Fall 2024 FHC Sections 1-12 with Course Descriptions

Fall 2024 HONR 10197 Freshman Honors Colloquium  Sections 1-12
SubjCourse#SectionTitleInstructorBldgRoomTimesMeeting Days
HONR101971FRESHMAN HONORS COLLOQUIUM IBrodsky, Adam H.SFH0021207:45 am - 09:00 am T R
HONR101972FRESHMAN HONORS COLLOQUIUM ISmith, Jeanne R.SFH0021312:30 pm - 01:45 pm T R
HONR101973FRESHMAN HONORS COLLOQUIUM IVan Ittersum, DerekSFH0031209:15 am - 10:30 am T R
HONR101974FRESHMAN HONORS COLLOQUIUM IRemley, R. D.JHN62/6409:15 am - 10:30 am T R
HONR101975FRESHMAN HONORS COLLOQUIUM ISanders, Michael T.SFH0021909:15 am - 10:30 am T R
HONR101976FRESHMAN HONORS COLLOQUIUM IRaabe, WesleyORH0014811:00 am - 12:15 pm T R
HONR101977FRESHMAN HONORS COLLOQUIUM IWinter, James P.SFH0021211:00 am - 12:15 pm T R
HONR101978FRESHMAN HONORS COLLOQUIUM ISanders, Michael T.BOW0022211:00 am - 12:15 pm T R
HONR101979FRESHMAN HONORS COLLOQUIUM ISwick-Higgins, Chelsea R.SFH0022011:00 am - 12:15 pm T R
HONR1019710FRESHMAN HONORS COLLOQUIUM IVogel, Lauren A.SFH0031212:05 pm - 12:55 pmM W F
HONR1019711FRESHMAN HONORS COLLOQUIUM IWinter, James P.JHN62/6412:30 pm - 01:45 pm T R
HONR1019712FRESHMAN HONORS COLLOQUIUM ILord, Susan D.SFH0021103:45 pm - 05:00 pm T R 

HONR    10197    1    FRESHMAN HONORS COLLOQUIUM I    Brodsky, Adam H.

How Media Works

Everyone’s influenced by media, so it is important to know how media works to deliver meaning. This colloquium will focus on media of the twentieth century with an emphasis on film, music, and art. We will view, listen to, read about, discuss, analyze, and critique popular media’s design, mechanics, aesthetics, and effects. Expect several types of essays, projects, and presentations as well as student-guided discussions and group activities. The core texts are listed below. This colloquium will also invest time directly experiencing creative works of cinema, art, and music.

Texts for Fall:

  • Understanding Media

  • The Anatomy of Film

 Texts for Spring:

  • How Music Works

  • What Are You Looking At? 

 

HONR    10197   2    FRESHMAN HONORS COLLOQUIUM I    Smith, Jeanne R.

What is expertise? How do we “know” what we know? How is knowledge developed and negotiated, what are the written and unwritten rules of academic discourse, and how can you begin to locate yourself in that conversation as a new student? When you enter your major field of study, you become a beginner, joining a conversation that has been happening for generations and will continue long into the future. The subject of our section of Colloquium is academic discourse itself, specifically its relationship to other discourses outside academia. You will learn about academic discourse by rhetorically analyzing and then by practicing the forms of communication and research used in academic knowledge-building work. In semester one you will examine your own journey to becoming a university student, connecting your goals to academic disciplines. You will study the differences between academic and other discourses on problems that interest you and relate to your goals as a student, locating research articles and book-length scholarly discourse on these issues. In semester two you will develop an original research project proposal on one of the areas you studied in semester one. You will conduct that research and present your findings. You will be provided with opportunities to continue your research agenda and find publication opportunities for your work, including an eventual Honors Thesis topic as well as additional research opportunities during your undergraduate career at the university.  The texts below are sample texts for the Fall semester.

Texts:

  • Opposing Viewpoints in Context and CQ Researcher: database access through University Libraries. 

