|
|
Catalogue 2019-2020 [ARCHIVED CATALOG]
Course Descriptions
|
|
|
|
| |
Economics: III. Advanced |
| |
-
ECON 345 - International Trade Theory and Policy
1 unit(s)
This course examines classical, neoclassical and modern theories of international trade, as well as related empirical evidence. Topics included are: the relationship between economic growth and international trade; the impact of trade on the distribution of income; the theory of tariffs and commercial policy; economic integration, trade and trade policy under imperfect competition. Geoffrey Jehle.
Prerequisite(s): ECON 201 .
Not offered in 2019/20.
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
ECON 346 - International Macroeconomics
1 unit(s)
The course is devoted to the problems of balance of payments and adjustment mechanisms. Topics include: the balance of payments and the foreign ex-change market; causes of disturbances and processes of adjustment in the balance of payments and the foreign exchange market under fixed and flexible exchange rate regimes; issues in maintaining internal and external balance; optimum currency areas; the history of the international monetary system and recent attempts at reform; capital movements and the international capital market. Tanseli Savaser.
Prerequisite(s): ECON 200 and college-level calculus, or permission of the instructor.
Not offered in 2019/20.
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
ECON 355 - Industrial Organization Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
This course examines the behavior of firms under conditions of imperfect competition. The role of market power is studied, including the strategies it permits, e.g., monopoly pricing, price discrimination, quality choice, and product proliferation. Strategic behavior among firms is central to many of the topics of the course. As such, game theory is introduced to study strategic behavior, and is applied to topics such as oligopoly pricing, entry and deterrence, product differentiation, advertising, and innovation. Time permitting, the course may also include durable goods pricing, network effects, antitrust economics, and vertical integration. Qi Ge.
Prerequisite(s): ECON 201 and ECON 209 .
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
ECON 367 - Comparative Economics Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
A study of different economic systems and institutions, beginning with a comparison of industrialized market economies in the U.S., Asia, and Europe. Pre-perestroika USSR is studied as an example of a centrally planned economy and the transition to a market economy is examined, with additional focus on the Czech Republic and Poland. Alternatives to both market and planned systems - such as worker self-management, market socialism, and social democracy - are also explored with emphasis on the experience of Yugoslavia and Sweden. David Kennett.
Prerequisite(s): At least two units of Economics At or above the 200-level.
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
ECON 383 - History of Economic Thought Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
A survey of the world-wide history of economic thought, from the ancient world to the present. Major contributions to the theories of value, production, and distribution are considered. Influential schools of thought and the technological, ideological and social forces that shaped them are examined concluding with an analysis of the development of modern economic thinking. Philosophical and methodological issues are discussed throughout. Paul Ruud.
Prerequisite(s): ECON 200 , ECON 201 and permission of the instructor.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
ECON 384 - Economic Growth
1 unit(s)
A survey of the theory and empirics of economic growth. Topics covered include neoclassical growth models, endogenous growth models, technological progress, the role of institutions in growth and development, and the convergence hypothesis. Paul Johnson.
Prerequisite(s): ECON 200 , ECON 201 , ECON 210 and MATH 220 ; or permission of the instructor.
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2019/20.
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
ECON 386 - The Economics of Immigration Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
This course examines the theoretical and empirical models that economists have developed to study the economic impact of immigration. The course describes the history of immigration policy in the United States and analyzes the various economic issues that dominate the current debate over immigration policy. These issues include the changing contribution of immigrants to the country’s skill endowment; the rate of economic assimilation experienced by immigrants; the impact of immigrants on the employment opportunities of other workers in the US; the impact of immigrant networks on immigrants and the source and magnitude of the economic benefits generated by immigration. The course also studies the social and civic dimensions of immigration - how it relates to education, marriage, segregation etc. We compare various cohorts of immigrants who entered the US at different time periods. We also compare generations residing in the US, more specifically immigrants and their children. Sukanya Basu.
Prerequisite(s): ECON 201 and ECON 209 .
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
ECON 388 - Latin American Economic Development Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as LALS 388 ) This course examines why many Latin American countries started with levels of development similar to those of the U.S. and Canada but were not able to keep up. The course begins with discussions of various ways of thinking about and measuring economic development and examines the record of Latin American countries on various measures, including volatile growth rates, high income and wealth inequality, and high crime rates. We then turn to an analysis of the colonial and post-Independence period to examine the roots of the weak institutional development than could explain a low growth trajectory. Next, we examine the post WWII period, exploring the import substitution of 1970s, the debt crises of the 1980s, and the structural adjustment of the 1990s. Finally, we look at events in the past decade, comparing and contrasting the experience of different countries with respect to growth, poverty and inequality. Sarah Pearlman.
Prerequisite(s): ECON 102 .
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
|
| |
-
ECON 399 - Senior Independent Work Semester Offered: Fall or Spring
0.5 to 1 unit(s)
Course Format: OTH
|
Education: I. Introductory |
| |
-
EDUC 105 - Conceptualizing Latin and Latino/a America Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as LALS 105 ) Topic for 2019/20b: Popular Education and Social Struggle in Latin America. Popular education builds on the values of solidarity, inclusion, and respect for human rights. Its critical pedagogy and radical education philosophies arm learners with skills and knowledge which many see as vital to the construction of new forms of anti-capitalist politics and social movements. Popular education exists in both formal and informal education environments and characterizes the informal learning that underpins and emerges from protests and social movements. It challenges dominant education approaches and formal educational systems. The latter are legacies of Latin America’s colonial past and driven by present-day state agendas, which critics claim reproduce existing unjust social conditions.
This course examines the development of popular education in Latin America since the 1960s. Students learn about popular education’s philosophical and theoretical assumptions as well as its pedagogical practices. The course first looks historically at the roots of popular education and liberation theology in the history of social protest in Brazil, El Salvador, Mexico, and then at contemporary popular education and social protests in Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Haiti, and Guatemala. Throughout the course, students compare popular education models with formal educational systems. Applying their understandings of the course content, students develop a critical Latin American studies curriculum for middle and high school students that examines the social, economic, gender, environmental, linguistic, and racial-justice issues faced by groups within diverse communities in Latin America. The overall goal of the course is to allow students to become well versed and able to apply a variety of educational theories that are rooted in popular education and fall within the tradition of social justice education. Tracey Holland.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
EDUC 136 - Early Childhood Education
0.5 unit(s)
This course explores the “why” behind the components of a quality early childhood education learning environment. Drawing on research from early childhood education and developmental psychology, students explore the following topics: school, classroom and playground design; pedagogical methods; core curriculum components; guidance and discipline; the role of parents and families; models of inclusion and diversity; and interfacing with state agencies (e.g., licensing, health department). Observation at Wimpfheimer Nursery School is required. Julie Riess.
First six-week course.
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2019/20.
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
EDUC 162 - Education and Opportunity in the United States Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
In this course, students identify, explore, and question prevailing assumptions about education in the United States. The objectives of the course are for students to develop both a deeper understanding of the system’s historical, structural, and philosophical features and to look at schools with a critical eye. We examine issues of power and control at various levels of the education system. Participants are encouraged to connect class readings and discussions to personal schooling experiences to gain new insights into their own educational foundations. Among the questions that are highlighted are: How should schools be organized and operated? What information and values should be emphasized? Whose interests do schools serve? The course is open to both students interested in becoming certified to teach and those who are not yet certain about their future plans but are interested in educational issues. Christopher Bjork.
Open only to first-year students; satisfies the college requirement for a First-Year Writing Seminar.
