2012-2013 Courses

Instructor: Laurie Anderson, Department of Botany and Microbiology
Tentative Title: Global Change Biology
Travel Component: Brazil – May (2 weeks)
Tentative Student Costs: $4,500
Global Change Biology is an upper-level science course that focuses on how organisms influence, interact with, and are affected by global environmental changes such as increasing temperature, increasing carbon dioxide, and changes in nitrogen cycling and precipitation. This course will use the Brazilian Amazon region as a case study to explore interactions among living organisms, global environmental change, and human pressures, such as deforestation and agricultural expansion, on the environment. Tentative destinations in Brazil include the Cristalino Jungle Lodge, an ecotourism center in the southern Amazon rainforest with a strong focus on local sustainability and forest conservation; the Brazilian cerrado (savanna) ecosystem, which is the type of habitat that the Amazon rainforest is predicted to become in warmer future climates; and the Brazilian Pantanal, a vast wetland region that offers a wonderful learning opportunity to consider the role of wetlands in future global climate scenarios and outstanding wildlife viewing.

Instructor: Amy Downing, Department of Zoology
Tentative Title: Marine Biology
Travel Component: North Carolina – October 5 days (Fall Semester)
Tentative Student Costs: $300
Marine biology is the study of life in the ocean. Topics include physical and chemical properties of oceans, productivity and energy flow, and animal and plant diversity. This course will cover both physical and biological features of major habitats, as well as the ecology and physiology of representative animals. Emphasis is placed on human interactions with the marine environment including human impacts on coral reefs, fisheries, marine mammals, and coastal ecosystems. Laboratory study explores standard marine biology techniques, experimental design, data analysis, and exposure to representative marine animals and plants. Over mid-semester break, the class will travel to the Duke Marine Lab on the Atlantic coastline in Beaufort, N.C., where we will visit salt marshes, mudflats, exposed beaches, and nearshore open water and benthic habitats.

Instructors: Amy Downing, Department of Zoology; Ramon Carreno, Department of Zoology
Tentative Title: Island Biology
Travel Component: Ecuador – May (2 Weeks)
Tentative Student Costs: $4,200
Island biology is a course that focuses on how characteristics of islands create fascinating biological phenomena for study. The course discusses the reasons island organisms provide superior examples for the study of evolution, ecology, behavior, and conservation. The course includes a required trip to the Galapagos Islands (extra cost). As part of the trip, students will travel to the Ecuadorian Cloud Forest north of Quito for a brief time before traveling to the Galapagos, where we will explore the islands by boat for 7 days. The Galapagos portion of the trip involves day excursions on the islands and many snorkeling opportunities around the shorelines. Students prepare intensively for this experience.
Prerequisite: Permission of instructor and one unit in Botany and Microbiology or Zoology.

Instructor: Janalee Emmer, Department of Fine Arts
Tentative Title: Contemporary Art
Travel Component: New York – May (2 weeks)
Tentative Student Costs: $840
This course focuses on contemporary art from the 1940s to the present, including a wide range of media from paintings, sculpture, and photography to performance, installation, and design, among others. Upon conclusion of the semester, we will travel to New York City, one of the world’s most vibrant centers of contemporary art. During this travel course, the students will be able to see in person many of the works that we studied in class, such Jackson Pollock’s early drip paintings at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party at the Brooklyn Museum, or Chuck Close’s hyper-realistic portrait paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This travel-learning course is aimed at showing the art scene in New York at close quarters, perhaps with a view to working in the field or to pursuing further study of contemporary art in the future. We will visit museums, galleries, and an auction house to see influential artworks in person and visit important sites connected to the art world. At these sites, we will have presentations, lectures, class discussions, and, where possible, visits with curators, artists, and other professionals.

