Practicum Seminar

This weekly seminar provides students with opportunities to examine curriculum development models, develop an integrated curriculum unit utilizing state and national content area standards, review researched based models of classroom management, and engage in dialogue with practicing teachers regarding numerous aspects of teaching and student learning. Additional topics covered include the arts in education, physical education, legal obligations of teachers, and home-school communication.

Obser & Assist/Inclusive Clsrm

Students are expected to complete a supervised field experience full-time every day during January Intersession in an inclusive classroom in a school setting. Placements can be located within or outside of the Five College area. In addition to the field experience component, students attend three course meetings (detailed below).

Devel. Literacy in Early/Elem

Through a balanced and integrated approach students will learn to develop literacy in early childhood/elementary schools. Class members will learn about emergent literacy, diagnosing language needs, integrating phonics skills in a literature-based program, the teaching of process writing, children's fiction and nonfiction literature, and the use of portfolios for assessment. Course required for spring semester practicum students. Course evaluation is based on written and oral work done individually and in groups. Requires a prepracticum.

Educational Psychology

What do we learn? How do we learn? Why do we learn? In this course, we will study issues of learning, teaching, and motivation that are central to educational psychology. We will explore the shifting paradigms within educational psychology, multiple subject matter areas, (dis)continuities between classroom and home cultures, students' prior experiences, teachers as learners, ethnic and gender identity in the classroom, and learning in out-of-school settings. Requires a prepracticum in a community-based setting.

Film Melodrama and Horror

An examination of classic and contemporary works in two important film genres, melodrama and horror. Topics of particular interest: affinities as well as contrasts between genres; feminist analyses and uses of genre; normative and alternative representations of sexualities; genre and the representations of race; spectatorship and the production of affect - tears and screams - by these genres. Extensive readings in film studies and cultural theory.

Wollstonecraft-Shelley Circle

The dynamic mother-daughter duo of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley is often read as part of the Godwin-Shelley circle, a cadre of writers circulating around their respective literary husbands. This course will place them at the center of literary innovation, examining their expansive work in multiple genres. Asking what it means to be an ardent and provocative women writer during this period, we will discuss their radical politics, their gender theories, and their ideas about literature intervening in the public sphere.

Irish Gothic

This advanced seminar will study the gothic as a genre and as a malleable yet persistent discursive site in Irish literary and political tradition. From the eighteenth century to the present, the gothic has been used to explore aspects of Irish history, in particular colonialism. The course will focus on texts that engage with three primary problems that the Irish gothic is used to explore: violence and terror, famine, and vampirism as a political metaphor.

American Literature III

This course explores the range and variety of American literary expression from the 1920s through the early 1940s. Topics include the role of regionalism; the emergence of a 'modernist' aesthetic; ethnicity and modernism; debates within African American literary culture. Authors include Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Henry Roth, and Pietro Di Donato.

Racism/Inequal in Schools/Soc

What is race? Who decides? Are we a postracial society? This course examines the historical, social, and legal underpinnings of the social construction of race and how perspectives on race have influenced lives within school communities. Classes compare old vs. new racism, contrast the workings of white privilege with calls for white responsibility, explore perspectives on the achievement and opportunity gaps, and examine impact of antiracist pedagogies on inequities in education at the curricular, interpersonal, and institutional levels.

Marlowe, Jonson, Middleton

A seminar on three major early modern dramatists--Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and Thomas Middleton--focusing on the range of genres, characters, conflicts, and aspirations explored in their plays. These playwrights, along with their contemporary Shakespeare, shaped the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century theatre into a site for performing authority and conquest, national and individual identity, trickery and carnival, desire and sexuality, and complex unfoldings of revenge.
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