Would you like to see a more just and humane world? The SJQ courses engage you from the very start of your Vassar studies in thinking about the relationship between power and social change. A set of public lectures that address the nature of social justice accompany SJQ courses.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
EDUC 163 - Centering Justice: A Speaker Series
0.5 unit(s)
Vassar College’s national reputation draws renowned scholars to its campus annually. Recent speakers like Jerusha Lamptee, Carlos Decena, Wilma King, Aisha Simmons, Claire Jean Kim and Jared Sexton provide a pedagogical and curricular opportunity available for students to reflect critically across speakers about how identity intersects with policy, coalition building, resistance movements and liberation. These speakers together present students with a unique curriculum; I propose to provide a framework, pedagogy, space and time for students to draw connections across speakers, across readings and across each their peers’ own experiences as they relate to the speakers.
Second six-week course.
One 2-hour period plus one 50-minute period.
Not offered in 2019/20.
Course Format: CLS
|
Education: II. Intermediate |
| |
|
| |
|
| |
-
EDUC 235 - Issues in Contemporary Education Semester Offered: Fall and Spring
1 unit(s)
This course introduces students to debates about the nature and purposes of U.S. education. Examination of these debates encourages students to develop a deeper and more critical understanding of U.S. schools and the individuals who teach and learn within them. Focusing on current issues in education, we consider the multiple and competing purposes of schooling and the complex ways in which formal and informal education play a part in shaping students as academic and social beings. We also examine issues of power and control at various levels of the U.S. education system. Among the questions we contemplate are: Whose interests should schools serve? What material and values should be taught? How should schools be organized and operated? Christopher Bjork.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
EDUC 237 - Early Childhood Education: Theory and Practice
1 unit(s)
(Same as PSYC 237 What is the connection between a textbook description of preschool development and what teachers do every day in the preschool classroom? This course examines curriculum development based on contemporary theory and research in early childhood. The emphasis is on implementing developmental and educational research to create optimal learning environments for young children. Major theories of cognitive development are considered and specific attention is given to the literatures on memory development; concepts and categories; cognitive strategies; peer teaching; early reading, math, and scientific literacy; and technology in early childhood classrooms. Julie Riess.
Prerequisite(s): PSYC 231 and permission of the instructor.
One 2-hour period; 4 hours of laboratory participation.
Not offered in 2019/20.
|
| |
-
EDUC 248 - The Human Rights of Children - Select Issues Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as INTL 248 and LALS 246 ) This course focuses on both theories surrounding, and practices of, the human rights of children. It starts from the foundational question of whether children really should be treated as rights-holders and whether this approach is more effective than alternatives for promoting well-being for children that do not treat children as rights holders.. Consideration is given to the major conceptual and developmental issues embedded within the framework of human rights in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). The course covers issues in both the domestic and international arenas, including but not limited to: children’s rights in the criminal justice context including life without parole and the death penalty; child labor and efforts to ban it worldwide; initiatives intended to abolish the involvement of children in armed conflict; violence against street children; and the rights of migrant, refugee, homeless, and minority children. The course provides students with an in depth study of the Right to Education, including special issues related to the privatization of education and girls’ education. The course also explores issues related to the US ratification of the CRC, and offers critical perspectives on the advocacy and education-based work of international human rights organizations. Tracey Holland.
Two 75-minute periods.
|
| |
-
EDUC 250 - Introduction to Special Education Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
This course explores the structure of special education from multiple viewpoints, including legislative, instructional, and from the vantage of those who have experience in it as students, teachers, therapists, parents, and other service providers. We tackle conceptual understandings of labeling, difference, and how individuals in schools negotiate the contexts in which “disability” comes in and out of focus. We raise for debate current issues in special education and disability studies such as inclusion, the overrepresentation of certain groups in special education and different instructional approaches.
Prerequisite(s): EDUC 162 or EDUC 235 .
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
EDUC 255 - Race, Representation, and Resistance in U.S. Schools Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as AFRS 255 and URBS 255 ) This course interrogates the intersections of race, racism and schooling in the US context. In this course, we examine this intersection at the site of educational policy, media and public attitudes towards schools and schooling- critically examining how representations in each shape the experiences of youth in school. Expectations, beliefs, attitudes and opportunities reflect societal investments in these representations, thus becoming both reflections and driving forces of these identities. Central to these representations is how theorists, educators and youth take them on, own them and resist them in ways that constrain possibility or create spaces for hope. Kimberly Williams Brown.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
EDUC 256 - Bilingualism and/in K-12 Public Education Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as LALS 256 and URBS 256 . Learning in schools where the language of instruction is new presents a challenge familiar to young immigrants and refugees across the globe. This affects their educational achievement, as well as their sense of inclusion and belonging in their new communities. This course examines the issue of education for English Language Learners through a field based experience in Poughkeepsie Schools. The hands-on component of the course is paired with readings that draw from bilingual education, critical theories of pedagogy, education policy, migration,, and education for social change. A group research and writing project is intended to highlight the academic needs of local ELLs, to examine the current instructional models for bilingual students, especially for newcomers, and to assess the possibilities for the adoption of ELL newcomer programming in the city of Poughkeepsie. The course is open to all Vassar students interested in (a) community-based learning as a tool for social change; (b) learning about the experiences of bilingual students in Poughkeepsie schools; and (c) gaining practical experience researching bilingual education policy. Tracey Holland.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
EDUC 263 - The Adolescent in American Society Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
This course examines the lives of American adolescents and the different ways our society has sought to understand, respond to, and shape them. Particular attention is paid to the relationship between educational policies/practices and adolescent growth and development. Empirical studies are combined with practical case scenarios as a basis for understanding alternative pathways for meeting the needs of middle school and high school learners. This course is required for secondary school teacher certification.
Prerequisite(s): EDUC 235 .
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
EDUC 269 - Constructing School Kids and Street Kids
1 unit(s)
(Same as LALS 269 and SOCI 269 ) Students from low-income families and racial/ethnic minority backgrounds do poorly in school by comparison with their white and well-to-do peers. These students drop out of high school at higher rates, score lower on standardized tests, have lower GPAs, and are less likely to attend and complete college. In this course we examine theories and research that seek to explain patterns of differential educational achievement in U.S. schools. We study theories that focus on the characteristics of settings in which teaching and learning take place (e.g., schools, classrooms, and home), theories that focus on the characteristics of groups (e.g. racial/ethnic groups and peer groups), and theories that examine how cultural processes mediate political-economic constraints and human action. Eréndira Rueda.
Not offered in 2019/20.
|
| |
-
EDUC 271 - Hello, Dear Enemy: Mounting an Exhibition of Picture Books on Experiences of War and Displacement Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as INTL 271 , LALS 271 MEDS 271 and WMST 271 ) At a time when the world is witnessing the largest displacement of people since WWII, due in significant measure to armed conflict, this course examines select case studies (both past and present) of armed conflict and their consequences for children. Journalists, photographers and writers of young adult literature have done much to raise awareness about children and armed conflict, and to treat them in such a way that audiences develop understanding, empathy, and solidarity with children affected by armed conflict. A principal aim of the course is to study the topics of war and displacement, journalism and photography, and young adult literature, and then to mount an exhibition in the Collaboratory of photographs and books that will travel to area schools and libraries, where Vassar students serve as docents. Our work is enriched by study of human rights statutes and policy pertaining to children affected by armed conflict, as well as by interaction with visiting artists and educators. Tracey Holland.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
EDUC 275 - International and Comparative Education
1 unit(s)
(Same as ASIA 275 and INTL 275 ) This course provides an overview of comparative education theory, practice, and research methodology. We examine educational issues and systems in a variety of cultural contexts. Particular attention is paid to educational practices in Asia and Europe, as compared to the United States. The course focuses on educational concerns that transcend national boundaries. Among the topics explored are international development, democratization, social stratification, the cultural transmission of knowledge, and the place of education in the global economy. These issues are examined from multiple disciplinary vantage points. Christopher Bjork.
Prerequisite(s): EDUC 235 or permission of the instructor.
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2019/20.
