: IN150 – all sections
Professor: Professor Sue Weinstein
The spring 2011 semester IN150-CWRR 1 Course will fulfill the English Department goals for this course through contextual study and practice of rhetorical strategies. Students will learn to organize and develop their college writing assignments using various combinations of narration, description, exemplification, process analysis, definition, division and classification, comparison and contrast, cause and effect, and argument. A thematic approach to reading assignments, class discussion and writing activities will also provide students with many opportunities for reflection and self-discovery. Some writing workshops will include researching and responding to outside sources in a computer lab. The highly interactive learning environment in this class encourages students to become comfortable sharing their ideas and writings while also supporting and encouraging others.
The required textbook for this class is:
Funk, Robert, Linda Coleman, and Susan X. Day. Strategies for College Writing: A Rhetorical Reader. 2nd. ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003.