WRC 1010.101 INTRODUCTION TO MATHEMATICS FOR WRC
Gen Ed. Attribute: Quantitative Literacy
Instructor: Dr. Sarah Greenwald
M: 4:00 pm-4:50 pm & TR 3:30 pm-4:45 pm
Prerequisite: passing the math placement test or MAT 0010.
Whether it is counting the number of stars, understanding why the Benjamin Franklin fund never earned its intended money, or managing the uncertainty inherent in polling and medical testing, many real-life situations require the critical and creative analysis of a variety of mathematical interpretations in order to fully consider the implications. This course focuses on local to global connections related to the application of geometry, algebra, probability, and statistics as you develop creative inquiry skills, research techniques, and communication skills. You’ll also explore what mathematics is, what it has to offer, and the diverse ways that people can be successful in mathematics and impact the world (including you!), as we study:
Geometry of our Earth and Universe: How we measure and view the world around us and decide what is the nature of reality.
Personal Finance: How we apply algebra to interest formulas and decisions we make about our own lives.
Consumer Statistics: How probability and statistical techniques allow us to recognize the misrepresentations of studies and make public and private policy decisions.
What is Mathematics? To reflect more broadly about the course themes as we tie the segments together. You can choose a topic you are interested in and research how mathematics relates to it or you can design a creative review of what we covered in class. You will communicate your expertise in a poster presentation session.
WRC 1103.101 INVESTIGATIONS LOCAL: STORIES CAN SAVE US
Gen Ed. Attribute: Serves as first-year Seminar (including Honors) and ENG/RC 1000 for Watauga College students.
Instructor: Professor Joseph Bathanti
Time: TR 11:00 am-1:45 pm & TR 2:00 pm-3:15 pm
"Words are all we have," the great Irish writer, Samuel Beckett, reminds us. All of us bear stories and they all matter, and I would hazard that sharing stories comes as naturally to humans of every stripe as breathing. Stories make us jointly human. They kindle intimacy. Stories can save us even when we don't know we need saving – by returning us to who we are essentially, by underscoring what matters most to us, by taking us back home, wherever that home might reside – an abstract in all likelihood. Tim O'Brien writes, in his short story, "Spin," from The Things They Carried: "Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story." This course will tackle story from a generous vantage. While the bulk of the reading will be short stories – some classic, some brand new, some obscure – we'll also engage with other kinds of stories: poems, memoirs, essays, interviews, film – and we'll host a number of noteworthy guests who will share their spellbinding stories with us. This is a course where your lived life is of the utmost importance, as is the place(s) where that lived life plays out. This is very much a course that relies on autobiography. And, of course, you will write stories too.
*Honors students interested in this course should register for WRC 1103.410
WRC 1103.102 INVESTIGATIONS LOCAL: CONDEMNATION AND CONSOLATION: THE GILEAD NOVELS OF MARILYNNE ROBINSON
Gen Ed. Attribute:Serves as first-year Seminar (including Honors) and ENG/RC 1000 for Watauga College students.
Instructor: Dr. Clark Maddux
Time: TR 11:00 am-1:45 pm & TR 2:00 pm-3:15 pm
The "Gilead" novels of Marilynne Robinson are acknowledged as some of the best works in American fiction, regardless of period. In 4 interlinked narratives, Robinson explores the nature of faith in this country, and the role that religious belief plays in American society, including its historical complicity in racial, gendered, and economic systems of injustice. During this class, we will read, discuss, and write about these works, as well as consider some of Robinson's non-fiction essays that complement her fiction, and explore the Calvinist theology that underpins both.
*Honors students interested in this course should register for WRC 1103.411
WRC 1103.103 INVESTIGATIONS LOCAL: DEMOCRACY: AN OWNER'S MANUAL
Gen Ed. Attribute: Serves as first-year Seminar (including Honors) and ENG/RC 1000 for Watauga College students.
Instructor: Dr. Joseph Gonzalez
Time: TR 11:00 am-1:45 pm & TR 2:00 pm-3:15 pm
Democracy is under attack. Both in the United States and Western Europe, substantial numbers of citizens express disillusion with or contempt for democratic governance. Tens of millions believe that the presidential election of 2020 was "stolen" from their candidate, absent compelling evidence. And young people (by some measures) express the greatest degree of indifference, refusing to participate in important democratic and civic rituals, such as voting.
