FHC Sections 1-10

Freshman Honors Colloquium Sections 1-10 (Descriptions Below)

HONR 10197 001 Brodsky, Adam H

How Media Works

Everyone is influenced by media, so it is important to know how media works to deliver meaning and extend human experience and understanding. This colloquium will explore the nature of media and focus on entertainment and informational media types with an emphasis on film, music, and art. We will view, listen to, read about, experience, analyze, write about, and critique popular media to recognize patterns, both contemporary and historic, in its design, mechanics, aesthetics, and effects.

Expect several types of essays, projects, presentations, and group activities. The core texts are listed below. This colloquium will invest time directly experiencing creative works of cinema, art, and music.

Texts for Fall:

• Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
• The Anatomy of Film

Texts for Spring:

• How Music Works
• What Are You Looking At?

HONR 10197 002 Smith, Jeanne R

Help Yourself! Scholarly Perspectives on Thriving in College

For as long as people have been writing, they have given each other advice on how to improve the experience of living and how to succeed. Today, self-help is a profitable genre and one of the most popular among younger adults. Our Colloquium will investigate current ideas about self-care and self-improvement as they relate to the lives of college students. In semester 1, you will choose one book-length piece of popular nonfiction covering an area within the genre. In a series of oral presentations, you will share the main concepts in your text and facilitate class discussions on how these ideas apply to college students specifically. We will analyze the arguments and evidence used in these texts, try out some of the ideas in our lives, and question them. We will begin comparing popular and scholarly treatments of ideas from our discussions. At the end of the first semester, you will develop a question potentially suitable for original research during the second semester. In semester 2, you will design an original research project examining an important concept from our first semester discussions. You gather appropriate data, analyze it, and present your conclusions in academic genres. The Colloquium will present you with  opportunities to continue your research.

Texts:

• The Happy High Achiever: 8 Essentials to Overcome Anxiety, Manage Stress, and Energize Yourself for Success – Without Losing Your Edge. Mary E. Anderson, 2024.
• The Mindful College Student: How to Succeed, Boost Well-Being, and Build the Life You Want at University and Beyond. Eric B. Loucks, 2022.
• Mindset Matters: Developing Mental Agility and Resilience to Thrive in Uncertainty. Gemma Leigh Roberts. 20022.
• Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic – and What We Can Do about It. Jennifer Breheny Wallace, 2023. 

HONR 10197 003 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    004    Remley, Dirk 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 Fall semester’s experience will focus on defining and critically assessing attributes that leaders demonstrate. The Spring semester’s experience will focus more on contextual factors that affect—positively or negatively—one’s ability to act on those attributes.  The works listed below provide a sampling of those that we will use.

• Leadership: Essential Writings by Our Greatest Thinkers, by Elizabeth Samet
• The Secret Sharer, Joseph Conrad; film directed by John Brahm
• Antigone, Sophocles
• Major Barbara, George Bernard Shaw; film directed by Gabriel Pascal
• The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit (Film, adapted from novel by Sloan Wilson)
• To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee; film directed by Robert Mulligan
• Lord of the Flies, William Golding; film directed by Peter Brook
• The Circle, Dave Eggers; film directed by James Ponsoldt 

HONR    10197    005    French, Danielle F

Mainstream culture’s obsessionality with true crime dominates contemporary entertainment, social, and news media with thousands of podcasts, films, music, and endless literature dedicated to the topic, but this interest has been a mainstay in popular culture for centuries. Though used as a horror trope and easy plot device in both speculative and fantastical fiction, “madness” is often linked with criminality in unsettling ways. According to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), “In 2022, there were an estimated 59.3 million adults aged 18 or older in the United States with AMI. This number represented 23.1% of all U.S. adults” (para. 5).  Ranging from mild to severe in their impact, “young adults aged 18-25 years had the highest prevalence of AMI (36.2%)” (para. 5). The AMI for the 18-25 age group has increased 6.8% since 2019, indicating instances of AMI are steadily rising.  This troubling connection of mental illness with intrinsic criminal or deviant behavior demands  our consideration and critical inquiry.

In this course, students will delve into historical and contemporary iterations of madness and murder across mediums and genres. As even fiction is often based in reality, students will examine mental illness depicted in creative nonfiction, fiction, podcasts, music, and film and consider the many ways disorders of the mind are often misdiagnosed, untreated, stigmatized, and criminalized. How does media romanticize, fetishize, or essentialize madness and link mental illness to deviance or criminality? Students will reflect on historical and contemporary understandings of psychopathology, analyze course texts, and produce meaningful discussion and writing on madness, murder, and true crime.

Texts for Fall:

• Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)
• Franz Kafka’s The Trial (1925)
• Albert Camus’ The Stranger (1942)
• Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962)
• Susannah Cahalan’s Brain on Fire (2012), and several films.

Spring texts will be elected entirely by past and present student votes from a curation of true crime books and media.  Students will work with archival materials from the Borowitz Collection, housed in the Special Collections and Archives contribute to season five of our class podcast, Madness and Murder, and consider the ethical implications of true crime media production & consumption. Join listeners from over 40 states and 35 other countries by checking out our class podcast.

HONR    10197    006    Raabe, Wesley