The Maya of Yesterday and Today

The course provides students a compact immersive experience in Yucatecan culture and Spanish language through a self-directed and individualized program. This course is primarily directed towards students who have previously completed the Yucatán program or are in their final year of studies and have at least an intermediate level of Spanish. Depending on the student, the activities in the class may be entirely project based or more focused on directed coursework with instructors in the Yucatán Program. Either way the students' work will take place on the Yucatán Peninsula and last four weeks.This course requires active student engagement in the preparation of the project as well as during the project. If you are interested in this course, please contact the instructor well in advance.

Picture this: you and your friends are grabbing burgers and you overhear someone order a pop. You instantly get the urge to correct them because soda is the proper word you were taught. Later, the server brings the coke they ordered, which further increases your urge to intervene because they actually ordered Sprite. After all, soda is the correct word. Or is it? Which word is correct? Actually, they all are.

Linguistic variation is inherent to all languages and from a linguistic standpoint, all languages are equal. Yet, humans are continuously judged, evaluated, and discriminated against based on how they speak and write in professional, academic, and everyday settings. These seemingly innocuous comments about correctness have harmful effects on people who don’t conform to perceived language standards. As a result, various forms of discrimination and policies that exist continue to marginalize people due to misinformation and in some cases, disinformation. In this class, we will examine the intersections of language, ideology, and discrimination in everyday, educational, and professional settings while developing our research practices.

Classes will be facilitated through weekly reading discussions and discourse analysis of data (i.e., data sessions) in small and whole group activities. Readings will address the intersections of language and discrimination, such as accentism, racialization, language subordination, and social identities. The class will provide foundational concepts from applied linguistics and related fields, such as sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. The course is also focused on developing your research literacies and project management skills. You will learn how to develop and carry out a project, evaluate the credibility of information, and various types of data. Labs will be used to create space for data sessions and peer-reviews.

Through discourse analysis, you will apply concepts you learned in class to develop your understanding of linguistic diversity and language related issues. Projects can utilize print and digital media to address, for instance, monolingual policies and their impact in educational or workplace settings, intersections of language and gender or race, and various forms of linguistic discrimination in the US or other contexts.

There are no prerequisites and this course is suitable for students who are curious about language, discourse, social issues, as well as research. Students will be evaluated based on completed assignments, such as readings and other homework, research projects, peer-review, and overall class contributions, including lab sessions. You must be prepared to reflect on implicit biases and perceptions of language and rethink how you approach and conceptualize research. This course meets both the writing requirement and HS requirement as it develops genre knowledge, rhetorical awareness, understanding of writing as dynamic and iterative processes, and research literacies grounded in social sciences.

How has human history shaped and been shaped by "the environment"? Environmental history is one of the most exciting new fields in history. In this course we examine world history from Mesopotamia to the present to see the role such things as resource scarcity, mythology, philosophy, imperialism, land policy, theology, plagues, scientific revolutions, the discovery of the new world, the industrial revolution, etc. on the natural, social, and built environments.

The European Union is a fascinating, ongoing experiment in international cooperation. Currently twenty-eight countries have joined together in a supra-national political and economic union, creating a political entity unique to a world of sovereign individual nation-states. This course focuses on understanding this complex and evolving union through study of its main political institutions: the European Council of Ministers, the European Parliament, and the European Commission. We will look at the workings of and functional relationships between these institutions through readings, meetings with politicians, bureaucrats, and NGOs involved in European-level politics, and visits to each of the institutions during two weeks in Brussels. We will also spend some time in the course looking at the broader political and cultural context in which the institutions operate, through examination of several important current topics in European politics. Topics could include: refugees and migrants in Europe, the reauthorization of the Common Agricultural Policy, Brexit, the rise of right-wing movements across countries in the EU. Students will be evaluated based on participation in class discussions, a reflective journal kept during their time in Brussels, and a presentation and final essay on a current EU-relevant political issue of their choosing.

This course provides students with an immersion experience in the language and culture of the Yucatán Peninsula. The course aims to increase student’s abilities to navigate the linguistic and cultural terrain of another society in sensitive, ethical, and effective ways. Class sessions, visiting lecturers, field trips, and readings will provide background on the history and anthropology of Yucatecan culture. Immersion experiences and living with a family will provide one important source of experiential learning. A second source takes the form of an independent project developed by each student based on the student’s interests. This practicum experience involves weekly activities during the term and an intensive independent project during the last three weeks. During these final three weeks, students live in a community of the students choosing, provided the location is relevant to their study and project. While each student is completely free to create their own unique project, past projects have included: creating a children's book, filming a documentary about the families work as ‘Mayan Dancers’, organizing classes for the children in the community, and participating in a crocodile research project. Evaluation is based on participation in the project as well as the final project presentation.

This course is offered through collaboration with CAVILAM as part of the COA program in Vichy, France. Students take 20 hours a week of language classes and workshops taught by immersion methods and advanced audio-visual techniques. Students live with host families in homestays and take part in a variety of cultural activities. They are carefully tested and placed at levels appropriate to their ability and are expected to advance in all four language skills - reading, writing, speaking and listening - as gauged by the European Erasmus scale of competency.