This semester we will consider how we came to this point--and what we can do about it. In the best traditions of the Watauga Residential College, we will explore the foundations upon which our republic was created, some of the crises it has endured, and its current state. Just as important, we will investigate democratic institutions locally and nationally, critically evaluating the U.S. Constitution and local organizations, such as schools, newspapers, and service clubs, that contribute to our civic life. We will also meet with local leaders, the people who make democracy "work" on a daily basis. Students will conclude the semester by redesigning the U.S. Constitution for the 21st Century.
*Honors students interested in this course should register for WRC 1103 .412
WRC 1103.104 INVESTIGATIONS LOCAL: METAMORPHOSES IN LIFE: LOVE AND DEATH
Gen Ed. Attribute: Serves as first-year Seminar (including Honors) and ENG/RC 1000 for Watauga College students.
Instructor: Dr. Michael Dale
Time: MW 2:00 pm-3:15 pm & TR 11:00 am-1:45 pm
Love and death are oftentimes experienced as seismic upheavals in our lives; we are changed in puzzling, perhaps even mysterious ways by these two forces, sometimes delightfully and sometimes terrifyingly or painfully. In love, suddenly someone or something that perhaps we did not even know existed comes into our life and now is seen and felt as a presence we cannot imagine living without. In death, as the poet Gerald Manley Hopkins puts it, "I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day." How should we see and understand the experiences and transformations wrought by love and death? The question is especially important in a society that frequently trivializes love, and at times and in some circumstances, makes death something to either be avoided, not spoken of, or a spectacle of entertainment.
*Honors students interested in this course should register for WRC 1103.413
WRC 1103.105 INVESTIGATIONS LOCAL: A CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE ON FOOD
Gen Ed. Attribute: Serves as first-year Seminar (including Honors) and ENG/RC 1000 for Watauga College students.
Instructor: Dr. Jessica Martell
Time: MW 2:00 pm-3:15 pm & TR 11:00 am-1:45 pm
Food is everything. Food is the primary source of energy for our bodies; it is a form of creative and cultural expression; and it can be a rallying call for implementing social change. In the last few decades, the popularity of regional foods, like Southern and Appalachian cuisines, has heralded an American culinary renaissance. Yet there is a great deal of controversy and politics wrapped up in food. "Foodie" trends have elevated culinary expression into a high art form; diets like paleo and keto flood social media; and people will fight tooth and nail over the right way to make barbecue. But not everyone has access to food – low income populations all over the world, including in the United States, struggle to find healthy and nutritious food on a daily basis. In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, supply chain disruptions and rising food insecurity have been exposed as major failings of the industrial model.
In this section of WRC 1103, students will learn about how the US food system operates, taking interdisciplinary dives into topics like nutrition, welfare, food justice, and environmental impact. After studying the system's vulnerabilities, students will explore alternative models in the High Country that work towards sustainability, equity, and community resilience. In addition to fulfilling the requirements of first year writing and research, students will apply their academic work by partnering with a Boone-based non-profit and volunteering to support one of their food system reform projects.
*Honors students interested in this course should register for WRC 1103.414
WRC 1103.106 INVESTIGATIONS LOCAL: (BE)LONGING: IDENTITY FORMATIONS IN 19TH-CENTURY AMERICAN ARTS
Gen Ed. Attribute: Serves as first-year Seminar and ENG/RC 1000
Instructor: Dr. Audrey Fessler
Time: TR 11:00 am-1:45 pm & TR 2:00 pm-3:15 pm
Historian David Shi identifies the “process of forging an American identity” as one of the “overarching themes of the early American republic [that] continues to resonate today.” Late-18th-century political writings such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution grounded this unitary (and therefore exclusionary) effort. In the early 1800s, Irving, Cooper, Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, and others began to establish a canon of “American” literature; in 1828, Webster published the first American Dictionary of the English Language, which sought to identify and consolidate a specifically “American” language. How did subsequent writers and artists in other media appropriate, challenge, expand, redefine, and otherwise respond to foundational conceptions of “an American identity”? In answering this question, we will explore a wide range of 19th-century short stories, novels, poems, slave narratives, dream narratives, speeches, paintings, cartoons, songs, and folk art productions, and will visit local museums and attend local artistic performances together.
Students will also research little-known paintings by important American artists and write label texts that may be permanently displayed with those paintings in an area museum. We will travel to the museum three times to work with the curators there, pandemic conditions permitting. Through this project, each classmate’s research and writing can reach and benefit thousands of museum-goers over time!
