These syllabi serve as samples of the types of WRIT 101 and Inquiry Seminar courses offered at PLU during 2008-2009. These courses are not guaranteed to be offered during your term, nor will your syllabi exactly resemble these here.
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"Balancing Self, Community, and Environment" |
View Sample |
| Brief Description: "Environmental advocates of "sustainability" often argue that our ecological crises are at heart not technological problems, but cultural ones....In this course, we will consider the interrelated challenges of creating health selves, communities, and environment." | |
| "From Virtue to Vice" | View Sample |
| Brief Description: "In a world of hate and jealousy, racism and bigotry, the emphasis on such an untroubled dictum would appear to be the right course of action. However, as G.K. Chesterton, a noted Catholic apologist once wrote, "The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone." This Writing 101 course will explore the nature of virtue and how those virtues can readily turn to vice." | |
| "Vanished Peoples and Lost Civilizations" | View Sample |
| Brief Description: "Pop archaeology is concerned with many of the same issues as academic archaeology: humans and their culture, human origins, and the development and understanding of human behavior. However pop archaeology often relies on methods, theories and assumptions that differ dramatically from academic archaeology. We will begin by learning to recognize the methods of science and pseudoscience and will develop a framework/method to evaluate competing claims. Then, we will use that methodology to explore, discuss and write about “mysteries” of the human past." | |
| "Serious Comics: The Rhetoric of the Graphic Novel" | View Sample |
| Brief Description: "Book-length comic books have earned the grown-up name of "graphic novel" or “graphic narrative” and, given the adult subject matter, “graphic” may refer to more than the fact they have pictures. We will read about the techniques and significance of comics and view films adapted from comics." |
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| "Gender and American Popular Culture" | View Sample |
| Brief Description: "We will refuse to take pop culture at face value—as mindless entertainment—and, instead, dig under its façade in order to uncover how it not only influences our attitudes, beliefs and values about gender and sexuality but can actually create our gender identities. By critically questioning—through writing and discussion—how our pop culture represents images of men, women and sexuality, we will come to read ads, reality television programs and films as political texts that inform our choices and that socialize and discipline us even as they entertain." | |
| "The Examined Life" | View Sample |
| Brief Description: "This course offers an introduction to the discipline of philosophy. By "discipline." I mean of course the subject matter - what topics or questions are explored - but also the way of doing that exploring: the methods involved in doing philosophy. So this course will provide you with an introduction to a set of questions and to a way of attempting to answer those questions. We will also see how answers to such questions weave together to form the core of a person's world view, or perspective on life." |
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| "Chinese Studies: Texts and Subjects" | View Sample |
| Brief Description: "This course is intended to be both an exploration of China and an exploration of academic exploration itself, the latter of which accounts for its 190 designation. The question can be phrased as follows: what about China is important to you and how does this particular interest on your part structure your learning experience? Thus and to reiterate, I hope and expect that each of you will be thinking about China in terms of what China’s rise to prominence in the contemporary world means to you personally as well as to the world globally." |
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| "Ethics & the Good Life" | View Sample |
| Brief Description: "Ethics & The Good Life is an introduction to ethics, focusing on two elements: general theoretical ethical theories, and more specific ethical dilemmas. By investigating what the good life is (or should be), you will be in a better position to then decide how to approach and attempt to resolve particular ethical dilemmas. More importantly, you can grapple with how to incorporate these values into your own life, and which values might be more important than others to respect." |
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| "Value Creation in the Global Environment" | View Sample |
| Brief Description: Understanding business economic value creating activities and the demands of stakeholders in competitive markets and the global environment. Business has become the primary form of organized economic activity across the globe. Our purpose is to introduce you to the nature of business organizations, their interactions via markets with consumers, many kinds of customers, and each other in the context of a global economy. |
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| "Intro. to Social Work and Social Welfare" | View Sample |
| Brief Description: "Introduction to Social Work explores the interdependence of social, cultural, political, and economic factors in the history, theory, and practice of social welfare with special reference to the development of the social work profession in response to welfare problems. The course examines the relationship among the social welfare systems, the problems and issues addressed by social services, and the role of the professional social worker in service areas and settings such as aging, child welfare, health and mental health, income maintenance and services to women and minorities." |
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