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
EDUC 278 - Education for Peace, Justice and Human Rights Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as INTL 278 ) The aim of this course is to introduce students to the field of peace education and provide an overview of the history, central concepts, scholarship, and practices within the field. The overarching questions explored are: What does it mean to educate for peace, justice and human rights? What and where are the possibilities and the barriers? How do identity, representation and context influence the ways in which these constructs are conceptualized and defined and what are the implications of these definitions? How can we move towards an authentic culture of peace, justice, and human rights in a pluralistic world? In order to address these questions, we survey the human and social dimensions of peace education, including its philosophical foundations, the role of gender, race, religion and ethnicity in peace and human rights education, and the function and influence of both formal and non-formal schooling on a culture of peace and justice. Significant time is spent on profiling key thinkers, theories, and movements in the field, with a particular focus on case-studies of peace education in practice nationally and worldwide. We examine these case studies with a critical eye, exploring how power operates and circulates in these contexts and consider ways in which to address larger structural inequities and micro-asymmetries. Since peace education is not only about the content of education, but also the process, the course endeavors to model peace pedagogy by promoting inquiry, collaboration and dialogue and give students the opportunity to practice these skills through presentations on the course readings and topics.
Prerequisite(s): EDUC 162 or EDUC 235 .
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
|
| |
-
EDUC 282 - Community Schools Research & Practice Semester Offered: Spring
1.0 unit(s)
Using schools as hubs, community schools bring educators, families, and community partners together to offer a range of opportunities, supports, and services to children, youth as well as their families and communities. This intensive focuses on learning about and conducting a PAR (participatory action research) project with a community school. Jaime Del Razo.
Prerequisite(s): Permission of the instructor.
Course Format: INT
|
| |
-
EDUC 283 - Our Lives and the World: Teaching and learning about human rights alongside local youth
0.5 unit(s)
-
Vassar students create a human rights club curriculum for high-school youth that teaches about and for human rights in their localized and global contexts. We consider how curriculum must be both a mirror of students’ own experiences and a window into the experiences of others, and use this a catalyst for social change and action. Vassar students and I then implement the curriculum with HS youth.
-
Fall of 2019: Students meet with me once a month for 2 hours. They read broadly about social justice, culturally sustaining pedagogies, popular education, and human rights education and consider ways to design multi-model curricula.
-
Spring 2020. We implement the curriculum with HS youth with during school (depending on teacher partner) or after school.
Maria Hantzopoulos.
Prerequisite(s): Permission of the instructor.
Yearlong course 283-EDUC 284 .
Not offered in 2019/20.
Course Format: INT
|
| |
-
EDUC 284 - Our Lives and the World: Teaching and learning about human rights alongside local yout
0.5 unit(s)
-
Vassar students create a human rights club curriculum for high-school youth that teaches about and for human rights in their localized and global contexts. We consider how curriculum must be both a mirror of students’ own experiences and a window into the experiences of others, and use this a catalyst for social change and action. Vassar students and I then implement the curriculum with HS youth.
-
Fall of 2019: Students meet with me once a month for 2 hours. They read broadly about social justice, culturally sustaining pedagogies, popular education, and human rights education and consider ways to design multi-model curricula.
-
Spring 2020. We implement the curriculum with HS youth with during school (depending on teacher partner) or after school.
Maria Hantzopoulos.
Prerequisite(s): Permission of the instructor.
Yearlong course EDUC 283 -284.
Not offered in 2019/20.
Course Format: INT
|
| |
|
| |
-
EDUC 287 - Science, Spirituality, and Peace Education:Addressing Climate Change Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
Climate Change is arguably the most pressing issue of our day. Utilizing the three core values of peace education as our starting point (Planetary Stewardship, Humane Relationship, Global Citizenship) this course examines global responses to climate change through the lens of peace education and global religions and spirituality. We explore the science of climate change and how polarizing the topic can be thanks in no small part due to variations in educational practices (among other influences). We also explore how various religious traditions conceive of nature, stewardship and climate change and their “call” to address it. Finally, we engage with case studies of real environmental efforts from around the world in both formal and informal educational settings. Leonisa Ardizzone.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
EDUC 288 - Rethinking Gender in an Educational Context Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as WMST 288 ) This course uses a feminist lens to examine the social and cultural context of education, the structure of schools and classrooms, and the process of teaching and learning. Issues of gender are inherently tied a variety of identities and subjectivities in ways that intersect and interlock. These intersecting and interlocking identities include, but are not limited to: race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, (dis)ability, socioeconomic class, and citizenship status. How does a feminist pedagogical strategy begin to address contemporary issues in education such as laws about bathrooms, and laws that impact immigrant and undocumented youth? Using a variety of methods including reflective self- inquiry the course will answer the following questions:
1. How do dichotomous understandings of gender shape students’ experiences in schools?
2. How is gender experienced differently depending on other intersecting identities? Are all “women” the same and do they experience gender oppression in the same ways?
3. How do schools and curriculum address issues of gender?
4. What is the relationship between gender, democracy and education?
5. What role do teachers play in identity development in schools?
6. How do schools begin to address violence against particular students (LGBTQ, Black students, Latino students and other students from underrepresented groups)? Kimberly Williams Brown.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
EDUC 290 - Community-Engaged Learning Semester Offered: Fall or Spring
0.5 to 2 unit(s)
All candidates for certification must demonstrate competency in an intensive community-engaged learning experience at the elementary, middle school, or senior high school level prior to student teaching. The Department.
Course Format: INT
|
| |
-
EDUC 297 - Independent Reading Semester Offered: Fall or Spring
0.5 unit(s)
Student initiated independent reading projects with Education faculty. A variety of topics are possible, including educational policy, children’s literature, early childhood education, the adolescent, history of American education, multicultural education, and comparative education. Subject to prior approval of the department. The department.
Course Format: OTH
|
| |
-
EDUC 298 - Independent Study Semester Offered: Fall or Spring
0.5 to 1 unit(s)
Individual or group projects concerned with some aspect of education, subject to prior approval of the department. May be elected during the regular academic year or during the summer.
Course Format: OTH
|
| |
-
EDUC 299 - Vassar Science Education Internship Program Semester Offered: Fall and Spring
1 unit(s)
The Vassar Science Education Internship Program provides opportunities for science students from Vassar College to intern with science teachers in area schools for course credit. Students have an opportunity to gain teaching experience, to explore careers in education, and to help strengthen science education in the Poughkeepsie area schools. Each intern works with a science teacher to design a project and to obtain laboratory and/or computer based educational exercise for their class, and to acquire laboratory and/or computing resources for sustaining a strong science curriculum. Interns participate in a weekly seminar on science education at Vassar College.
Enrollment is limited and by permission. Students wishing to pursue internships should meet the following criteria: four completed units of course work in the natural sciences or mathematics, with at least two units at the 200-level, a minimum GPA of 3.4 in science and math coursework, and 3.0 overall.
Course Format: OTH
|
Education: III. Advanced |
| |
-
EDUC 300 - Senior Portfolio: Childhood Education Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
This senior seminar focuses on analysis of the student teaching experience. Through the development of their teaching portfolio, senior students examine the linkages between theory, current research, and classroom practice. This course should be taken concurrently with the student teaching practicum. Maria Hantzopoulos.
Course Format: OTH
|
| |
-
EDUC 301 - Senior Portfolio: Adolescent Education Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
Same as EDUC 300 , but for students earning certification in Adolescent Education. Maria Hantzopoulos.
Course Format: OTH
|
| |
-
EDUC 302 - Senior Thesis/Project Semester Offered: Fall
0.5 to 1 unit(s)
Individual reading, research, or community service project.
Prerequisite(s): EDUC 384 .
Yearlong course 302-EDUC 303 .
Course Format: INT
|
| |
-
EDUC 303 - Senior Thesis/Project Semester Offered: Spring
0.5 unit(s)
Individual reading, research, or community service project.
Prerequisite(s): EDUC 302 .
Yearlong course EDUC 302 -303.
