Division of Continual Learning
MALS Program - Fall 2007 Courses
Fall 2007
Each seminar carries three academic credit hours.
Arts & Activism
MLS 610A
August 23 - December 6
Thursdays, 6:00 - 8:50 pm
Triad Center, 7900 Triad Center Drive
Click here for syllabus.
Who Wrote the Bible?
MLS 610B
Mondays, 6:00 - 8:50pm
August 20 - November 26
Triad Center, 7900 Triad Center Drive
Click here for book list.
Click here for tentative syllabus.
Voices from Latin America: Why Don’t They Like Us?
MLS 610C
ONLINE COURSE
August 20 - December 10
Click here for syllabus and book list.
The Age of Revolutions
MLS 610D
ONLINE COURSE
August 20 - December 10
Click here for syllabus and book list.
Dress, Identity, and Culture
MLS 620A
Tuesdays, 6:00 - 8:50pm
August 21 - December 4
Triad Center, 7900 Triad Center Drive
Click here for book list.
The Global Economy
MLS 620B
ONLINE COURSE
August 20 - December 10
Click here for syllabus and book list.
Global Human Rights
MLS 620C
ONLINE COURSE
September 10 - November 16
Click here for tentative syllabus.
Creating Peace
MLS 620D
August 22 - December 5
Wednesdays, 6:00 - 8:50 pm
Mandatory Retreat: September 15th, 9am-3pm, Riverbirch Retreat Center
Riverbirch Retreat Center, 7628 Penns Grove Rd., Summerfield
Click here for tentative syllabus.
Slow Food in a Fast Food Nation
MLS 620E
Mondays, 6:00 - 8:50 pm
August 20 - November 26
Triad Center, 7900 Triad Center Drive
Click here for book list.
MLS 610A
August 23 - December 6
Thursdays, 6:00 - 8:50 pm
Triad Center, 7900 Triad Center Drive
Artists and their work have stoked the furnaces of social change for as long as there have been societies. They have championed lost causes, won hearts and minds, and even toppled governments through their medium of choice. In this course we will explore the impact theatre, music, film, and visual arts have made when artists became activists. Social, political, and historical issues of local, national, and global concern will come to life through readings, discussions, film, performances, and guest artists.
Dr. Marsha Paludan is an Associate Professor in the UNCG Theatre Department, a member of the Performance Faculty, and the recipient of the 2001 Teaching Excellence Award. In her career as a performance artist and director she has been drawn to projects that build and inspire community, compassion and healing.
Creating Peace
MLS620D
August 22 - December 5
Wednesdays, 6:00 - 8:50 pm
Mandatory Retreat: September 15th, 9am-3pm, Riverbirch Retreat Center
Riverbirch Retreat Center, 7628 Penns Grove Rd., Summerfield
September 11, 2001 brought Americans to a heightened awareness of the choices we face in creating peace in the world. For some it is about changing others (eliminate them or convert them to our ways of thinking and believing). For others, it is about changing themselves—we must become the peace we seek. This offering is an active and interactive seminar on creating peace in ourselves, our families, our communities and the world. Special emphasis will be placed on non-violent communication skills, conflict resolution, and a variety of tools that support the inward journey of creating peace in our own lives.
Dr. Dee Irwin is retired from the UNCG School of Education where she taught human development and curriculum studies. She is currently Director of Healing Ground, a ministry of the Servant Leadership School of Greensboro.
Dress, Identity, and Culture
MLS620A
Tuesdays, 6:00 - 8:50pm
August 21 - December 4
Triad Center, 7900 Triad Center Drive
Dress is an intensely personal phenomenon, in that it helps us to express our innermost thoughts, feelings, and desires. At the same time, dress is completely socially situated as it functions to make such thoughts, feelings, and desires public. In this course, dress, in the form of modifications made to the body and supplements placed on the body, is the starting point for an exploration of the self in society. We will examine the ways by which the dressed body communicates our personal and social identities through its intersections with such factors as gender, age, social roles, ethnicity, and culture. Our study of dress will be contextualized through an interdisciplinary examination of how time and space are critical to understanding the meanings that are both embedded within and expressed through the dressed body.