Instructor: Chris Fink, Department of Health and Human Kinetics
Tentative Title: A Qualitative Investigation of Food Philosophies and Traditions
Travel Component: Italy – May (2 weeks)
Tentative Student Costs: $2,100
The course will be focused on developing qualitative, ethnographic research skills, and on a cross-cultural comparison of aspects of the food system in the United States and Italy. Skills to be developed include structured observation, interviewing, and focus group work, as well as thematic analysis. The particular project in this course will focus on an ethnographic examination of changes to the social and built food environment as well as individual food philosophies and traditions in the United States, and especially in Central Ohio. Findings then will be compared with similar factors in several locations in Italy, where students also will have the opportunity to share their findings with students and professionals in food studies and health promotion. Additionally, the time spent in Italy will give students an opportunity to think critically about their results, as they will encounter a set of social-ecological variables that are different from their experience here in Ohio. These variables will foster discussion about the potential for the promotion of an improved connection with food and diet locally, and how this might affect broader health and systemic goals.

Instructor: Lee Fratantuono, Department of Humanities and Classics
Tentative Title: Chasing the Dream: Alexander the Great
Travel Component: Greece/Turkey – May (2 weeks)
Tentative Student Costs: $3,000
This travel-learning course will follow in the footsteps of the early life and career of Alexander the Great, as we advance from Greece to Macedonia to Turkey. Students will have a chance to explore sites of special connection to Alexander, as well as explore the important contemporary European debates about the identity of Greeks versus Macedonians, and the relationship between East and West at the Hellespont, where Europe meets Asia and Greece joins Turkey.

Instructor: Jason Hiester, Department of Music
Tentative Title: Choral Music of Italy
Travel Component: Italy – March (Spring Break)
Tentative Student Costs: $2,400
Chamber Singers will spend the semester studying the choral music of the Renaissance and Baroque Italian master composers with the intention of visiting and singing at the churches and opera houses where these composers specifically wrote and directed their music. We will visit Saint Mark’s Basilica in Venice, the church where Giovanni Gabrieli, Andrea Gabrieli, and Heinrich Schütz worked during the early Baroque period. We will visit the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence; the Renaissance composer Guillaume Dufay wrote specific motets that were strongly influenced by the structure of this cathedral. The patron system was an important factor in the development of music in the Renaissance and Baroque time periods and, thus, we will seek to visit these patrons’ palaces as well.

Instructor: Frank Hobbs, Department of Fine Arts
Tentative Title: Landscape Painting in Italy
Travel Component: Italy – May (2 weeks)
Tentative Student Costs: $2,300
This course offers students a unique opportunity to expand their knowledge and practice of landscape painting by traveling and painting in Italy, while studying the history, critical theories, and practices of the art form that developed there in the mid-19th century. The course will enable students to study the paintings of the Macchiaioli in the country where they were painted, while working on-site in many of the same spots where these, and other historically significant, artists painted. Students will engage and develop their own skills in landscape painting while gaining knowledge of the Italian tradition of that art form, as well as the role played by landscape images in shaping the cultural identity of Italy in the aftermath of the Risorgimento.

Instructor: Mary Howard, Department of Sociology/Anthropology
Tentative Title: The Andes: Environment, Poverty, and People
Travel Component: Peru and Bolivia – May (2 weeks)
Tentative Student Costs: $1,400
This course examines the challenges to the South American Andean Region’s fragile ecosystem and the impact of such on the humans inhabiting it. During the 2013 spring semester, our class will begin a study of the history, ecology, and culture of both Peru and Bolivia. In May, we will fly into Cuzco, Peru, where we will visit the ancient Inca ruins of Machu Pichu. From there, we will travel to Lake Titicaca and Bolivia’s capital, La Paz. After a week in the highlands, we will fly to Santa Cruz province in Bolivia’s lowlands, the reluctant host community for massive numbers of altiplano migrants fleeing environmental disaster and poverty in the highlands. We will move to nearby Buena Vista – a town bordering the Amazon Basin of Bolivia and home to Amboro National Park. We’ll be staying at Flora y Fauna Hostel, which is run by Dr. Robin Clarke, zoologist and co-founder of Amboro National Park. We will take daylong hikes into Amboro and spend time with Robin’s neighbors in a peasant farming village. Throughout our time in Bolivia, Robin and I will engage students in discussions of the course’s themes. Our travel will bring to life the issues we read about in the classroom: global warming, ecological degradation, migration, squatting, urban poverty, rapid social change, political crisis, and ethnic and regional conflict. We will not simply read about such issues, but will be living with and interviewing those affected by them. Students may have decided where they stand prior to leaving, but they will all have their views challenged and complicated by the realities they witness.