Course Format: INT
|
| |
-
EDUC 304 - Senior Thesis/Project Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
Individual reading, research, or community service project.
One 1-hour period.
Course Format: INT
|
| |
-
EDUC 305 - Senior Thesis/Project Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
By special permission only. Individual reading, research, or community service project. Maria Hantzopoulos.
Prerequisite(s): EDUC 384 .
Course Format: INT
|
| |
-
EDUC 336 - Childhood Development: Observation and Research Application Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as PSYC 336 ) What differentiates the behavior of one young child from that of another? What characteristics do young children have in common? This course provides students with direct experience in applying contemporary theory and research to the understanding of an individual child. Topics include attachment, temperament, parent, sibling and peer relationships, language and humor development, perspective taking, and the social-emotional connection to learning. Each student selects an individual child in a classroom setting and collects data about the child from multiple sources (direct observation, teacher interviews, parent-teacher conferences, archival records). During class periods, students discuss the primary topic literature, incorporating and comparing observations across children to understand broader developmental trends and individual differences. Synthesis of this information with critical analysis of primary sources in the early childhood and developmental literature culminates in comprehensive written and oral presentations. Julie Riess.
Prerequisite(s): PSYC 231 and permission of the instructor.
For Psychology Majors: completion of a research methods course.
One 3-hour period. and 4 hours of laboratory observation work.
Course Format: OTH
|
| |
-
EDUC 350 - The Teaching of Reading: Curriculum Development in Childhood Education Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
The purpose of this course is to examine the nature and process of reading within a theoretical framework and then to examine and implement a variety of approaches and strategies used to promote literacy in language arts and social studies. Special emphasis is placed on material selection, instruction, and assessment to promote conceptual understandings for all students. Observation and participation in local schools is required.
Prerequisite(s): PSYC 105 , PSYC 231 .
Year long course 350/EDUC 351 .
One 2-hour period; one hour of laboratory.
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
EDUC 351 - The Teaching of Reading: Curriculum Development in Childhood Education Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
The purpose of this course is to examine the nature and process of reading within a theoretical framework and then to examine and implement a variety of approaches and strategies used to promote literacy in language arts and social studies. Special emphasis is placed on material selection, instruction, and assessment to promote conceptual understandings for all students. Observation and participation in local schools is required.
Prerequisite(s): PSYC 105 , PSYC 231 , EDUC 350 .
Year long course EDUC 350 /351.
One 2-hour period; one hour of laboratory.
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
EDUC 353 - Pedagogies of Difference: Critical Approaches to Education Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
This course continues the on-going work of raising awareness around difference, equity and social justice - particularly as they relate to race. In Pedagogies of Difference, we go beyond reflection of oppressive societal structures to build skills and engage pedagogy to interrupt oppression in its many forms, with an emphasis on aggressions within our own community. The primary goal of this course is to prepare students at Vassar to productively, honestly and ethnically engage their peers in dialogue about and across racial difference. Students experience and participate in a number of activities used to raise awareness around social identity, consider how they might facilitate such activities, work on facilitating around triggers (their own and those of others) and learn how to put together a workshop to facilitate.
There are two prerequisites for Pedagogies of Difference: EDUC 235 - Issues in Contemporary Education and EDUC 255 - Race, Representation, and Resistance in U.S. Schools (or a similar course). In Education 235, you began the study of both the content and process necessary for facilitating dialogues across difference. In Education 235, students explored how and why students experience schools in vastly different ways and how these differing experiences result from inequitable treatment (and lead to inequitable outcomes). Thus, you began preliminary study of the content of focus in Pedagogies of Difference. In this course, students also begin the study of pedagogy, teaching for perhaps the first time.
The second prerequisite for Pedagogies of Difference is Education 255 or another semester-long course that focuses on race and racism. In Education 255, you continued the study of both the content and process necessary for facilitating dialogue across difference (with a focus on racial difference, in particular). In Education 255, we attempted to set a foundation in race theory, studying different racial theoretical frameworks (with a focus on critical race theory). Students also engaged in courageous conversations about race and racism, pushing themselves to stay on their learning edge (in their risk zone).
Prerequisite(s): EDUC 235 and EDUC 255 or permission of the instructor.
One 3-hour period.
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
EDUC 355 - The School-to-Military Pipeline Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
As an education department, we encourage our “students to think deeply and critically about the ways in which schools socialize as well as educate citizens” (“About Education Department”, https://education.vassar.edu/about/). This course relates to this previous statement by centering the role that schools play in assisting the military recruitment of its students into the U.S. Armed Forces, which is informed by the ways that “schools socialize as well as educate citizens.” As the largest and highest funded U.S. institution, the U.S. Armed Forces plays a direct and indirect role in the lives of all members of the campus community in the treasure of our country that includes not just money but lives lost and affected. Some of which included our student body, faculty, and staff. Thus, all students benefit from taking this course by examining how these two large U.S. institutions, schools and the military, work together to maintain “The School-to-Military Pipeline.” Jaime Del Razo.
Prerequisite(s): Permission of the instructor.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
EDUC 360 - Workshop in Curriculum Development Semester Offered: Fall
0.5 unit(s)
This course focuses on the current trends, research and theory in the area of curriculum development and their implications for practice in schools. Procedures and criteria for developing and evaluating curricular content, resources and teaching strategies are examined and units of study developed. Maria Hantzopoulos.
Prerequisite(s): Open to seniors only or permission of the instructor.
First six-week course.
One 3-hour period.
Course Format: OTH
|
| |
-
EDUC 361 - Seminar: Mathematics and Science in the Elementary Curriculum Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
The purpose of this course is to develop the student’s competency to teach mathematics and science to elementary school children. Lectures and hands-on activity sessions are used to explore mathematics and science content, methodology, and resource materials, with an emphasis on conceptual understanding as it relates to the curricular concepts explored. Special emphasis is placed on diagnostic and remedial skills drawn from a broad theoretical base. Students plan, implement, and evaluate original learning activities through field assignments in the local schools. In conjunction with their instruction of instructional methods in science, students also teach lessons for the Exploring Science at Vassar Farm program. Jaime Del Razo.
Prerequisite(s): Permission of the instructor.
Two 75-minute periods; weekly laboratory work at the Vassar Farm.
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
EDUC 362 - Student Teaching Practicum: Childhood Education Semester Offered: Fall
2 unit(s)
Supervised internship in an elementary classroom, grades 1-6. Examination and analysis of the interrelationships of teachers, children, and curriculum as reflected in the classroom-learning environment.
Prerequisite(s): PSYC 105 , PSYC 231 ; EDUC 235 , EDUC 250 , EDUC 290 , EDUC 350 /EDUC 351 ; EDUC 360 , EDUC 361 may be concurrent.
Permission of the instructor.
Open to seniors only.
Ungraded only.
One or more conference hours per week.
Course Format: OTH
|
| |
-
EDUC 367 - Urban Education Reform Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as URBS 367 ) This seminar examines American urban education reform from historical and contemporary perspectives. Particular attention is given to the political and economic aspects of educational change. Specific issues addressed in the course include school governance, standards and accountability, incentive-based reform strategies, and investments in teacher quality. Maria Hantzopoulos.
Prerequisite(s): EDUC 235 or permission of the instructor.
One 2-hour period.
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
EDUC 369 - Social Citizenship in an Urban Age Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as HIST 369 and URBS 369 ) During a 1936 campaign speech President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared that in “1776 we sought freedom from the tyranny of a political autocracy.” Since then “the age of machinery, of railroads; of steam and electricity; the telegraph and the radio; mass production and mass distribution—all of these combined to bring forward a new civilization and with it a new problem … . For too many of us the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality.” Therefore, the President concluded, government must do something to “protect the citizen’s right to work and right to live.” This course looks at how Americans during the twentieth century fought to expand the meaning of citizenship to include social rights. We study efforts on behalf of labor laws, unemployment and old age insurance, and aid to poor mothers and their children. How did these programs affect Americans of different social, racial, and ethnic backgrounds? How did gender shape the ways that people experienced these programs? Because many Americans believed that widening educational opportunities was essential for addressing the problems associated with the “new civilization” that Roosevelt described, we ask to what extent Americans came to believe that access to a good education is a right of citizenship. These issues and the struggles surrounding them are not only, as they say, “history.” To help us understand our times, we look at the backlash, in the closing decades of the twentieth century, against campaigns to enlarge the definition of citizenship. Miriam Cohen.
