France

This course offers a panoramic view of the history of France. While in Bordeaux, students confront the names of historical figures through Bordeaux and French toponymy. This historical background makes it possible to better understand actuality and the press. Learning takes place by encountering historical characters from prehistory, antiquity, the middle ages, the renaissance, modern times, and the contemporary period.

This semi-intensive language course is roughly equivalent to the first quarter or to the first semester of beginning French language instruction on students' home campuses. It introduces basic speaking, listening, reading and writing skills to the complete beginner within a French-immersion context. This course is for absolute beginners only. The textbook for this course is MOTIFS: AN INTRODUCTION TO FRENCH by K. Jansma, 6th Edition, 2014. This course helps students develop the ability to communicate in spoken and written French. By the end of the course, students have been presented with the basic structures of French grammar and obtain a basic working vocabulary organized according to certain themes. Students are presented with information on French and Francophone culture on the following topics: greetings, identifying and describing people and things, leisure activities and sports, vacation time, family structures, schooling, the workplace, the news, eating and drinking, café life, and the geography, music, and cuisine of the francophone world. Students engage in short conversations using simple sentences and basic vocabularies, with limited use of perfect and recent past tenses and occasionally use near future tense. Covered in this course are: present, perfect, recent past, and near future tenses, along with high-frequency regular and irregular verbs, high-frequency reflexive verbs, the polite conditional mood, subject and object pronouns, articles, prepositions, possessive adjectives, interrogative expressions, and time and weather expressions. Basic oral competency skills are covered. Students are required to read, understand, and discuss short, highly contextualized and predictable texts, containing cognates and borrowed words, on very familiar topics. They also are required to write with some accuracy on well-practiced, familiar topics using limited, formulaic language in simple French. Students reflect upon basic cultural differences as reflected in a variety of French and Francophone contexts. This course involves class participation in tasks such as whole class discussion, small group and pair work, role play, games, and individual and group presentations. Cultural immersion activities are included and students may choose to pursue a personal project, such as an off-site dance or art course or similar activity, or to take part in instructor-led site visits. The course uses the city of Paris as a living laboratory to provide students with real life scenarios to help develop their speaking and listening skills.

This course contextualizes digital data to understand its benefits and limitations, particularly with generalizability. Students learn how inequality, institutions, and ideology may influence the transformation of the media, as well as Big Data (and small). The inequality segment examines class, gender, and race intersectionalities in digital data production and impact, such as online harassment. Corporate and civic institutions also influence digital data, so the course unpacks institutional effects, from Facebook to the State. Finally, political ideology shapes how data is created and seen, so political campaigns and movements are analyzed to understand how they produce and distribute digital data. The course interrogates the broader role of technology in society and ties current cases with long-standing sociological debates, methods, and theories.

This course focuses on the problems and methods of philosophy through a survey of philosophical responses to the following questions: What exist and what is its nature? What is it to have a mind and knowledge, and how much knowledge do we really have? Can we freely determine our actions, what actions are moral or immoral, and what is the good life for a human being? What is justice and is it possible to design a just government for human societies? The selection of readings is taken from the following four areas of philosophical thinking: metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and politics. The course provides a preliminary orientation to the notion of philosophical argument, its various forms, and the ways they can be analyzed. The course analyzes and comments on philosophical arguments, develops knowledge of the canonical position held by philosophers, and encourages students to develop and defend their own positions through careful argumentation.

This is a beginner level French language course for students with no prior French language background. It focuses on understanding and using simple sentences concerning daily life, saluting, spelling, pronunciation, numbers and telling time, introducing oneself or someone else, directions, press headlines and simple articles, and using basic formulas of politeness. It builds skills to ask and answer simple questions, express preferences, and make plans in settings such as stores, restaurants, banks, doctors' offices, the post office, and while traveling. The course covers nouns and noun groups, nouns and determiners, and descriptive, possessive, and demonstrative adjectives. It also introduces first group verbs, irregular and auxiliary verbs, semi-auxiliary verbs, as well as verb tenses such as indicative present, near future, recent past, and past perfect.