In this course, students will learn to create dynamic worlds with diverse populations, mythology, and characters for games and animation. Students will use a variety of techniques and processes to develop and design worlds for their concept. World building gives a rich and dynamic canvas on which to develop characters, obstacles, motivations, macro and micro issues, and conflicts and resolutions. Such practice allows for more robust and consistent worlds in which to set singular or serial events in linear and non-linear ways.

This course provides an introduction to the history of games, terminology, and principles of game design and game mechanics. We will also explore the development of analog games and game systems from inception through playtesting and prototyping. Students will learn to analyze, design, prototype, and document different non-digital games using professional processes for game development in non-digital and digital games. (keywords: game design, game development, analog games)

How do young people make sense of their environments and how can environmental exploration create opportunities for children and youth to become critical learners and actors? Important learning occurs both inside and outside classrooms and schools, yet there is often little coordination of activities that take place in these different venues. With thoughtful consideration, one can build learning opportunities for youth that encourage their active participation in local research and the creation of more vibrant, healthy and just communities.

The contemporary practice of art is less and less dependent on any particular disciplinary skill. Nonetheless, making art is very much still a rigorous process. It depends on highly developed critical, sensory and communicative skills. This studio art course is an introduction to some of the basic questions a contemporary artist must answer: What rules will guide the making of my work? What forms and materials will be best for what I wish to express? How can my work metaphorically embody my ideas?

"Desire lines" refer to the well-worn, yet unruled paths made by bodies finding their way. What bodily pathways are prescribed by dance and movement training, and where do our bodies really want to go? How might individual and shared making processes activate tensions between what has been prescribed and the movement(s) we most desire? What do concepts of home teach us about the contours of our interior worlds? How might we map and choreograph home space?

This beginning-level course invites students to develop movement, making, and performance practices as vehicles for thinking about and supporting new beginnings. The course will function as dance class, rehearsal, and research seminar where we will examine assumptions about whose bodies are afforded the opportunity to be expressive, and learn to trust what our bodies already know.

This is an intermediate to advanced creative writing workshop with a focus on writing closely and observing the natural world, particularly-though not exclusively-the realm of birds. Both fiction and creative non-fiction will be written and read, with the purpose of more intimately understanding what it means to have an environmental imagination, local and global, and why environmental, social, and racial justice are inseparable.

In this workshop, students will consider different configurations of time as frameworks through which to explore the emergence of self and the experience of place. By paying close attention to notions of multiplicity, continuity, rupture, and simultaneity, students will be encouraged to develop poems and prose works that delineate and trouble the trace of time. Prior workshop experience and a willingness to experiment with form are highly recommended. Readings may include works by Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, Georges Perec, Simone White, Arthur Sze, and Jean Valentine, among others.

While I absolutely believe revision can be taught, and reading can be taught. Probably the only sound pedagogical tool for poetry is imitation. Writing can be introduced to people, but ultimately, only poems can teach poetry. Received forms such as sonnets, villanelles, sestinas, pantoums, and ghazals, can understandably appear difficult, daunting even, so, in this workshop, students will extensively read, examine, imitate, and workshop poems that adhere to as well as rethink common received poetic forms and conventions.

This is a creative writing workshop in which students will read and create comics, with an emphasis on comics rooted in autobiographical stories and/or narratives of displacement. Because comics are primarily a visual medium, as much time will be spent considering the visual and artistic choices of the creators as discussing their thematic elements. The same is true for your own work, which will be workshopped for its visual as much as written inventiveness. It doesn't matter if you cannot draw well! Lots of "professional" comics artists are limited in their visual skills.