Fys program

We'll work both individually and in teams, with lots of reading, writing, discussion, and presentations. FYS TF Exploring Cultural Landscapes: Placing Power, Symbolism, and Identity [in person] Dixon They say a picture is worth a thousand words; the same visual literacy that is used to understand, analyze, and critique pictures is needed as we examine places.

Places manifest power, symbolism and identity. We will evaluate what the cultural landscape that a society creates says about it, and how public spaces are used to shape communal identities.

In this course, students will explore symbolism and meaning embedded in cultural landscapes, both everyday places close to home and internationally iconic landscapes. This class will explore both what we learn from, and what we are taught by popular media. Some lessons are unintended and others mindfully constructed to reach specific audiences.

Join us as we dissect the messages we receive through the media and discuss our own personal media experiences. We will discuss novels and songs, films and telenovelas, works of art and memes.

Writing assignments may be completed in English or in Spanish. FYS MW Leadership Study Through the Biography [in person] Kunkel This course will look at the dimensions of leadership primarily through the study of biographies and biographical portraits. For final projects, students will conduct research as well as read a biography of their choice and share portraits of their subject based on their original research.

FYS TTh Native American Arts [in person] Lawrence This course explores expressions of indigeneity through arts such as storytelling, literature, films, images, dance performance and objects, including the impact of climate change on Indigenous cultures in a contemporary society. FYS MW Picturing the Self [in person] Seaman In this seminar, we will seek to understand the complexities and varieties of self-portraits in visual art.

By looking closely at examples of self-portraits, both famous and obscure, and examining concepts both of the artist and of the self, we will investigate self-depictions over time and around the world to discover the power and possibility of these works. The fact that we live in a vast universe with many planets has led to speculations about the possible existence of aliens.

There is ongoing exploration of our solar system for indications of life, while others have claimed that alien intervention in human societies has already happened. In this course we tackle the question of alien life in three ways. We will explore the ways that alien life has been imagined; we will analyze and evaluate the evidence for past and current visitations by aliens; and we will become familiar with what current explorations of the solar system and beyond reveal about the possibility of alien life.

We end the class with a better understanding of both the scientific evidence for and our fascination with aliens. First Year Seminars provide you with a great opportunity to explore a fascinating subject with a full-time faculty member and a small group of your classmates.

The class size no more than twenty students and intensity of the work fosters lasting connections with faculty and other students. Plus, you get to hone academic skills crucial to success at college and beyond. In your First Year Seminar, you will sharpen skills that will be crucial in your studies at the College, and in your life beyond: critical and creative thinking, effective oral and written communication, group collaboration, and the ability to research efficiently and ethically.

Each First Year Seminar is designed for students with no previous knowledge in the field. So, for example, if you are interested in a physics based class, but have no background in physics, have no fear.

The class will be designed to provide whatever introduction is necessary for in-depth discussion. All First Year Students those entering the College with 23 or fewer credits transferred from another college must complete a First Year Seminar in one of their first two semesters on the campus. Unfortunately, First Year Seminars are only open to first year students. If you are interested in a particular topic, please feel free to contact the professor to see if she or he will be looking at similar material in other classes.

Maureen Reddy, at mreddy ric. This innovative and important program is designed to introduce first year students to both the challenges of academic engagement and the pleasures of belonging to the RIC community of scholars.

We hope that students will remember their First Year Seminar course as one of the most important classes in their college careers. FYS is an opportunity for faculty members to pursue a personal interest or passion that may or may not be directly connected to their usual areas of academic expertise or pedagogy.

Professors are encouraged to think creatively to construct projects and experiences so that students will not merely be the recipients of knowledge, but will be actively engaged in the learning process. Because the course is open only to first or second semester students, the instruction should be targeted at that level, and cannot assume prerequisite skills or knowledge. While developing the course, professors should remind themselves that these students are inexperienced with the academic world, but that they are very excited about being a part of it and are willing to work hard to succeed.

Some may see the College as a place for a fresh start, where they can develop skills with which they may have struggled in high school. FYS is designed to channel that excitement into an active and informed participation in academic discourse. At the end of the First Year Seminar, students should feel a sense of pride and accomplishment for tackling a rigorous class successfully. Creative assignments, including field experiences and assignments that make imaginative use of technology or ask students to engage in service, are welcomed.

Professors should be aware of their own pedagogical strengths, and centralize those strengths for this class. Each FYS course should be designed to introduce students to the General Education Outcomes listed below, with assignments and activities designed to help students begin to master these outcomes.

