BA / MAT 4+1 PROGRAM

92087

MAT ED151 Pedagogy AND Practice: SOCIAL, CULTURAL AND EDUCATIONAL ISSUES IN Civic EngagEMENT

Mary Leonard Michael Murray

T 6:30 pm-7:45 pm

OLIN 205

Time: Tuesdays, 6:30-7:45 pm and four Saturdays between 9:00am-12:30pm (10/7; 10/14; 10/28; 11/4). There will also be one required day in which you will be teaching ninth graders from the Rhinebeck High School, scheduled for Friday from 9:00-2:00.

Credits: 2 This course is designed for Bard undergraduates who are working in one of the college’s many educational outreach programs and who are committed to the idea of civic engagement. Guided by readings in education, we will consider the inter-personal, cultural, social and ethical issues that arise in the context of civic engagement in schools.  In particular, we will consider:

         What are our personal and professional aspirations as tutors, mentors and leaders?

         What systemic or other changes might we like to see in our civic engagement and how might we best go about making or advocating for them?

         How can we improve our own communication skills so that we become better and more skillful listeners and responders?

· What are the potential challenges we may face in supporting someone’s learning?

Throughout this course we will emphasize writing as a means of engaging with content, and we will workshop and critique problems that you may experience and encounter in your outreach work. This course is required of all junior-year MAT 3+2 students, who will be expected to tutor in Bard College’s Hudson-based programs. It is also recommended for tutors and mentors in all TLS education programs. It will be graded pass/fail and carries two credits (non-distributional).  Class size: 22

92086

LIT 355 American Realisms

Jaime Alves

Th 6:00 pm-8:20 pm

HEG 308

LA

ELIT

This course is centered around American literary texts produced between (roughly) 1865 and 1914, by a variety of writers seeking to convey the “realities” of American life and culture in this turbulent period. A conventional understanding of Realism has, for many years, been defined by the works of James, Howells, Twain, Crane, Dreiser, Wharton, and Chopin---a handful of writers whose influential and significant contributions to the aesthetic movement of Realism are uncontested, but whose positionality (especially as white, privileged, and, for the most part, male) severely limited their ability to record, shape, or criticize the diverse whole of “real” American life. Alongside works by these writers, then, we will also examine texts by writers of color, of varying ethnicities, and by greater numbers of women, in order to access and better understand the different realities they were striving to document and influence. Texts by Zitkala-Sa, Charles Chesnutt, W.E.B. DuBois, James Weldon Johnson, and Sui Sin Far---whose contributions are now, finally, garnering attention as responsive to and constitutive of a larger Realist aesthetic---flesh out our shared reading list, enriching and complicating our encounters with American languages, stories, and forms. In addition to the course readings, students will work closely with essays in contemporary criticism to analyze how current scholars wrangle with problems of defining Realism and its offshoots, among them Naturalism and Regionalism. A variety of writing assignments will afford us the opportunity to consider how small groups of texts converse about Realism’s major themes and preoccupations. This course is cross-listed with the MAT program for 3+2 students in literature. Class size: 10

92120

HIST 3224 The Great War in World History

Wendy Urban-Mead

Th 4:40 pm-7:00 pm

OLIN 201

HA D+J

HIST

This seminar examines changes and trends in the research and writing of history as practiced by professional historians. After brief consideration of the origins of history as a formal academic discipline in the 19th Century, and of the transition from political to social history in the mid-twentieth century, we also consider the shift from social history to the multiplicity of approaches that came out of the "theory explosion" between the 1960s and early 2000s. This course draws from the fields of modern European, African, and World History. Course readings shall consist mostly (but not entirely) of historical writing about the Great War from a variety of historiographical points of view. Readings also include a wide range of primary materials. Conventional teaching on WWI tends to follow the diplomatic history approach, and to emphasize the war on the western front. To enlarge this view, we will read not only from the classic “causes of WWI" literature, but also from gender, cultural, and post colonial treatments of the war, and read about the impact of the war on the eastern front, on China, in Africa. Working with this diversity of texts gives us the opportunity explicitly to discuss how different historiographical approaches change how we understand “what happened." This course satisfies the historiography requirement for Historical Studies concentrators; it may also serve as a Major Conference if arranged with the instructor. This course is cross-listed with the MAT program for 3+2 students in social studies/history. Class size: 15