Instructor: Zack Long, Department of English
Tentative Title: Shakespeare at the Globe
Travel Component: England – May (1 week)
Tentative Student Costs: $1,700
Shakespeare’s plays were written for specific actors and particular performance spaces. The most famous of Shakespeare’s playhouses was the Globe Theatre, where works such as Henry V, Hamlet, and As You Like It were originally produced. This course explores the staging practices, acting styles, and performance conditions of Shakespeare’s Globe, with special focus on the research and findings of scholars and theatre professionals working at the reconstructed Globe Theatre in London, the most accurate re-creation of a Shakespearean playhouse in the world. The course will culminate in a weeklong trip to the reconstructed Globe, where students will see plays, attend lectures, and participate in workshops led by Globe Education scholars, actors, and theatre professionals, while also touring sites of Shakespearean interest in London.

Instructor: Karen Poremski, Department of English
Tentative Title: Reading Native American Literature: The Reservation and The City
Travel Component: South Dakota, Minneapolis (Minnesota), Chicago (Illinois) – May (2 weeks)
Tentative Student Costs: $900
Since the beginning of the Native American Literary Renaissance in the 1970s, works by native writers have sought to depict life on the reservation in all its complexities—from the problems that go hand-in-hand with poverty and isolation to the resources arising from a rich cultural life in a community that carries on its traditions and language. Writers depict the reservation as a space that is crucial to native communities. At the same time, writers also depict life in the city, where the population of native people has risen since the 1950s in the wake of Treaty Termination and Relocation, a federal program that relocated native people away from poverty-stricken reservations. While this program often did improve economic opportunities for native families, it also separated them from extended networks of community support, disrupted long-held relationships with their traditional homelands, and removed them from the sites of stories that have been told for centuries. In this course, students will read Native American literary works that depict the reservation and the city in all their complexities. At the end of the semester, we will travel to the Sicangu Lakota Nation (also known as Rosebud Reservation) to learn from elders and artists about reservation life for one week. We will then travel to Chicago and Minneapolis to learn about the urban Indian Centers there, and learn from elders and artists about native life in the city.

Instructor: Melinda Rhodes, Department of Journalism
Tentative Title: Fallout on Fleet Street: Effects of Rupert Murdoch Scandal on British Press
Travel Component: England – May (9 days)
Tentative Student Costs: $1,700
This course explores literary journalism and advanced-reporting techniques. Students engage in long-form storytelling to improve research and interviewing skills, expand practical knowledge of media law and ethics, learn how to use public records and documents, and hone creative writing techniques that can be applied to and enhance nonfiction work. During the course, we will periodically examine techniques that resulted in the News Corp media scandal in London, discuss how those stories might have been generated legally and ethically, and, finally, visit with professional journalists, story subjects, litigators and lawmakers involved in the scandal and/or media reform. By permission of instructor, open to non-journalism majors/minors with an interest in creative nonfiction.