One 2-hour period.
|
| |
|
| |
-
EDUC 373 - Adolescent Literacy Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
This course combines literacy research, theory, and practice in the context of adolescent learning. We engage in case study research about the cultural, semiotic, and identity literacies our students produce in contrast to the literacies that are sanctioned and mandated in formal schooling. We define literacy broadly, and consider reading, writing, visual literacy and multimodal literacy– including new technologies. We look at how (im)migration status, race, ethnic heritage, and linguistic identity intersect with youth literacy production. Finally, we explore how literacy training is constructed through methods and curriculum with a special emphasis on diversity.
Prerequisite(s): EDUC 235 or permission of the instructor.
One 3-hour period.
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
EDUC 382 - Reframing Literacy for the 21st Century Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
This course attends to the ways in which a traditional conception of literacy as based solely on reading and writing can be broadened to address the strengths and needs of diverse students and their multiple literacy practices in the twenty-first century. Particular attention will be given to critical literacy and multiliteracies, with consideration for the ways in which different literacies (e.g. media literacies, digital literacies, multimodalities) can conflict or intersect with school-sanctioned literacy practices. Students will understand literacy concepts in context through regular collaborations with high school students. In addition to assigned course readings, students will participate in a book club and compare different literacy theories of their choice from various scholarly traditions. Ah-Young Song
Prerequisite(s): EDUC 235 or permission of the instructor.
1 2-hour period
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
EDUC 384 - Advanced Seminar Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
This course explores various approaches to research methods in the field of education, with emphasis on qualitative approaches. The course provides an overview of the different types of educational research, the varied philosophical groundings that drive particular methodological approaches, and discussion on data collection and analysis. Kimberly Williams Brown.
Prerequisite(s): EDUC 162 or EDUC 235 .
One 3-hour period.
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
EDUC 385 - American Higher Education: Policy and Practice
.5 unit(s)
This seminar examines American higher education from historical and contemporary perspectives, paying particular attention to how students themselves experience college preparation, admission and campus life. Particular attention is given to the social, political, economic, and cultural challenges associated with policy and practice in private higher education. The types of questions the course addresses include: What changes in policy, administration, and/or instruction are likely to improve student outcomes in higher education in America? What research tools are available to decision-makers in higher education to help inform policy and practice? Who and what are the drivers of reform in higher education and what are their theories of action for improving the college experience? How should consumers of educational research approach the task of interpreting contradictory evidence and information about American higher education? What is an appropriate definition of equality of educational opportunity and how should we apply this definition to American private higher education? What roles do race and socioeconomic status play in American higher education? This semester, our texts and supplementary readings focus on issues pertinent to American higher education in general and highly selective private liberal arts college more specifically. Topics in the course include, but are not limited to: college admissions; student affairs policy and practice; micropolitics within colleges and universities; standards and accountability mechanisms, and efforts to promote diversity and inclusion. Small group case study projects give students the opportunity to develop potential solutions to contemporary problems in American higher education.
Prerequisite(s): One course in Education, American Studies, or Political Science.
Open to juniors and seniors only.
Second six-week course.
Not offered in 2019/20.
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
EDUC 386 - Ghetto Schooling Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as LALS 386 and SOCI 386 ) In twenty-first century America, the majority of students attend segregated schools. Most white students attend schools where 75% of their peers are white, while 80% of Latino students and 74% of black students attend majority non-white schools. In this course we will examine the events that led to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka and the 60-year struggle to make good on the promises of that ruling. The course will be divided into three parts. In part one, we will study the Brown decision as an integral element in the fight against Jim Crow laws and trace the legal history of desegregation efforts. In part two, we will focus on desegregation policies and programs that enabled the slow move toward desegregation between 1954 and the 1980s. At this point in time, integration efforts reached their peak and 44% of black students in the south attended majority-white schools. Part three of the course will focus on the dismantling of desegregation efforts that were facilitated by U.S. Supreme Court decisions beginning in the 1990s. Throughout the course we will consider the consequences of the racial isolation and concentrated poverty that characterizes segregated schooling and consider the implications of this for today’s K-12 student population, which is demographically very different than it was in the 1960s, in part due to new migration streams from Latin America, Asia, and the Caribbean. Over the last 40 years, public schools have experienced a 28% decline in white enrollments, with increases in the number of black and Asian students, and a noteworthy 495% increase in Latino enrollments. Eréndira Rueda.
One 2-hour period.
|
| |
-
EDUC 392 - Multidisciplinary Methods in Adolescent Education Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
This course is designed to engage prospective middle and high school educators in developing innovative, culturally relevant, and socially responsive curricula in a specific discipline, as well as in exploring ways to branch inter-disciplinarily. In particular, students strive to develop a practice that seeks to interrupt inequities in schooling and engender a transformative experience for all students. The first part of the course explores what it means to employ social justice, multicultural, and critical pedagogies in education through self-reflections, peer exchange, and class texts. The remainder of the course specifically looks at strategies to enact such types of education, focusing on methods, curriculum design, and assessment. Students explore a variety of teaching approaches and develop ways to adapt them to particular subject areas and to the intellectual, social, and emotional needs of adolescent learners. There is a particular emphasis on literacy development and meeting the needs of English Language Learners. Maria Hantzopoulos.
Prerequisite(s): EDUC 235 .
One 2-hour period.
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
EDUC 399 - Senior Independent Work Semester Offered: Fall or Spring
0.5 to 1 unit(s)
Special permission.
Course Format: OTH
|
English: I. Introductory |
| |
-
ENGL 101 - The Art of Reading and Writing Semester Offered: Fall and Spring
1 unit(s)
Development of critical reading in various forms of literary expression, and regular practice in different kinds of writing. The department.
Open only to first-year students; satisfies the college requirement for a First-Year Writing Seminar.
Although the content of each section varies, this course may not be repeated for credit; see the First-Year Handbook for descriptions.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
ENGL 170 - Approaches to Literary Studies Semester Offered: Fall and Spring
1 unit(s)
Each section explores a central issue, such as “the idea of a literary period,” “canons and the study of literature,” “nationalism and literary form,” or “gender and genre” (contact the department office for current descriptions). Assignments focus on the development of skills for research and writing in English, including the use of secondary sources and the critical vocabulary of literary study. The Department.
Topic for 2019/20a: Tools for Reading Narrative. Everyone today has a story to tell. But are all stories worth telling? What makes for a good story? What’s the difference between telling stories and telling lies? In order to come to terms with the “narrative turn” in the arts and sciences we adapt a dueling approach: the first technical and the second imaginary. On the one hand, we pillage useful studies of narrative from the ancients to the moderns. Here our goal is to acquire a durable set of tools and concepts: plot, description, narrator, free indirect style, focalization, storyworlds, etc. On the other hand, to test these lenses, we examine (and perhaps create) fictional texts that both bind and unravel narrative conventions. These might include: Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, Eileen Chang’s Love in a Fallen City, Franz Kafka’s “The Burrow,” Daniel Clowes’s graphic novel Ghost World, and short stories by Ernest Hemingway, Kathy Acker, Alice Munro, Lydia Davis, Mary Butts, and others. Heesok Chang.
Open to first-year students and sophomores, and to others by permission; does not satisfy the college requirement for a First-Year Writing Seminar.
