Humanities Learning Communities

Anyone, no matter what your major is, can choose to participate in the Humanities Learning Community. Each Learning Community will consist of 60-120 students and two to three faculty members. In addition, each community will have a different theme. Each semester students will:

  • Attend one large weekly lecture (60-120 students) on a theme/topic that meets the learning requirements for the General Education (GE) C3 requirement (Humanities)
  • Attend a weekly seminar (20-25 students) linked to the lecture to practice critical thinking, writing, and oral presentation skills. The weekly seminar will fulfill GE area A3, critical thinking.

Students who successfully complete the two-semester sequence will receive credit for GE areas A3 and C3.

Students can choose from the following options:

African American Culture

Michael Ezra (AMCS) & Kim Hester-Williams (English)

AMCS 101 is a learning community centered around the critical study of African American culture. In this course, students will explore African American culture through a wide range of media and forms, including literature, visual art, music, and theater. These texts will come from a wide range of time periods from slavery to the present. Students will be encouraged to produce original interpretations of African American cultural texts as a means of understanding their own lives. This community also fulfills the ethnic studies requirement.

Art History & Visual Culture

Jennifer Roberson & Jennifer Shaw (Art)

In this community you will learn about the history and cultural significance of art and architecture from Prehistory through the Modern Period. As the scope of the course is vast, the focus will be on works that are representative of a specific style period or movement (religious, political, social), emphasizing the ways that art functions as aesthetic objects and as cultural artifacts. We will ask questions about who made them, how they were made, and why? This will lead us to a consideration of broader issues of immediate concern for us: Who is art made for? What are its uses? What is the relationship between art and politics? What is its spiritual significance? What ideas about the human body are represented in the arts of different cultures? What is beauty? How does the answer to that question vary over time and in different places? In addition to counting for GE, this course also fulfills lower division requirements for the Art Studio and Art History majors.

Culture, Self-Making, and Power

Patricia Kim-Rajal (CALS) & Anne Goldman (English)

This learning community explores the ways in which individuals and communities define and are defined by cultural practices. How does art allow us to express ourselves as individuals? How do we come to recognize ourselves through the cultures we claim? How do these processes situate us with respect to racial and ethnic communities?  We will address these broad questions through case study, by focusing on the ways Latina/o contributions to literature, theater, cinema, television, fine art, and music reflect and challenge notions of the "American me/we." This community also fulfills theethnic studies requirement.

Introduction To Critical Language Studies: Language, Power and Society

Robert Train (Modern Languages) & Greta Vollmer (English)>

Nothing in our lives is more central to who we are and what we do than language. Yet the everyday presence of language in human existence often masks important questions as to what language is, how we become speakers of a language, and how we understand our selves, other people and our world in terms of language. This 4 unit course offers students a path toward understanding these issues and others by critically examining language as a sociocultural construct that gives shape to and is shaped by larger social, political, and historical contexts. Through lectures and small seminar groups, students will be introduced to cross-disciplinary approaches to language study drawing upon modern languages, education, anthropology, cultural studies, sociolinguistics and applied linguistics.  Students will demonstrate their ability to be critically informed language users in complex, multiple social worlds.

Exploring Self, Exploring Other: Transformations In The City of Light

Christine Renaudin & Suzanne Toczyski (Modern Languages)

This community invites students to reflect on their own space in the world, using as their mirror Paris, the City of Lights, its history, culture, and literature. Students will explore their own relationship to their city of origin, their "city" of residence (SSU, Rohnert Park, etc.), and their place in the world in general as they transform themselves into self-aware global citizens.

Philosophy and Law Confront an Unethical World

John Sullins & Joshua Glasgow (Philosophy)

This learning community will focus on legal, ethical, and socio-political issues.  In addition to covering the fundamentals of critical thinking, we will address different topics under our theme, including technology, war, robotics, abortion, discrimination, race, and racism.

The Heart of Wisdom: Compassion And The Good Life

Andy Wallace (Philosophy) & Denny Bozman-Moss (Phil/English)

What makes life worth living? In the Heart of Wisdom: compassion and the good life, students draw upon a rich variety of sources in tandem with their own personal experiences to explore answers to this question. In particular, contemporary science is confirming insights from the ancient wisdom traditions, both Western and Eastern: essential to living a worthwhile life is helping others flourish for their own sake, motivated from an intrinsic concern for their welfare. The positive social emotions, like compassion and lovingkindness, provide humans with a natural and indispensable source of motivation for such helping behavior. The course will provide exercises and readings to help students develop and strengthen their innate capacity to help others intrinsically, to become more compassionate and loving. Students will participate in a range of different kinds of community-based service activities, thereby learning by doing. The Heart of Wisdom is a great course for any student who aspires to a career in the helping professions or for any student who would like to learn more about what makes life worth living, regardless of their career ambitions. Course readings are interdisciplinary. They include selections from philosophy, religion, psychology, biology, history, sociology, and literature.

Seeing Theatre Today

Scott Horstein, Judy Navas, & Christine Cali (Theatre)

Experience great performances created by modern and contemporary theatre artists. Students are engaged as audiences through videotaped productions of renowned and important performers, directors, and choreographers, Department of Theatre Arts and Dance productions, and Associated Students Productions (ASP). Post-viewing discussions, papers, and readings ask students to further engage by reflecting upon their shared experience.

More information

For more information on the School of Arts and Humanities, please visit their website.