Instructor: Emmanuel Twesigye, Department of Religion
Tentative Title: Christianity and the Non Western Challenge
Travel Component: Uganda – May-June (2 weeks)
Tentative Student Costs: $2,900
Christianity and the serious political and cultural conflicts in Africa and Latin America will be discussed. Examples of the dynamics of the processes of developing locally relevant Christian ethics, theology, rituals, symbols, and worship within the traditional cultural, moral, historical, and political complexities in the context of challenging religious pluralism of Africa will be discussed very fully in preparation for this travel course. Given that Christianity in its Catholic and Pentecostal expressions is growing fastest in Africa and Latin America, students will go to Uganda, which is the center of African Catholic Christianity, for the travel and experiential component. The course will also pay close attention to the African context as the basis for meaningful study and understanding Christianity and its political, cultural, and moral challenges, especially in Africa. African cultures, religion-political history, and Christian Martyrs of Africa in Uganda will be the main focus. Students will have a rare opportunity to witness, document, and participate in the very colorful and historically important annual Christian holy pilgrimage and celebration of the African Catholic Saints and Christian Martyrs of Uganda. The spectacular celebrations take place in the first week of June. The students will also visit historical sites, royal palaces, universities, cathedrals, mosques, the source of the River Nile in Jinja on Lake Victoria, and selected African wildlife parks. The participating students are expected to keep either a detailed photo journal or detailed written journal to be used to write a travel report for grading. The journals will be used for sharing experiences with each other, and be kept for purposes of reporting to the OWU community in the fall.

Instructors: Paula White, Department of Education; John Durst, Department of Sociology/Anthropology
Tentative Title: Teaching for Equity and Social Justice
Travel Component: Mississippi – March (Spring Break)
Tentative Student Costs: $300
EDUC 100.2 Teaching for Equity and Social Justice provides students the opportunity to examine education through an equity and social justice lens. Using social justice education as the theoretical framework, students will investigate ways in which racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, ageism, and other forms of discrimination permeate educational policy and practice. By understanding systems of power, privilege, and oppression, all students, especially teacher education students, will be prepared to consider what individuals, schools, and communities can do to ensure that all learners have equitable educational opportunities. During SOAN 499 Seminar in Applied Sociology and Anthropology, senior majors in sociology/anthropology undertake a significant project based on either original research or an internship experience. Emphasis is placed on the application of sociology and anthropology to significant problems in the United States and abroad. Students enrolled in these two courses will explore social justice issues surrounding the development of a Freedom School in Mississippi Delta.

Instructor: Ching-Hsuan Wu, Department of Modern Foreign Languages
Tentative Title: CHIN 300.5 Introduction of Chinese Literature, Classical, Contemporary, and Modern
Travel Component: China – May (2 weeks)
Tentative Student Costs: $2,800
A selection of poetry and prose from Chinese classical, contemporary, and modern literature is studied, analyzed, and compared to develop students’ understanding of how Chinese literature styles, philosophy, history, values, people, and society have evolved over time. The class will be conducted in Chinese, and the reading materials will be in Chinese. The class will meet 3 hours per week during the spring semester 2013 and then will travel to different poetic sites in China, such as Sichuan, Shanxi, Yellow Mountain, Yellow Crane Pagoda, and The Three Gorges in Yangtze River., where the students learn about in the selected literature. The students also will have the opportunity to visit a Chinese literature class in a university and interact with local students.

Instructor: Alper Yalçinkaya, Department of Sociology/Anthropology
Tentative Title: Sociology of Knowledge
Travel Component: England/Scotland – May (10 days)
Tentative Student Costs: $3,000
In this course, we analyze the social factors that shape the way we perceive and think about the world and our existence within it. We discuss different approaches to concepts such as ideology, worldview, and hegemony, and study the characteristics of social institutions that produce knowledge. A central question we focus on is what makes knowledge claims credible and authoritative. For this purpose, we analyze science as a social institution and the ways in which scientific knowledge is produced and displayed. As part of this course, we will visit locations in England and Scotland that are significant for the social history of science and demonstrate how different social groups and practices that are no longer seen as “scientific” played a part in the transformation of science into the institution that it is today. We will also see how “science” and “the scientist” are represented in museums and similar institutions, and compare these representations with the ways other (“less authoritative”) types of knowledge production are represented.