All the outcomes should be considered at the introductory level. This is an interdisciplinary seminar that will combine methods and readings from history, anthropology, ethnobotany, and environmental studies.

Writing assignments throughout the course will enable participants to develop skill in expository writing, research with primary and secondary sources, and methods for historical analysis.

Health and safety permitting, there might also be an optional field trip or two. Please note that some of the texts for this course may be disturbing.

Please contact the instructor if you have any questions. This course considers the role that piracy and the transatlantic slave trade played in the foundations of Atlantic empires. Discussions will focus on interactions between pirates male and female , sailors, captives, privateers, corsairs, chartered companies, and European colonizers.

Through historical accounts, fiction, and film we will examine life on the high seas, the local and global in the movement of people, goods and ideas, and the regulatory role of the state. We will be attentive to the position of pirates as an emerging social group, as well as addressing themes such as capitalism, citizenship, masculinity, revolt, the Middle Passage, and profit vs.

In addition, we will analyze representations of captives and pirates in popular culture. In this course students will study the relationship between poetry and rhetoric -- more specifically, how meter, rhyme, and stanzaic arrangement have historically worked together to create meaning and construct different types of argument.

We will read poems, commentaries, analyses, and other critical material to explore the role of form in shaping and enriching consciousness. This course will also provide intensive training in academic writing at the college level, with assignments designed to build critical reading and writing skills over the course of the semester. In this course, students will apply the sociological imagination to films and major social problems in the United States. The sociological imagination refers to the ability to relate personal troubles to public issues -- that is, the ability to understand the social world and how it has profound effect in our personal lives through a sociological lens.

Students will be able to enhance their writing and presentation skills by developing clear arguments i. Students will also engage with current events, podcasts, and peer-reviewed journals that discuss contemporary social problems.

Since then Eastern Europe has been considered an obscure, ambiguous, and paradoxical place. Yet, it offers an epistemological advantage to those who decide to linger in its strange and fascinating lands. We will read and watch several key philosophical and cinematic works from Ukraine, Slovenia, Russia, and other nearby countries to elucidate the privileged vantage point of Eastern Europe.

If circumstances allow, students will have the opportunity to visit several cultural venues in Los Angeles, including the Wende Museum of the Cold War, and the Museum of Jurassic Technology.

Sometime in the year BCE, the Athenian philosopher Socrates, convicted of impiety and corrupting the youth, fulfilled his death sentence by calmly draining a cup of poison hemlock, lifted to his mouth by his own hand. Both refused numerous opportunities to avoid their fate. Socrates's rich friends repeatedly offered to buy his way out of trouble. Porete was afforded multiple opportunities to disown her writings and recant her views. Knowing full well the dangers they faced, both chose instead to sacrifice themselves for their convictions.

Underlying their practice, the philosophical teachings of Socrates and Porete express theoretical viewpoints on the themes involved in their own fatal acts—the nature of the soul, justice, wisdom, nobility, and devotion—as well as on the very idea of self-sacrifice. In the first part, we'll read the "first tetralogy" of Plato's dialogues—Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo—which recounts Socrates's final days and also serves as one of the finest introductions to philosophical inquiry available.

In the second part, we'll read Porete's condemned Mirror of Simple Souls, a dazzlingly surreal work of apophatic mysticism that reports a conversation between personifications of Love, Reason, Soul, and other interlocutors.

Throughout, we'll supplement this primary reading with selections from other thinkers in related contexts, as well as secondary literature from modern philosophers and historians. This course will introduce students to social constructionism, the perspective that our shared social reality is constructed. We will start with the general perspective, then examine how this perspective applies to particular topics like gender, race, sexual orientation, time, and space. Students will write several essays in which they explain this perspective.

Sport is a central feature of American life, and relatively few institutions in the United States have been as enduring as that of baseball. From its pastoral origins in the 19 th Century U. The course will touch on immigration, labor issues, race, gender, collective identity, municipal politics, and will use baseball as a lens to understand broader social processes of modernization, rationalization, and globalization. This course will explore various historical struggles of Native peoples in North America in their quest for sovereignty and agency.

Sovereignty, in legal terms, has defined the boundaries of possibility for Native peoples, acting as both an opportunity to secure and protect rights, while also as an imposed structure allowing for continued marginalization. There will be a strong emphasis on writing and critical analysis throughout the course. First-Year Seminar Program. What Makes You You? Resources for Students Find answers to frequently asked questions and other resources.

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