RATIONALE:
Mathematics has developed over the years in part by mathematicians considering questions of practical importance from other disciplines. Understanding many of those applications requires a mathematical background that most college students do not possess. This course presents an array of topics from political science, history, economics and business management. The advantage here is that the tools do not require an extensive mathematical background but in this course, students do develop the analytical skills that mathematicians commonly use to solve problems.
Course Replacement
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IIMATH 315: MATHEMATICS AND SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS
IIMATH 310: THE EVOLUTION OF MATHEMATICS
RATIONALE:
The current MATH 310 addresses the development of mathematical ideas and applications from mathematical, historical, cultural, and scientific perspectives. In addition, the course considers how mathematics has contributed to many other fields of study, and how these other disciplines have in turn enriched the subject of mathematics. It therefore makes sense to revise the course as an interdisciplinary offering in the Integrative Studies Program. As the course builds on both ISP foundations courses, ITW-101 and IQL-101, it would appear most suitable to offer it at the upper-level.
IAMU 112 Latin American Music Survey
RATIONALE:
Latin American Music has served the needs of students in the Spanish
major as a program requirement, of music majors as an option to fulfill
requirements in the BA and BM programs, and of the general student population
as a general education course. It is being revised to meet the needs of the college
and to meet the requirements of the Integrative Studies Program.
IHSP 100 Basic Spanish Language and Culture
RATIONALE:
Course level and content are being described more accurately and have been redesigned in accordance with Integrative Studies Program.
IHFR 100 Basic French Language and Culture
RATIONALE:
Course level and content are being described more accurately and have been redesigned in accordance with Integrative Studies Program.
IIHLSC 350: Women and Health: Witches, Harlots, & Healers
RATIONALE:
We, in Health Science, believe this course is a good course to add to the interdisciplinary program because it is taught from different disciplinary perspectives. Women’s health is primarily studied from health science, history, psychology, and sociology. However, these four dominant perspectives also require the discussion of such topics as economics, politics, women studies, and social justice. For example, in using a historical view, we discuss and analyze the history of women’s health and health related issues (e.g. women’s role in health care). In using the psychological perspective, we look at mental health and mental health related topics, particularly focusing on the history of women’s mental health, the psycho-sociocultural issues of diagnostic categories, and the biopsychosocial issues of body image, eating disorders, and alcohol and other drug problems. In using the sociological view, we incorporate the issues of societal roles, sexism, and oppression in understanding women’s health from the past to the present.
(see attachment for more rationale explanation)
II ECON 310 GAME THEORY
This course takes advantage of an area of expertise that newly-hired Assistant Professor Armağan Gezici brings to the College and provides students from a variety of programs the opportunity to explore the diverse range of applications game theory offers.
II TDS 160 Peak Oil and Sustainable Solutions
As a Professor in the Technology Design and Safety Department, I have been instructing TDS 160 Introduction to Power and Energy continuously since my appointment in 1978. Based largely on my doctoral work at Umass-Amherst (national energy policy, energy conservation, renewable sources), I radically revised the course content over the years to meet TDS programmatic changes. This course has evolved from its Industrial Arts teacher-training roots with in-depth training in the narrow field of mechanics (small engine/auto mechanics; hydraulics, pneumatics) to an orientation to energy systems as they apply to the commercial/industrial, residential and transportation sectors. In the last decade I have worked consciously to develop this course as an interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary exploration of how local initiatives can remedy the problematic combination of flawed federal energy planning and international energy corporate control. To encourage students to apply creative problem-solving strategies to unstructured problems related to local energy issues, I employ a Problem-Based Service Learning or PBSL project (involving local non-profit agencies) that serves as the ‘final examination.”
The course most recently served as a TDS elective in the Technology Studies major and as an open elective that consistently attracted students campus wide — Technology (Product Design and Development), Architecture, Environmental Studies, Computer, Education, Mathematics, Safety, science and social science degree candidates, as well as students pursuing transfer to engineering schools.
[refer to attached Appendix: Rationale, Student Outcomes II, Service Learning, Assessment and Texts for more background]
II-TDS 150 Technology and Civilization
As a Professor in Technology Design and Safety, I previously had been teaching the social science interdisciplinary course IDSS 150 Technology and Civilization on a regular basis since 2000. Political Science Professor Chuck Weed and I developed and team-taught the pilot course that fall. We based our collaboration on our work together at an Antioch Graduate School seminar for faculty in higher education offered earlier that summer. The weeklong experience was designed to bring faculty from different disciplines together to design interdisciplinary courses. Chuck and I completely overhauled an existing interdisciplinary course that I had taught intermittently in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s when it was listed under the “Liberal Studies” prefix as LS 205 Technology and Civilization. Dr. Robert Andrews developed the original course in the early 1980’s.
We had a great time working with the first group of students that fall, and we found ourselves endlessly amending the original challenges (individual and group student assignments), editing content and fine-tuning assessment tools. Unfortunately, department/discipline demands prevented us from repeating our experiment, but fortunately, student feedback and the match of the course content with the needs of TDS majors in Architecture, Technology (Product Design & Development) and Safety encouraged me to offer IDSS 150 at least once a semester.
The range of student research in IDSS 150 over the previous seven years reinforced my intuition that II-TDS 150 would most appropriately be offered as an ISP-Interdisciplinary course as opposed to a Perspectives offering. I have found that the subject content of IDSS 150 had outstripped its social science parameters as students assessed the impact of technical solutions from a wide range of perspectives and their research projects required them to explore solutions based on a multiple of disciplines from the arts and humanities and the from the “hard sciences” — from biology to physics and chemistry.
[refer to attached Appendix: Rationale, Student Outcomes II, Service Learning, Assessment and Texts for more background]
II ENG 270 LITERATURE AND THE ENVIRONMENT
This 200-level course has been taught as an interdisciplinary course since it was added to the catalog. For example, in a team-taught version of this course in the Spring of 2007 on “Mountains and Literary Imagination” we had cultural historians and mathematitions visit the class to talk about the cultural history of specific landscapes about which students were reading poems and looking at paintings. Students also compared the representation of mountains in European and American painting with those from Asian cultures. In the Spring of 2006 the book order included both Wordsworth’s poetry and Tom Wessels’s modern classic of forest ecology Reading the Forested Landscape. This change makes this 200-level English course available as an II course in the Integrative Studies program and provides faculty with the opportunity to continue developing courses that invite interdisciplinary collaboration.