 

HONR    10197    3    FRESHMAN HONORS COLLOQUIUM I    Van Ittersum, Derek

Many students enrolling at KSU this year have spent more than 10 years in schools of some kind, while others may be learning in an official school context for the first time. How does schooling shape one's approach to learning? What does learning look like in a school vs. outside a school? Critics of schooling talk about the "hidden curriculum," a program of study that happens in the background of every course and trains students to stifle their curiosity, prioritize obedience over creativity, and focus on evaluation rather than enjoyment or meaning, among other things. This hidden curriculum shapes students' learning in profound ways, they argue, and differs tremendously from learning outside of schools. However, there are many different contexts for learning outside of school--not all of them are idealistic self-directed explorations. People learn through apprenticeships, through coaching, and on the job. How do these contexts shape learning and learners? What about remote schooling, homeschooling, or unschooling?

In the Fall semester, we'll investigate schooling, its effects, and then expand our focus to examine frameworks that shape the ways we learn, such as cognitive biases and mental models. Students will connect their own experiences with learning and schooling with larger conversations about these topics through writing, research, and class discussion. In the Spring semester, students will choose an ambitious learning challenge to document and complete over the course of the semester. This challenge will ask students to learn something new (maybe a skill like playing guitar, or improve a skill like writing short stories, or become expert in an area of content like nuclear physics) through methods and processes that they haven't used before. We'll be reading accounts from people who have similarly challenged themselves and writing our own accounts. By the end of the year, students should have a clearer picture of themselves as learners, an actionable understanding of how different approaches to learning suit them and their goals, and a familiarity with a variety of arguments and ideas about schooling and learning.

Texts

  • I Love Learning and I Hate School – Blum
  • Range – Epstein; Ultralearning – Young
 

HONR    10197    4    FRESHMAN HONORS COLLOQUIUM I    Remley, R. D.

What makes someone a good leader? How can we critically reflect on others’ leadership skills toward understanding their effectiveness or weaknesses? How can we use these observations to assess and improve upon our own leadership skills? These are questions that will be addressed through this Colloquium section’s theme: Leadership Characteristics and Characters. Students will engage with principles of leadership found in characters and plot from various works of literature and film. Through critical reading, thinking, discussions, research, analytical writing activities, and other projects, students will come to understand several attributes that affect leadership effectiveness in various contexts; these attributes include cultural and social phenomena as well as personal traits and situational factors. Students, also, will consider their own leadership abilities and how they may be able to improve those skills. The works listed below provide a sampling of those that we will use.

Texts:

  • Leadership: Essential Writings by Our Greatest Thinkers, by Elizabeth Samet

  • The Secret Sharer, Joseph Conrad

  • Antigone, Sophocles

  • Major Barbara, George Bernard Shaw

  • The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit (Film, adapted from novel by Sloan Wilson)

  • To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

  • Hidden Figures, Margot Lee Shetterly 

 

HONR    10197    5    FRESHMAN HONORS COLLOQUIUM I    Sanders, Michael T.

Drifting and Wandering
The figure of the drifter is a fundamental element of the mythology in most cultures. The search for what lies beyond, and the subsequent journey/quest, provides the basis for the legends that help those cultures to define and appraise themselves. The wanderer comes to delineate world culture in many ways, as a source of archetypes and iconography ranging from the strong and resilient hero whose actions and attitudes speak for themselves to the befuddled everyman in the postmodern search for identity and meaning.  

This colloquium will explore how the myth of the wanderer has changed over time, even as it continues to define, confound, and inspire.  We will look at this phenomenon from many perspectives: from the ancient world, where empires found their roots in the resultant myths, to the modern day, where those who, in pursuit of truth and self awareness, encounter and struggle to overcome obstacles, both physical and metaphysical, that get in their way. Through these readings, we will explore the role of the drifters and the wanderers and the way that they have come to shape who we are and how we see ourselves today. The texts below are possible texts.