Three 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
|
| |
-
ENGL 177 - Special Topics
0.5 unit(s)
(Same as AMST 177 and URBS 177 )
First six-week course.
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2019/20.
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
ENGL 180 - Improvisational Writing Semester Offered: Fall
0.5 unit(s)
This course uses techniques of improvisational generation of creative material drawn from schools such as Oulipo, writers such as Raymond Roussel, and teachers such as Ruth Danon. All of them aim to subvert the critical mind in order to allow the unexpected to emerge in directed free writing exercises. The course consists of such writing exercises, as well as direction in using the material that emerges as a platform for further work and drafts. It focuses on the genres of fiction and poetry.
The course is designed to direct writing practice at the stage of generation of material. Focus on generation increases tools for overcoming writing blocks and develop muscles in an area that such creative writing classes don’t allow as much time for as they do criticism and analysis of completed pieces. Jean Kane.
Course Format: INT
|
| |
-
ENGL 183 - Building a Queer Oral History Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as WMST 183 ) This intensive provides students with practical training and experience in conducting oral history interviews. The goal is for each student, by the end of the semester, to contribute an oral history (including transcription) to the Vassar College LGBTQ Oral History Archive. In addition to practical training, students read about oral history methodology and theory; this includes engaging various ethical questions relevant to our work. Students also familiarize themselves with the LGBTQ Oral History Archive collection. Additionally, students collaborate in expanding the LGBTQ Oral History Archive to include a queer mapping component that geo-locates queer spaces and memories at Vassar and within Poughkeepsie. Our goal is to complement the oral histories in the collection with a map that documents the spaces that hold queer memories for our narrators. This course entails conducting, transcribing, and archiving oral histories. Students will apply for IRB approval. Hiram Perez.
Course Format: INT
|
English: II. Intermediate Prerequisite: open to sophomores, juniors, and seniors with one unit of 100-level work or by permission of the associate chair. Students applying for permission to elect 200-level work must present samples of their writing to the associate chair. First-year students with AP credit may elect 200-level work after consultation with the department and with the permission of the instructor. First-year students who have completed ENGL 101 may elect 200-level work with permission of the instructor. Intermediate writing courses are not open to first-year students.
|
| |
-
ENGL 203 - These American Lives: New Journalisms
1 unit(s)
(Same as AMST 203 ) This course examines the various forms of journalism that report on the diverse complexity of contemporary American lives. In a plain sense, this course is an investigation into American society. But the main emphasis of the course is on acquiring a sense of the different models of writing, especially in longform writing, that have defined and changed the norms of reportage in our culture. Students are encouraged to practice the basics of journalistic craft and to interrogate the role of journalists as intellectuals (or vice versa).
Not offered in 2019/20.
|
| |
-
ENGL 205 - Introductory Creative Writing Semester Offered: Fall and Spring
1 unit(s)
Study and practice of various forms of prose and poetry. Reading and writing assignments may include prose fiction, journals, poetry, drama, and essays.
Not offered to first-year students.
One 2-hour period and individual conferences with the instructor.
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
ENGL 206 - Introductory Creative Writing Semester Offered: Fall and Spring
1 unit(s)
Prerequisite(s): Open to any student who has taken ENGL 205 .
One 2-hour period and individual conferences with the instructor.
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
ENGL 207 - Intermediate Creative Writing: Literary Non-Fiction
1 unit(s)
Open to any student who has taken ENGL 205 or ENGL 206 .
One 2-hour period.
Not offered in 2019/20.
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
ENGL 209 - Advanced Creative Writing: Narrative Semester Offered: Fall and Spring
1 unit(s)
Development of the student’s abilities as a writer and reader of narrative, with particular emphasis on the short story. Amitava Kumar (a); Owen King (b).
Special permission. Writing samples are due before preregistration. Check with the English Office for the exact date of the deadline.
One 2-hour period and individual conferences with the instructor.
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
ENGL 211 - Advanced Creative Writing: Verse Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
Development of the student’s abilities as a writer and reader of poetry. In addition to written poetry, other forms of poetic expressions may be explored, such as performance and spoken word. Paul Kane.
Special permission. Writing samples are due before preregistration. Check with the English Office for the exact date of the deadline.
One 2-hour period and individual conferences with the instructor.
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
ENGL 213 - The English Language
1 unit(s)
Study of the history of English from the fifth century to the present, with special attention to the role of literature in effecting as well as reflecting linguistic change. Treatment of peculiarly literary matters, such as poetic diction, and attention to broader linguistic matters, such as phonology, comparative philology, semantics, and the relationship between language and experience.
Not offered in 2019/20.
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
ENGL 214 - Process, Prose, Pedagogy Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as MEDS 214 ) An exploration of the intersections among language, form, genre, and medium, this course aims to deepen your appreciation for and understanding of multimodal authorship. To do so, we focus our critical gaze upon one of the more experimental periods of textual production: literary modernism. Together, we consider selections of poetry, short fiction, the novel, woodcut narratives, autobiography, letters, manifestos, essays, and film produced by a diverse range of authors such as Mina Loy and Djuna Barnes, Mu Shiying and Mikhail Bulgakov, Max Ernst and Zora Neale Hurston––as well as more canonical figures like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Samuel Beckett. Our discussions center on the ways in which writing emerges from its immediate historical contexts, and also how genre and medium look beyond their present moment, revising models inherited from the past and anticipating future forms of expression. Ultimately, this course helps us to better analyze and construct arguments about distinct types of texts through the sustained practice of close critical reading and recursive writing, and to sharpen our ability to facilitate dialogue about complex ideas and various modes of communication. Matthew Schultz.
|
| |
|
| |
-
ENGL 216 - Modern Drama: Text and Performance after 1800 Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
Study of modern dramatic texts and their embodiment both on the page and the stage. Authors, critical and theoretical approaches, dramatic genres, historical coverage, and themes may vary from year to year.
Topic 2019/20a: Dysfunctional Families. This course explores modern American plays that present debacles in the private sphere and its most widely accepted, codified, and institutionalized social manifestation: the family. As a site of incessant conflicts and negotiations between the individual and the other, and between the intimate and the public, the family offers an ideal framework and subject matter for commentary on a variety of moral and social issues. Through an overview of contemporary American drama, this course pays particular attention to the vestiges of the American Dream in a range of dramatic representations of dysfunctional families. As a survey with a special focus, the course may include plays by Edward Albee, Lorraine Hansberry, David Henry Hwang, Basil Kreimendahl, Tracy Letts, Taylor Mac, Arthur Miller, Marsha Norman, Eugene O’Neill, Suzan-Lori Parks, Sam Shepard, Tennessee Williams, and August Wilson. We also read selected theoretical texts about the role and significance of family in the 20th century. Zoltán Márkus
Two 75-minute periods.
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
-
ENGL 219 - Queer of Color Critique Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as AFRS 219 ) “Queer of Color Critique” is a form of cultural criticism modeled on lessons learned from woman of color feminism, poststructuralism, and materialist and other forms of analysis. As Roderick Ferguson defines it, “Queer of color analysis…interrogates social formations as the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class with particular interest in how those formations correspond with and diverge from nationalist ideals and practices.” This course considers what interventions the construction “queer of color” makes possible for queertheory, LGBT scholarship and activism, and different models of ethnic studies.We will assess the value and limitations of queer theory’s “subjectless critique” (in other words, its rejection of identity as a “fixed referent”) in doing cultural and political work. What kind of complications (or contradictions) does the notion “queer of color” present for subjectless critique? How might queer of color critique inform political organizing? Particular attention will be devoted to how “queer” travels. Toward this end, students will determine what conflicts are presently shaping debates around sexuality in their own communities and consider how these debates may be linked to different regional, national or transnational politics. Throughout the semester, we evaluate what “queer” means and what kind of work it enables. Is it an identity or an anti-identity? A verb, a noun, or an adjective? A heuristic device, a counterpublic, a form of political mobilization or perhaps even a kind of literacy? Hiram Perez.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
ENGL 222 - Early British Literature Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
This course offers an introduction to British literary history, beginning with Old and Middle English literature and continuing through the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the establishment of Great Britain, the British Civil War, the Puritan Interregnum, and the Restoration. Topics may include discourses of difference (race, religion, gender, social class); tribal, ethnic, and national identities; exploration and colonization; textual transmission and the rise of print culture; authorship and authority; and the formation and evolution of the British literary canon. Authors, genres, critical and theoretical approaches, historical coverage, and themes may vary from year to year.