*Honors students interested in this course should register for WRC 1103.415
WRC 2001.101 28607: DAYS IN THE LIFE
Gen Ed Attribute: Sophomore Writing, Fills ENG/RC 2001 requirements
Instructor: TBA
Time: W 2:00 pm-4:30 pm
Science fiction dazzles its readers with alien invaders, comet collisions, futuristic technologies, and dystopian landscapes. Why are such works so captivating, and what can they show us about the societies that produce them? In this second-year writing course, we will delve into major works of British, U.S., and Indigenous science fiction. We'll begin in the late-nineteenth century, when the genre arguably emerged, and journey through the twentieth century, encountering the "Pulp Era" of the 1920s-30s, the so-called "Golden Age" of the 1950s, and the "New Wave" that began in the late 1960s. We will then spend substantial time on twenty-first century science fiction, including iterations in new mediums such as podcast, digital art, and web series. As we move through this historical progression, we'll analyze common themes such the fraught role of technology and science, the question of what makes someone "human," the use of extrapolation to predict the future, and more. Because science fiction cannot be separated from its social and historical contexts, gender, race, settler colonialism, sexuality, and class will be central to our explorations. Expect to encounter well-known writers like H.G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, Ursula Le Guin, and Octavia Butler, as well as lesser-known and emerging authors and creators.
*Hybrid Course (at least 50% online)
WRC 2001.103 28607: DAYS IN THE LIFE
Gen Ed Attribute: Sophomore Writing, Fills ENG/RC 2001 requirements
Instructor: TBA
Time: TR 12:30 pm-1:45 pm
WRC 2201.101 HEARING VOICES: Science and Nature in Literature
Gen Ed Attribute: Integrative Learning Experience Theme; Literary Studies Designation
Instructor: Dr. Michael Dale
Time: TR 2:00 pm-3:15 pm
Living in relationships with the natural world (land, oceans, and the larger universe of galaxies and star systems) and reaching for an understanding of nature provides fertile ground for novelists, short-story writers, and writers of narrative non-fiction. In this seminar we will explore and examine the intellectual and emotional landscape of fictional and non-fiction beings as they are immersed in and navigate the world of science and nature. What happens when the sciences and humanities meet? What do we learn about science and the all-too-human human beings who pursue scientific knowledge and understanding when both are brought together on the landscapes of novels, short stories, poems, and essays? What do we hear from the voices of science and scientists in narrative literature and poetry?
*Honors students interested in this course should register for WRC 2202.410
WRC 2201.102 HEARING VOICES
Gen Ed Attribute: Integrative Learning Experience Theme; Literary Studies Designation
Instructor: TBA
Time: TR 12:30 pm-1:45 pm
Cherokee scholar Daniel Heath Justice writes in the preface to Why Indigenous Literatures Matter that "To argue for and produce Indigenous writing as such is necessarily to engage in political struggles and to challenge centuries of representational oppression" (xx). Taking Justice's statement as a provocation and launchpad, this course surveys Native American literature from pre-1492 to the present. Students will encounter a variety of genres and mediums including oral tradition, essays, memoir, fiction, graphic novels, poetry, and digital media. We will ask: How do Indigenous values and knowledge systems endure across centuries? How does literature express Indigenous peoples' unique relationships to their lands? What is the relationship between cultural production and Indigenous struggles for sovereignty? How do gender, class, sexuality, and (dis)ability shape what it might mean to be Indigenous? How are Indigenous people enacting decolonization amid the continuing violence of settler colonialism? Students should be prepared to encounter challenging texts, reflect on their relationships to the course readings, and produce writing of their own.
WRC 2201.103 HEARING VOICES
Gen Ed Attribute: Integrative Learning Experience Theme; Literary Studies Designation
Instructor: TBA
Time: TR 3:30 pm-4:45 pm
Cherokee scholar Daniel Heath Justice writes in the preface to Why Indigenous Literatures Matter that "To argue for and produce Indigenous writing as such is necessarily to engage in political struggles and to challenge centuries of representational oppression" (xx). Taking Justice's statement as a provocation and launchpad, this course surveys Native American literature from pre-1492 to the present. Students will encounter a variety of genres and mediums including oral tradition, essays, memoir, fiction, graphic novels, poetry, and digital media. We will ask: How do Indigenous values and knowledge systems endure across centuries? How does literature express Indigenous peoples' unique relationships to their lands? What is the relationship between cultural production and Indigenous struggles for sovereignty? How do gender, class, sexuality, and (dis)ability shape what it might mean to be Indigenous? How are Indigenous people enacting decolonization amid the continuing violence of settler colonialism? Students should be prepared to encounter challenging texts, reflect on their relationships to the course readings, and produce writing of their own.