Nancy Nelson Hodges (Ph.D. University of Minnesota) is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Consumer, Apparel, and Retail Studies department at UNCG. Dr. Nelson Hodges’ research emphasis involves the exploration of dress in history, culture and society. Specifically, her research focuses on issues of gender as related to dress. Current research topics include: women, education, and the textile and apparel industry in North Carolina; cross-dressing and the Internet; the social psychology of apparel consumption; and women and the creation of knowledge within the clothing and textiles field.
Global Human Rights
MLS620C
ONLINE COURSE
August 20 - December 10
The setting of this course is a grassroots, intensely focused, and highly respected human rights organization. MALS students will join the organization as trainees to become human rights monitors (investigators). The highly interactive training program will require new monitors to learn by exploring human rights issues around the world. The research requires virtual travel to sites of current conflict to investigate allegations of genocide in Darfur, sex slavery in Thailand, detainee abuse in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, and growing threats to civil liberties.
Although there will be no formal textbooks, students will develop critical familiarity with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, its historical antecedents in the U.S. Bill of Rights and the French Rights of Man, and explore their cultural and political foundations. Most required readings will be available online, but students will be expected to view documentaries and films as well as read additional materials that inform their human rights research.
Students will become proficient in research methodologies that encourage investigative independence and creativity while maintaining academic rigor in order to understand complex issues and recommend achievable solutions in their reports to the agency director.William Hamilton, Ph.D. (Tulane University) is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies Program. Previously he taught at universities in Louisiana and Indiana. At Tulane University he specialized in Latin American intellectual history, human rights, and church-state relations.
Slow Food in a Fast Nation
MLS 620E
Mondays, 6:00 - 8:50 pm
August 20 - November 26
Location TBA
Enjoying good food slowly has become a rare experience. Fast food joints, eating on the run, microwave dinners, and processed foods have become the norm.
Eating healthy food has become even rarer. Over-used pesticides (a potato requires 17 applications), growth hormones and antibiotics in our meat, breakfast cereals with genetically modified foods (not allowed in Europe), and dubious additions of salt, sugar and fat in just about everything, have rendered us fat, disease prone, and tired.
The earth—the soil, water aquifers, clean water, and biodiversity—suffer too. Our farmland loses a ton of soil per acre each year; half of our productive soil has gone with the wind. Large scale agriculture is our biggest polluter, bigger than cars or heavy industry.
How did it get this way? That is a story we will tell. In this story, there are good guys and bad guys, and a lot of duped eaters who got caught up in the cheap and abundant food of petroleum based agriculture.
Is there another way? Yes, there is and it also is a cluster of practices and attitudes, growers and eaters, but these follow a different rule, the rule of slow food.
Slow food begins with a cooperative partnership between growers and the land. The food, often organic, passes on to the consumer more directly; it tastes fresh and is more nutritious. Eating becomes a more convivial experience; the meals may be longer. Back at the farm, the soil is enhanced, local species are protected, and the rural economy gets a shot in the arm.
We will read several books, including Eat Here and Hope’s Edge, and discuss the cultural, economic, ecological, and psychological aspects of slow food in a fast food nation. A paper and a project are also required.
An additional fee of $50.00 for common food fund is required.Charlie Headington (PhD, University of Chicago), teaches a variety of courses at UNCG and in the community. Most of them encourage people to examine themselves and society, and make constructive changes in how they think and live. He likes to garden, walk, cook, be with his family, and learn Italian.
The Age of Revolutions
MLS 610D
ONLINE COURSE
August 20 - December 10
Changes in the Western world over the last 600 years have been so profound as to constitute a series of revolutions. This course examines this “Age of Revolutions,” and figures out how each one, from the Commercial Revolution to the Sexual Revolution, helped shape the modern age. In each revolutionary episode, we will look at the institutions, practices, and ideas that were overthrown or radically altered by new developments; examine the individuals and texts that played a critical role; and trace the impact the new institutions, practices, and ideas had on the revolution brought forth.
William Hamilton, Ph.D. (Tulane University) is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies Program. Previously he taught at universities in Louisiana and Indiana. At Tulane University he specialized in Latin American intellectual history, human rights, and church-state relations.
