WRC 1010.101 Introduction to Mathematics For WRC
Gen Ed. Attribute: Quantitative Literacy
Instructor: Dr. Sarah Greenwald
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:
Personal Finance: How we apply algebra to interest formulas and decisions we make about our own lives.
Geometry of our Earth and Universe: How we measure and view the world around us and decide what is the nature of reality.
Consumer Statistics and Probability: 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 video project session.
*Honors students interested in this course should register for WRC 1010.410
WRC 1103.101 INVESTIGATIONS LOCAL:
Gen Ed. Attribute: UCO 1200 and RC 1000
Instructor: Professor Jess Martell
Time: TR 11:00 am-1:45 pm & TR 2:00 pm-3:15 pm
*Honors students interested in this course should register for WRC 1103.410
WRC 1103.102 INVESTIGATIONS LOCAL:
Gen Ed. Attribute: UCO 1200 and RC 1000
Instructor:
Time: TR 2:00 pm-3:15 pm & TR 11:00 am-1:45 pm
*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: UCO 1200 and RC 1000
Instructor: Professor Joe Gonzalez
Time: TR 2:00 pm-3:15 pm & TR 11:00 am-1:45 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, nationally, and globally, all the while critically interrogating 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: UCO 1200 and RC 1000
Instructor: Professor 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: Voices and Visions in American Arts
Gen Ed. Attribute: UCO 1200 and RC 1000
Instructor: Professor 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. 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 1103.414
WRC 2001.101 or 102 28607: DAYS IN THE LIFE (Second Year Writing)
Gen Ed Attribute: Sophomore Writing, RC 2001 requirements
Instructor: Professor Cary Curlee
Time: MW 2:00 pm-3:15 pm and TR 2:00 pm-3:15pm
Days in The Life: Mountain Messages, will introduce students to writing across the curriculum using poems, essays, short stories and scientific texts. Readings in the course will touch spiritual, cultural, and environmental aspects of living in Appalachia and beyond. Our exercises will hone research and analytical skills learned in WRC 1103 while introducing you to writing and reading across academic disciplines. We will take a rhetorical approach to reading and writing across the curriculum and students will engage in more independent work and more involved research. We will read texts from a variety of academic disciplines, including analyses of disciplinary writing in order to identify other writers’ rhetorical choices and discipline-specific writing strategies and conventions. Our writing projects, some of which will entail independent research, will provide you opportunities to make effective choices in your own writing for specific purposes and academic communities, and using various digital methods. Learning to assess different writing situations and make effective context-specific rhetorical choices should prepare you to meet writing challenges in the future, whether it be for another college course, on the job, or for civic or personal reasons.
*Honors students interested in this course should register for WRC 2001.410 or 411
WRC 2201.102 HEARING VOICES of American Literature, Culture and Climate
Gen Ed Attribute: ILE Theme, Experiencing Inquiry; Literary Studies Designation
Instructor: Professor Clark Maddux
This course will explore some of the ways in which American literature intersects with historical and scientific concerns of climate change and the environment. We will consider how narrative as a way of making meaning of our experience informs, questions, and constructs our stories about our own sense of place and the natural world in which we live. This course uses long and well-established traditions of American Studies to cross disciplinary boundaries and think about how America becomes America in relation to its environment, landscape, and climate. Throughout the semester, we will examine how our relationship to a geographic space is as much about our lived experience, as it is about ideas of governance or beliefs in liberty and equality. From the 17th century to the present, who we are is almost always where we are in America, and where we are is affected, always radically, by consequences of our cognition, as well as our mere presence. Students will be required to purchase hard copies of the following texts:
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Octavia Butler, The Parable of the Sower
Richard Powers, Bewilderment
*Honors students interested in this course should register for WRC 2201.411
WRC 2202.101 WHAT IF? ASKING HIST QUESTIONS: Transatlantic Ireland
- Gen Ed Designation: Historical Studies designation and Intercultural Literacy
- Instructor: Professor Jess Martell
"Transatlantic Ireland" explores the interconnected histories of Ireland, the US South, and Appalachia. Students will watch Derry Girls, research items in Belk Library's Special Collections, and learn how to create their own oral history. * Also, in Summer 1 2027, Dr. Martell will lead a 2-week study abroad program in Ireland and Northern Ireland. The application process will begin in October 2026.
*Honors students interested in this course should register for WRC 2202.411
WRC 3000.101 Interrogating Popular Culture: Games, Gamers & Gaming
Gen Ed Attribute: SS Designation and Humanity and Its Systems
Instructor: Professor Mark Nunes
Whether you are an avid gamer or a dabbler in Wordle, games occupy an important role in popular culture and in everyday life. This course will focus (almost) exclusively on video games--that is, games that are designed for and played on computers, consoles, phones, and other digital devices. We will start off by considering what is a game, and what does it mean to play? How do games build (story)worlds, and how do we inhabit and engage with these worlds? We will explore how rules, game mechanics, design elements, and digital affordances shape our experience of gaming and game play. We will also discuss the social, economic, psychological, and cultural elements of gamers and gaming--the myths and moral panics, as well as the pleasures of gaming and the joy of play.
*Honors students interested in this course should register for WRC 3000.410
WRC 3203.101 WHY ART? WAYS OF RESPONDING TO THE WORLD AROUND US
- Gen Ed Designation: Fine Arts designation and ILE-Experiencing Inquiry
- Instructor: Professor
As a group, we will explore the production, function, and consumption of art. Methodologies and processes from artists across disciplines will be examined while we cultivate our own interdisciplinary creative practices. We will reflect on the ways art reflects, impacts and captures its moment in time in the world. No artistic talent is required, but students should arrive with an open curiosity about how, when, where, and why art happens.
*Honors students interested in this course should register for WRC 3203.410
WRC 3401.101 MYTH AND MEANING
Gen Ed Attribute: Liberal Studies Experience, Literary Studies Designation
Instructor: Professor Laura Ammon
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 4001.101 Capstone
Instructor: Professor Laura Ammon
A senior capstone experience on Watauga Residential College, with an emphasis on demonstrated understanding of the College in relation to the history of residential colleges and on the development of projects or procedures to improve the residential college experience for future students. This course is the culminating course of the Minor in Experiential, Integrative Learning.