Texts:

  • Homer:  Odyssey
  • Virgil:  Aeneid
  • Miller: Circe
  • Gaiman: American Gods
  • Quin: Medea
  • Silko: Ceremony
  • Murakami: South of the Border, West of the Sun
 

HONR    10197    6    FRESHMAN HONORS COLLOQUIUM I    Raabe, Wesley

Course Theme: Sea and Shore
In lifetimes that will be shaped profoundly by rising sea levels, how should we imagine our relationship to the earth’s waters? Living in NE Ohio, Erie our nearest shoreline, we may hope to escape the devastating consequences that face those who live on the shores of oceans and seas. The topic is immediate for some, as insurance rates rise (or are cancelled) in low-lying coastal areas, at high risk for catastrophic flooding. During the coming decades, gradually rising water levels (from melting icecaps) and more intense storms (from warmed waters) are expected to produce cataclysmic effects. They are inevitable no matter how humans in the next generation or two prepare for--or deny--the coming, but difficult to predict, reality. Because ocean changes interact with climate, that we can escape in our land-locked corner of NE Ohio is misplaced, for the backbone of world commerce is the massive container ship, as Baltimore reminded me (March 2024) when I drafted this description. Moreover, we will certainly be in contact, personally, with places experiencing the direct impact of ocean and climate transformations. In this seminar, we shall read literature, histories, and popular sciences that explore the relationship between peoples and waters, with an emphasis on them as topics of symbolic meaning. Our readings are from the modern era, early 19th C. to near present. Or, rather, the same but in reverse or chronologically. Our Question: “How can…” Or, if our sense is more dire, simply: “Can varied tools of culture--historical and fictional narrative, poetry and song, natural sciences, other forms of expression--prepare us psychologically and socially for what will likely be a deeply unsettled era for humanity, for our relationship to sea and shore and to their symbolic meanings. Students will write a reading response, every other week, which will be posted to the class discussion board.  Students will write three formal essays or seminar papers (6 pages each) per semester and produce an end-of-term group project, open as to form, which is subject of a class presentation.  The assigned texts, for purchase at bookstore for fall 2024 semester (to be supplemented with shorter class software posted readings) are below.

Texts:

  • Goodell, The Water Will Come
  • Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
  • Golding, The Lord of the Flies
  • Druett, Island of the Lost
  • Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs.
 

HONR    10197    7    FRESHMAN HONORS COLLOQUIUM I    Winter, James P.

Norman Mailer, Pulitzer-Prize winning writer of The Naked and the Dead and The Executioner’s Song, describes “faction” as a hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration, a definition that can extend to any literature that combines historical events, people, and places with the narrative exploration and analysis of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. In this course, you will create pieces of faction that focus on a specific historical event, person(s), or place of your choice which will culminate in a final project, again of your choice, written as poetry, short fiction, creative nonfiction, or an academic research project.  
During our time together, a variety of texts will give you insight as to how other writers create and develop faction in its literary forms. Through our smaller essay and research assignments, you will become familiarized with the academic writing process, namely pre-writing, drafting, editing, and APA citation, as well as various methods of online research. Utilizing argumentative writing and persuasive criticism techniques will broaden your textual analysis and communication skills and we will practice vital parts of academic writing: introductions, thesis statements, body paragraphs that contain controlling ideas, incorporate research, and transitions.

Texts for Fall:

  • Love and Hydrogen by Jim Shepard 
  • The Donner Party by George Keithley
  • The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison

Texts for Spring:

  • Queen of the Mist by Joan Murray
  • I Am Not Jackson Pollock by John Haskell
  • The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth
 

HONR    10197    8    FRESHMAN HONORS COLLOQUIUM I    Sanders, Michael T.

Drifting and Wandering
The figure of the drifter is a fundamental element of the mythology in most cultures. The search for what lies beyond, and the subsequent journey/quest, provides the basis for the legends that help those cultures to define and appraise themselves. The wanderer comes to delineate world culture in many ways, as a source of archetypes and iconography ranging from the strong and resilient hero whose actions and attitudes speak for themselves to the befuddled everyman in the postmodern search for identity and meaning.  

This colloquium will explore how the myth of the wanderer has changed over time, even as it continues to define, confound, and inspire.  We will look at this phenomenon from many perspectives: from the ancient world, where empires found their roots in the resultant myths, to the modern day, where those who, in pursuit of truth and self awareness, encounter and struggle to overcome obstacles, both physical and metaphysical, that get in their way. Through these readings, we will explore the role of the drifters and the wanderers and the way that they have come to shape who we are and how we see ourselves today. The texts below are possible texts.