WRC 2202.101 WHAT IF? ASKING HISTORICAL QUESTIONS
Gen Ed Attribute: Integrated Learning Experience theme; Historical Studies designation
Instructor: Dr. Marjon Ames
Time: MWF 11:00 am-11:50 am
How do we know what we think we know? What informs our understanding of the past? This course examines both historical nonfiction and fictionalized accounts of modern Britain to help us shape the ways we think about European history. Students read a variety of historical works in order to form a foundation of techniques and theories on which to build. Students read fiction and watch films in conjunction with nonfiction in order to consider what results in successful storytelling and why it has fascinated people throughout history. Students examine different storytelling techniques employed, question the quality of the portrayal of the historical backdrop, and observe how different approaches in narrative can result in different stories.
WRC 2403.101 THE PRACTICE OF POETRY
Gen Ed Attribute: Liberal Studies Experience; Literary Studies Designation.
Instructor: Professor Joseph Bathanti
Time: TR 3:30 pm-4:45 pm
"A creative-writing class may be one of the last places you can go where your life still matters," claims the great Northwest poet, Richard Hugo. This course introduces the basics of poetry writing. It tackles poetry through a "writerly eye" (reading like a writer) and pays careful attention to the kinds of craft (a protean word we'll use regularly and seek to define contextually) choices that influence the emotional impact and meaning of a given poem.
The class will also provide students with an overall context for poetry: its scope; trends; its development, especially during the last decades of 20th Century to the present, with a decided lean toward American poetry (of a narrative vein), but with a keen eye on diversity and burgeoning voices, multiculturalism and various "kinds" of poetry, including formalism and free verse.
An extremely important component of the course will be careful readings and analyses of poems from a number of realms and "schools." Approximately 40% of the class time will be spent workshopping student-generated poems, and each student will have the opportunity to workshop two poems. We'll also engage occasionally in in-class writing assignments and hopefully do a bit of writing out of the classroom. Our ultimate aim, by the end of the semester, is to acquire an understanding of, and instinct for, various elements and strategies – all revolving around craft choices – employed by writers in building/composing poems, elements and strategies you can then employ in your own poetry.
Regardless of whether you consider yourself primarily a poet, fiction writer, or creative nonfiction writer – and even if you've never attempted to write a poem before – this course is the right place for you.
WRC 3203.101 WHY ART?
Gen Ed Attribute: Integrative Learning Experience Theme; Fine Arts Designation
Instructor: TBA
Time: W 5-7:30
*Honors students interested in this course should register for WRC 3203.410
WRC 3401.101 MYTH AND MEANING
Gen Ed Attribute: Hist & Soc Theme-Culture in Social Practice and Liberal Studies Experience, Literary Studies Designation
Instructor: Dr. Laura Ammon
Time: MW 3:30 pm-4:45 pm
Myths are the stories we tell about the world, exploring and explaining humanity's place in the past, the present and the future offering insights on what it means to be human. This course will explore various expressions of myth, from the Aztecs to Black Panther, and how these myths construct meaningful imaginative worlds within specific historical, cultural, and literary contexts. We will cover an assortment of myths, rituals, symbols that construct the worldviews of various communities, investigating conflict, syncretism, and hybridity in differing global encounters, and how that conflict impacts the stories humans tell about their place in the world. This investigation is necessarily an interpretive journey involving theoretical approaches to the role of mythology in human cultures and religions.
*Honors students interested in this course should register for WRC 3401.410
WRC 3401.102 MYTH AND MEANING
Gen Ed Attribute: Hist & Soc Theme-Culture in Social Practice and Liberal Studies Experience, Literary Studies Designation
Instructor: Dr. Laura Ammon
Time: TR 3:30 pm-4:45 pm
Myths are the stories we tell about the world, exploring and explaining humanity’s place in the past, the present and the future offering insights on what it means to be human. This course will explore various expressions of myth, from the Aztecs to Black Panther, and how these myths construct meaningful imaginative worlds within specific historical, cultural, and literary contexts. We will cover an assortment of myths, rituals, symbols that construct the worldviews of various communities, investigating conflict, syncretism, and hybridity in differing global encounters, and how that conflict impacts the stories humans tell about their place in the world. This investigation is necessarily an interpretive journey involving theoretical approaches to the role of mythology in human cultures and religions.
*Honors students interested in this course should register for WRC 3401.411