Topic 2019/20a: Love, Labor, & Loss: Romance and Gender in Early British Literature: This course introduces students to British poetry, drama, and prose from the middle ages through the eighteenth century—a wide swath of historical territory, indeed. To ground our discussions, we will explore texts that deal with themes of romance, love, courtship, sex, and marriage. From the bawdy farce of Chaucer’s “The Miller’s Tale” to the murderous tragedy of Shakespeare’s Othello, our attention will focus on both careful close reading—attending to formal nuances of genre and style—as well as ideologies of gender, sexuality, race, religion, and nationality. Canonical authors may include Spenser, Sidney, Donne, Milton, Pope, Dryden, Swift, and Richardson, to be read alongside female writers such as Aphra Behn, Anne Finch, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Talia Vestri.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
ENGL 225 - American Literature, Origins to 1865
1 unit(s)
Study of the main developments in American literature from its origins through the Civil War: including Native American traditions, exploration accounts, Puritan writings, captivity and slave narratives, as well as major authors from the eighteenth century (such as Edwards, Franklin, Jefferson, Rowson, and Brown) up to the mid-nineteenth century (Irving, Cooper, Poe, Emerson, Hawthorne, Fuller, Stowe, Thoreau, Douglass, Melville, Whitman, and Dickinson).
Not offered in 2019/20.
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
ENGL 226 - American Literature, 1865-1925 Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
Study of the major developments in American literature and culture from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Literary movements such as realism, naturalism, regionalism, and modernism are examined, as well as literatures of ethnicity, race, and gender. Works studied are drawn from such authors as Twain, Howells, James, Jewett, Chestnutt, Chopin, Crane, London, Harte, DuBois, Gilman, Adams, Wharton, Dreiser, Pound, Eliot, Stein, Yezierska, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, O’Neill, Frost, H. D., and Toomer. Wendy Graham
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
ENGL 227 - The Harlem Renaissance and its Precursors Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as AFRS 227 ) This course places the Harlem Renaissance in literary historical perspective as it seeks to answer the following questions: In what ways was “The New Negro” new? How did African American writers of the Harlem Renaissance rework earlier literary forms from the sorrow songs to the sermon and the slave narrative? How do the debates that raged during this period over the contours of a black aesthetic trace their origins to the concerns that attended the entry of African Americans into the literary public sphere in the eighteenth century? Eve Dunbar.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
ENGL 228 - African American Literature Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as AFRS 228 and DRAM 228 ) Topic for 2019/20b: From the Page to the Stage: Turning Black Literature into Black Drama. This course will explore the expressive possibilities of 20th century black literature by means of critical reading, critical writing, and critical performance. Students will examine key works in their historical context, paying attention to the criticism and theory that have shaped their reception (Hayden, Giovanni, Brooks, Hurston, Baldwin, Morrison, Johnson, Whitehead). They will then attempt to transform parts of these texts into scenes as informed by past and present theories of performance and theatre making. Their work will culminate in a public performance of the pieces they have conceived. Tyrone Simpson.
Two 75-minute periods and one 2-hour lab.
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
ENGL 229 - Asian-American Literature, 1946-present
1 unit(s)
This course considers such topics as memory, identity, liminality, community, and cultural and familial inheritance within Asian-American literary traditions. May consider Asian-American literature in relation to other ethnic literatures.
Not offered in 2019/20.
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
ENGL 230 - Latina and Latino Literature
1 unit(s)
(Same as LALS 230 ) Students and instructor collaborate to identify and dialogue with the growing but still disputed archive of “Latinx Literature.” The category “Latinx” presents us then with our first challenge: exactly what demographic does “Latinx” isolate (or create)? How does it differ from the categories “Hispanic,” “Chicanx,” “Raza,” “Mestizx,” or “Boricua,” to name only a few alternatives, and how should these differences inform our critical reading practices? When and where does Latinx literature originate? Together, we work to identify what formal and thematic continuities might characterize a Latinx literary heritage. Some of those commonalities include border crossing or displacement, the tension between political and cultural citizenship, code-switching, indigeneity, contested and/or shifting racial formations, queer sexualities, gender politics, discourses of hybridity, generational conflict, and an ambivalent sense of loss (differently articulated as trauma, nostalgia, forgetting, mourning, nationalism, or assimilation).
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2019/20.
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
ENGL 231 - Native American Literature
1 unit(s)
(Same as AMST 231 ) This course examines Indigenous North American literatures from a Native American Studies perspective. Native American literature is particularly vast and diverse, representing over 500 Indigenous nations in the northern hemisphere and written/spoken in both Indigenous languages and languages of conquest (English, Spanish, French). Because of this range of writing and spoken stories, our goals for the class are to complicate our understanding of “texts,” to examine the origins of and evolution of tribal literatures (fiction, poetry, non fiction, graphic novel, etc.), and to comprehend the varied theoretical debates and frameworks that have created and nurtured a robust field of Native American literary criticism. A Native American Studies framework positions the literature as the creative work of Native peoples on behalf of their respective Nations or communities and complicated by the on-going legacy of colonialism. Authors include William Apess, Luther Standing Bear, Pauline Johnson, Mourning Dove, Gerald Vizenor, N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Silko, Louise Erdrich, Wendy Rose, Thomas King, Beth Brant, Kimberly Blaeser, and Richard Van Camp, among other Native theorists, spoken word artists, filmmakers, and artists.
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2019/20.
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
ENGL 235 - Old English Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
(Same as MRST 235 ) Introduction to Old English language and literature.
Topic for 2019/20a: Old English: In a time when Latin was the language of the learned and the literate, the language of the law and of the prevailing Christian faith, Old English was significant enough (in England) to be used for legal, religious, scientific, and literary texts. Thus, Old English is significant not only in the history of English itself but also in the history of vernacular writing in western Europe. Furthermore, texts recorded in Old English have important, if seldom-acknowledged, effects on the modern world. For example, Thomas Jefferson thought that instruction in Old English should begin in elementary school and that the language had democratic ideals embedded in it—ideas that are only the tip of his disturbingly expansionist and nationalistic agenda for the language. And, in the 19th c., Old English was the vehicle by which American women scholars advanced academic careers in a period when the academy was dominated by men (although while still reifying existing hierarchies of race and class). Vassar may have been the first women’s college in the United States to offer Old English, making this course a significant Vassar tradition.
In this class we learn and practice the grammar and vocabulary of this earliest form of English. You also get to experience the genres of writing in which Old English was used by its speakers and learn about the social values and literary motifs that this corpus preserves. This knowledge prepares you to read Beowulf in its original form, which is the focus of English 236. Erin Sweany.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
ENGL 236 - Beowulf Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
(Same as MRST 236 ) In-depth study of the early English epic in the original language. Erin Sweany.
Prerequisite(s): ENGL 235 or demonstrated knowledge of Old English, or permission of the instructor.