Texts:

  • Homer:  Odyssey
  • Virgil:  Aeneid
  • Miller: Circe
  • Gaiman: American Gods
  • Quin: Medea
  • Silko: Ceremony
  • Murakami: South of the Border, West of the Sun
 

HONR    10197    9    FRESHMAN HONORS COLLOQUIUM I    Swick-Higgins, Chelsea R.

In our society, we often are deduced to one distinguishing feature of our identity: be it gender, race, class, religious belief, disability, or any other identity. In this section of Honor’s Colloquium, we will be addressing how people cannot be viewed as one single identity but are instead the intersections of many identities.  Using interpretive lenses from literature, rhetoric, linguistics, and gender studies, we will explore how intersectionality is used within literature and contemporary media and how that shapes the world in which we live.

Students can expect to participate in student-driven class discussion, compose critical essays of varying lengths, reflect on class readings and discussions through response essays, and create multimodal compositions.  We will critically engage with theoretical articles, novels, shorter literary works (short stories and poetry), and contemporary media (films, television, and multimodal compositions).

Texts for Fall:

  • Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine
  • Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale
  • Bell Hook’s Belonging: A Culture of Place
  • Angela Davis’s Women, Race, and Class

Texts for Spring:

  • Susan Nussbaum’s Good Kings, Bad Kings: A Novel
  • Chinelo Okparanta’s Under the Udala Trees
  • Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
 

HONR    10197    10    FRESHMAN HONORS COLLOQUIUM I    Vogel, Lauren A.

This course will explore complex and sensitive topics surrounding identity, social justice, and diversity through children’s literature and young adult (YA) books. We will read literature that represents windows of ourselves and mirrors into the perspectives of the often-difficult lived experiences of others. Students will produce mini multigenre projects throughout the semester to prepare for their final multigenre research social justice project.
Texts:

  • Kent State by Deborah Wiles
  • Stamped (for kids) by Jason Reynolds and Ibram Kendi
 

HONR    10197    11    FRESHMAN HONORS COLLOQUIUM I    Winter, James P.

Norman Mailer, Pulitzer-Prize winning writer of The Naked and the Dead and The Executioner’s Song, describes “faction” as a hybrid of documented fact and novelistic elaboration, a definition that can extend to any literature that combines historical events, people, and places with the narrative exploration and analysis of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. In this course, you will create pieces of faction that focus on a specific historical event, person(s), or place of your choice which will culminate in a final project, again of your choice, written as poetry, short fiction, creative nonfiction, or an academic research project.  
During our time together, a variety of texts will give you insight as to how other writers create and develop faction in its literary forms. Through our smaller essay and research assignments, you will become familiarized with the academic writing process, namely pre-writing, drafting, editing, and APA citation, as well as various methods of online research. Utilizing argumentative writing and persuasive criticism techniques will broaden your textual analysis and communication skills and we will practice vital parts of academic writing: introductions, thesis statements, body paragraphs that contain controlling ideas, incorporate research, and transitions.

Texts for Fall:

  • Love and Hydrogen by Jim Shepard
  • The Donner Party by George Keithley
  • The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison

Texts for Spring:

  • Queen of the Mist by Joan Murray
  • I Am Not Jackson Pollock by John Haskell
  • The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth
 

HONR    10197    12    FRESHMAN HONORS COLLOQUIUM I    Lord, Susan D.

The American Library Association reports that a record number of books were challenged and/or banned in 2023.  Organized groups and some state legislators are working to remove books that they deem controversial from public school classrooms and, in some cases, even public libraries.  In this course, we will explore the issue of censorship, focusing mainly on some texts that have appeared on the ALA’s lists in recent years.  Why are these books controversial, and what makes them worth reading and discussing?  Is censorship ever acceptable or desirable?  During fall semester, we will focus mostly on dystopic novels, and during spring semester, we will look at topics such as race in literature.

Texts for Fall:

  • Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
  • Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
  • Geraldine Brooks, Year of Wonders
  • Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale  
  • Celeste Ng, Our Missing Hearts

Texts for Spring (tentative):

  • Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
  • Alice Walker, The Color Purple
  • Art Spiegelman, Maus  
  • John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
  • Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner