The College of Arts and Sciences is adding approximately 30 new courses to its listings for the spring semester, according to the Office of Undergraduate Academic Affairs.
As existing curricula expand and new programs form, Academic Assistant Dean for Retention and Outreach Justin Grossman said, IU’s largest academic division strives to keep up with the changing educational landscape by not only adding new options for students, but also updating current courses in increments both large and small.
“New fields of scholarship emerge just as others transform,” Grossman said. ”The interests of our faculty and students change as well. We want to be responsive to these in terms of the courses offered.”
The process for creating a new course can take several weeks and require many revisions, Grossman said. After a course and syllabus are developed by a department, the college reviews the potential class’s learning goals, and whether it fulfills any arts and sciences designations.
This semester, several departments have successfully established new courses.
ENG-R 211 Rhetoric and Sports is a class created by the Department of English and will be taught by Assistant Professor Justin Hodgson. The course will use rhetorical analysis to interpret the culture of sports, and discuss their influence on social movements and political climates.
The idea of Rhetoric and Sports came from the faculty’s recent establishment of a communication and public advocacy minor, and the new undergraduate concentration in public and professional writing. Hodgson wanted to create a course offering that coupled his love for sports and his interest in the importance of communication.
“I’m particularly fascinated by how we talk about sports and the ways sports are fundamental to public life,” Hodgson said.
According to Hodgson, the course will examine traditional and contemporary representations of sports in the media, ranging from books to TV series.
“I want to develop more sophisticated ways and more considerate practices for talking about and thinking about sports, sports issues, sports figures and sport values,” Hodgson said.
The Department of Criminal Justice is also offering CJUS-P 318 Global Gender and Justice, which will be taught by adjunct lecturer Helen Levesque. This course will focus on the contexts of several gender-related issues, such as human trafficking, rape and domestic violence.
Levesque said the course stemmed from her desire to update Gender and Crime, a class she taught previously. She wanted to view a larger number of issues through a global lens. After updating her course description, the college decided to turn her changes into an entirely new course.
“Part of the reason that I wanted to move away from my old mode of teaching Gender and Crime was that I felt that the content had really become dated given the global culture we experience today and the international make-up of IU’s student body,” Levesque said.
Through her new course, Levesque said she wants to tackle several issues that go beyond the United States’ borders, and compare the attitudes toward these problems overseas to a more domestic perspective.
Notable additions to the curriculum include discussions on global issues such as child prostitution in developing nations, international sex slavery and the steep incarceration rates for minority men. Levesque said these international issues are often overlooked in the conversations that typically take place in criminal justice classes.
“In the current academic and social climate, I think that students feel like citizens of the whole world and want to learn about issues pertinent across cultures,” Levesque said.