The Global Economy
MLS620B
ONLINE COURSE
August 20 - December 10
For the past decade or so, “globalization” has been the media buzzword used to describe changes in the U.S. and world economies, perhaps second in recent years only to “the New Economy” in frequency of use. For the most part, this discussion of globalization has focused on changes that seem apparent in contrast to the period following WWII. According to one popular version of this story, in the 1970s the barriers to cross-border trade and financial transactions began to come down. By the late 1990s, as one commentator put it, we lived on the cusp of a “borderless world” where people, information, equipment and ideas would flow freely. In this context, it was imagined, the world would prosper as never before.
During the post-war period, global cross-border trade and financial transactions were a fraction of what they are today. For many developed countries, the increased trade of the past few decades has meant a decline in the importance of manufacturing, as production of everything from cars to shoes has moved to places where labor was relatively cheap. For a few developing countries, this has meant increased investment from rich developed nations. But for many—especially countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, to say nothing of the ex-manufacturing sectors of the developed world—so called
“globalization” has bought few, if any, of the beneficial effects once imagined. Or so it would seem.
This course begins where the theory of the global economy and its reality meet. In general, the course highlights the theory of free trade, since it is on the back of this theory that the promise of globalization—or we might say, economic liberalization—rests. As we will see the most recent episode of economic liberalization is but a small part of the whole story, although our recent experiences can tell us a good deal about how free trade might or might not work, and for whose benefit.
The course is divided into eight basic units, each exploring an important topic for understanding the global economy.
Jeffrey K. Sarbaum, Ph.D. (SUNY Binghamton) is a Lecturer of Economics at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Dr. Sarbaum specialized in experimental, labor international and urban economics and is an award-winning economics teacher.
Voices from Latin America: Why Don't They Like Us?
MLS 610C
ONLINE COURSE
August 20 - December 10
This class examines the history of U.S. economic, political, and military hegemony in Latin America since the days of “Gunboat” and “Dollar” Diplomacy in the early twentieth century. To understand the recent electoral successes of populist governments in such countries as Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, and Venezuela, we will try to determine why they were able to mobilize voters with anti-U.S./anti-globalization rhetoric. Examining the historical roots of popular resentment and resistance to U.S. interference in Latin American affairs provides us with an opportunity to take a closer look at aspects of our own national character that make it difficult for us to be admired and trusted abroad.
William Hamilton, Ph.D. (Tulane University) spent a decade in Latin America, working with ecumenical human rights and education agencies as a researcher, editor, and grass-roots organizer. At Tulane University he specialized in Latin American intellectual history, human rights, and church-state relations. Previously he taught at universities in Louisiana and Indiana before coming to UNCG in 2004.
Who Wrote the Bible?
MLS610B
Mondays, 6:00 - 8:50pm
August 20 - November 26
Triad Center, 7900 Triad Center Drive
This class examines recent developments in biblical archaeology covering the period between about 2000 B.C. and 500 B.C.–from the time of Abraham to that of the Babylonian exile. We will compare the evidence of archaeological findings with the biblical narrative, and try to understand how and why they differ and what bearing this has on the questions of when, why, and by whom the Bible was written. Students will be graded on class participation and the three required papers.
Dr. Stephen Ruzicka (Ph.D. University of Chicago) is Associate Professor of History. His interests as a classical historian focus on periods of cultural change. He is the recipient of the 2000 Alumni Teaching Excellence Award.
*To participate in any online course, students MUST have access to one of the following system set-ups:
MAC
Mac OS 9 or better
128 MB RAM
G3 processor or better
At least 56Kbps modem connection (although Broadband / fastaccess is preferred)
Internet Explorer 5 or better or Safari
PC
Windows 98 or better
128 MB RAM
Pentium III or better (or at least a processor running 333 Mhz or better)
At least 56Kbps modem connection (although Broadband / fast access is preferred)
Internet Explorer 5.5 or better
Questions? Call Julee Johnson, Liberal Studies Coordinator, (336) 334-4597; or Kathleen Forbes, Director of Liberal Studies, at (336) 334-4599.
The University of North Carolina at Greensboro is committed to equality of educational opportunity and does not descriminate against applicants, students, or employees, based on race, color, national origin, religion, gender, age, or disability.