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
ENGL 237 - Medieval Literature Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
This course serves as an introduction to medieval literature, with a focus on Middle English literatures (c. 1066-1550). Students will become familiar with the linguistic and stylistic features of Middle English, and will read a variety of texts from the period. Special topics for the course vary from year to year; examples of topics include: Arthurian literature, Chaucer, the Chaucerian tradition, women’s writing in the Middle Ages, transnational/comparative medieval literatures (including French and Italian), medieval “autobiography,” the alliterative tradition, Piers Plowman and the Piers tradition, dream visions, fifteenth century literature and the bridge to the “early modern,” literature and heresy, gender and sexuality in the Middle Ages, and medieval mystical writing. Students engage throughout with the process of establishing English as a “literary” language; authorial identity; the grounding of English literary tradition; and the role of translation and adaptation in medieval writing. The course also prepares students who might wish to pursue work in medieval literature at the 300 level, and/or pursue a senior thesis in the period.
Topic for 2019/20a: The Canterbury Tales. In this course we spend the semester on the road with Chaucer in a collective reading of his encyclopedic human comedy, The Canterbury Tales, sauntering with him through fourteenth-century England. An important part of this leisurely immersion is sensory and linguistic, as we experience the text in the original Middle English, acquiring as an added benefit facility in English philology. Through close reading, class discussion, and writing we consider the Tales as they provide diverse, intersecting pathways into Medieval critical attitudes toward social and class distinctions, religious and gender antagonisms, town/gown animosities, discourses of desire and sexuality, and conflicts born of a developing urbanism during England’s transformation from a feudal to an early modern society. Besides this “social Chaucer” we consider the “clerkly Chaucer,” and what the Tales tell us about his influential insights into authorship and reading, language and meaning, science and nature, philosophy and ethics, history and collective memory, psychology and the construction of a modern self. Thomas Hill.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
ENGL 240 - Shakespeare Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
Study of some representative comedies, histories, and tragedies.
Topic for 2019/20a: Shakespeare and Gender. This course offers an introduction to Shakespeare studies through the discussion of seven Shakespeare plays: The Taming of the Shrew, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet, Othello, and The Tempest. Situating these plays in the cultural and historical contexts in which they were written and performed, we are able to appreciate significant differences as well as intriguing continuities between early 17th century and early 21st century interpretations and representations regarding such basic concepts and institutions as gender, family, filial and marital duties, marriage, the “private sphere,” and sexuality. Moreover, by examining these plays in production both on the stage and on the screen, we try to determine their current meanings and cultural significance. To attain this second crucial aim, we view and discuss a stage production as well as several film adaptations of our plays and organize staged readings of selected scenes. Zoltán Márkus.
Not open to students who have taken ENGL 241 -ENGL 242 .
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
ENGL 241 - Shakespeare
1 unit(s)
(Same as DRAM 241 ) Study of a substantial number of the plays, roughly in chronological order, to permit a detailed consideration of the range and variety of Shakespeare’s dramatic art.
Not open to students who have taken ENGL 240 .
Yearlong course 241-ENGL 242 .
Not offered in 2019/20.
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
ENGL 242 - Shakespeare
1 unit(s)
(Same as DRAM 242 ) Study of a substantial number of the plays, roughly in chronological order, to permit a detailed consideration of the range and variety of Shakespeare’s dramatic art.
Not open to students who have taken ENGL 240 .
Yearlong course ENGL 241 -242.
Not offered in 2019/20.
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
ENGL 245 - The Enlightenment
1 unit(s)
Study of poetry, intellectual prose, and drama of importance in Great Britain in the late seventeenth and throughout the eighteenth century. Famous Enlightenment philosophers include John Locke, Isaac Newton, Voltaire, David Hume, and Adam Smith. Focus, however, will be on the great literary writers of the period: including John Dryden, Aphra Behn, Jonathan Swift, Anne Finch, William Congreve, Joseph Addison, Alexander Pope, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Samuel Johnson, Mary Leapor, William Cowper, James Boswell, and Olaudah Equiano.
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2019/20.
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
ENGL 247 - Eighteenth-Century British Novels Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)
Topic for 2019/20b: Miss Behavior: Transgressive Women in 18th-Century British Fiction. The focus of this course is eighteenth-century English fiction that features “girls gone wild,” women who violate the stringent social codes dictating their behavior in this period. We read a range of critical texts—some contemporary to us, and others contemporary to the 18th-century writers on our syllabus—to learn what constituted “misbehavior” for women, and who was making the rules. Conduct books, educational treatises, periodical literature, pamphlets and political writings give us a cultural context, and prepare us to examine how fiction writers were reflecting and reshaping codes of conduct for their own social, political and artistic ends.
Because the act of writing itself often constituted misbehavior for eighteenth-century women, texts by women differ considerably from those by men with regard to topics, style and genre. In the first half of the course, we see male authors diversely imagining female cross-dressers, “female husbands” (a contemporary term for women who sought to partner with other women), prostitutes, witches, sadists and pleasure-seekers. In the second half, we see women writers working in two literary modes—the gothic, and the novel of manners—to respond to oppressive societal concerns about femininity and modesty. Students leave this course not only with a strong sense of the cultural history of female comportment in eighteenth-century England, but also having looked closely at how these pervasive social codes interacted with literary form to shape the fiction of the period. Katie Gemmill.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
ENGL 248 - The Age of Romanticism Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)
Study of texts from the Romantic era, a period charged with revolutionary spirit and a desire for new forms of thought and literature. Topics may include the French revolution and the emerging discourse of individual human rights; the gothic, the supernatural and the sublime; poetry and its relationship to altered states of consciousness; literary renderings of nature and landscape; introspection, imagination and the self; and political movements such as abolitionism, workers’ rights and feminism. Authors may include such poets as William Blake, William Wordsworth, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Hannah More, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron and John Keats; prose writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Edmund Burke, William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb and Thomas De Quincey; and novelists such as Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, Walter Scott and Mary Shelley.
Topic of 2019/20a: The Age of Romanticism: Revolution and Rebellion. This course surveys the literature of the Romantic period through the lens of revolution and rebellion, both of which characterize this period in British history on a number of levels. Across the English Channel, French civilians were overthrowing their monarchy; revolutions in science and technology were catapulting Europe into the industrial era; English poets were rebelling against what they perceived to be the antiquated poetic forms of the eighteenth century; and prose writers were producing some of the original human rights manifestos, calling for women’s empowerment and the abolition of the British slave trade. Paying close attention to these historical and political contexts, we will examine how writers of the period mobilized the concept of revolution in their literary works and used it as an impetus for experimentation, on both thematic and formal levels. Surveyed poets include Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Barbauld, Robinson, Byron, Shelley and Keats; fiction writers include Austen, Shelley and Polidori; and prose writers include Burke, De Quincey, Prince and Wollstonecraft. Katie Gemmill.
Themes, topics, genres: The Gothic and the supernatural, Origins of the vampire myth, Literature of addiction, Poetry and dreams, Theories of poetic innovation, Abolitionism, Political and feminist poetry, The Romantic sublime.
Two 75-minute periods.
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
ENGL 249 - Victorian Literature
1 unit(s)
Study of Victorian culture through the prose writers of the period. This course explores the strategies of nineteenth-century writers who struggled to find meaning and order in a changing world. It focuses on such issues as industrialization, the woman question, imperialism, aestheticism, and decadence, paying particular attention to the relationship between literary and social discourses. Authors may include nonfiction prose writers such as Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold, Pater, and Wilde as well as fiction writers such as Disraeli, Gaskell, Dickens, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, George Eliot, and Arthur Conan Doyle.
Not offered in 2019/20.
Course Format: CLS
|
| |
-
ENGL 251 - Topics in Black Literatures
1 unit(s)
(Same as AFRS 251 ) This course considers Black literatures in all their richness and diversity. The focus changes from year to year, and may include study of a historical period, literary movement, or genre. The course may take a comparative, diasporic approach or may examine a single national or regional literature.
Two 75-minute periods.
Not offered in 2019/20.
|
| |
Page: 1 <- 4
| 5
| 6
| 7
| 8
| 9
| 10
| 11
| 12
| 13
| 14
… Forward 10 -> 24 |
|
|
Print this Page