Course Descriptions

EDUC 201 - Practicum: Foundation of Education

EDUC 210 - Fieldwork in Education

EDUC 215 - Earth Science and Chemistry for K-6 Elementary Education

EDUC 302 - Teaching the Exceptional Learner

EDUC 303 - Practicum: The Exceptional Learner

EDUC 305 - Teaching Elementary Reading

EDUC 306 - Practicum: Teaching Elementary Reading

EDUC 310 - Art for Elementary Education

EDUC 315 - Music and Movement for Elementary Education

EDUC 340 - Elementary Language Arts and Social Studies Methods

EDUC 341 - Practicum: Elementary Language Arts and Social Studies Methods

EDUC 343 - Elementary Math and Science Methods

EDUC 344 - Practicum: Elementary Math and Science Methods

EDUC 345 - Elementary and Secondary Vocal Music Methods

Credits: 3
Planned Offering: Fall

An overview of singers’ vocal development including analysis of common vocal challenges, study of pedagogical techniques in group settings, evaluation of vocal and choral literature and texts, construction of vocal interviews, and guidelines for performance at the elementary and secondary levels. Lynch.

EDUC 346 - Practicum: Elementary and Secondary Vocal Music Methods

Credits: 1-2
Planned Offering: Fall, Winter

This fieldwork placement permits students to work in the schools with choral groups to observe and practice the instructional techniques covered in EDUC 345. Course work includes non-music observations in public schools and a music project In which students observe and participate as instructional aides. Class sessions focus on techniques for observing and recording classroom behavior, relationships between teaching of music and the planning of music instruction. May be repeated for up to three credits total. Lynch.

EDUC 353 - Middle and Secondary Content Area Reading and Writing

EDUC 354 - Practicum: Secondary Content Area Reading and Writing

EDUC 356 - Methods for Middle and Secondary Education

EDUC 357 - Practicum: Methods for Middle and Secondary Education

EDUC 365 - Methods for Foreign Language

EDUC 366 - Practicum: Methods for Foreign Language

EDUC 369 - Urban Education and Poverty

EDUC 375 - Elementary and Secondary Instrumental Music Methods for Woodwinds and Brass

EDUC 376 - Practicum in Elementary and Secondary Instrumental Music Methods for Woodwinds and Brass

Credits: 1-2
Corequisite: EDUC 375.

Graded Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory. An introduction to the teacher’s role in instructional settings. Includes non-music observations in public schools and a music project in which students observe and participate as instructional aides. Class sessions focus on techniques for observing and recording classroom behavior, relationships between the teaching of reading and the teaching of music, and planning music instruction. Students must complete a placement on both the elementary and the secondary level. To meet the course requirements, students must complete 30 hours of fieldwork during the term. May be taken for a second credit if a different placement is completed. Staff.

EDUC 377 - Elementary and Secondary Instrumental Music Methods for Strings and Percussion

EDUC 378 - Practicum in Elementary and Secondary Instrumental Music Methods for Strings and Percussion.

EDUC 401 - Directed Individual Study

EDUC 402 - Directed Individual Study

EDUC 403 - Directed Individual Study

Credits: 3
Prerequisites: Consent of the Director of Teacher Education. Students must have completed at least one course in professional studies and have had relevant field experience. May be completed in the Lexington area. Students investigate current issues in education through research and work in the field and have opportunities to put educational theory into practice in elementary and secondary school settings. May be repeated for degree credit if the topics are different.

Winter 2014 topic:

EDUC 403: Directed Independent Study:Psychology Instruction (3). Work and research in teaching psychology as part of the Rockbridge County enrichment program. Ojure, Fulcher. Ojure.

EDUC 451A - Directed Teaching Seminar: Pre-K to 12

EDUC 451E - Directed Teaching Seminar: Elementary

EDUC 451S - Directed Teaching Seminar: Middle and Secondary

EDUC 461A - Directed Teaching: Pre-K to 12

EDUC 461E - Directed Teaching: Elementary

EDUC 461S - Directed Teaching: Middle and Secondary

ENGN 160 - CADD: Computer-Aided Drafting & Design

ENGN 203 - Mechanics I: Statics

ENGN 204 - Mechanics II: Dynamics

ENGN 207 - Electrical Circuits

ENGN 208 - Electronics

ENGN 225 - Mathematical Methods for Physics and Engineering

ENGN 240 - Thermodynamics

ENGN 250 - Introduction to Engineering Design

ENGN 251 - Experimental Methods in Physics and Engineering

ENGN 255 - Numerical Methods for Engineering and Physics

ENGN 260 - Materials Science

ENGN 265 - Integrative Science Topic

ENGN 267 - Bioengineering and Bioinspired Design

ENGN 295 - Intermediate Special Topics in Engineering

ENGN 301 - Solid Mechanics

ENGN 311 - Fluid Mechanics

ENGN 312 - Heat Transfer

ENGN 330 - Mechanical Vibrations

ENGN 351 - Solid Mechanics Laboratory

ENGN 361 - Polymer Science and Engineering

ENGN 395 - Special Topics in Engineering

ENGN 401 - Engineering Problems

ENGN 402 - Engineering Problems

ENGN 403 - Engineering Problems

ENGN 421 - Directed Individual Research

ENGN 422 - Directed Individual Research

ENGN 423 - Directed Individual Research

ENGN 473 - Senior Thesis

ENGN 493 - Honors Thesis

ENGL 201 - Advanced Expository Writing

ENGL 202 - Topics in Creative Writing: Playwriting

ENGL 203 - Topics in Creative Writing: Fiction

ENGL 204 - Topics in Creative Writing: Poetry

ENGL 205 - Poetic Forms

ENGL 206 - Topics in Creative Writing: Nonfiction

ENGL 207 - Eco-Writing

ENGL 230 - Poetry

ENGL 231 - Drama

ENGL 232 - The Novel

ENGL 233 - Film

ENGL 234 - Children’s Literature

ENGL 235 - Fantasy

ENGL 236 - The Bible as English Literature

ENGL 237 - The Bible as Literature: Exile and Return

ENGL 240 - Arthurian Legend

ENGL 242 - Individual Shakespeare Play

ENGL 243 - Performing Shakespeare

ENGL 250 - Medieval and Early Modern British Literature: Masculinity and Monstrosity

FDR: HL
Credits: 3
Planned Offering: Winter 2014

Winter 2014 emphasis: Masculinity and Monstrosity. This course is a survey of English literature from the Early Middle Ages to the Early Modern period. We read works in various genres–verse, drama, and prose–and understand their specific cultural and historical contexts. Our particular focus is on the diverse conceptions and representations of masculinity and monstrosity in texts such as Beowulf, Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Shakespeare’s King Lear, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and Milton’s Paradise Lost. Can heroic, courtly, or spiritual masculinity exist without monstrosity? And how does female masculinity or male femininity navigate the monstrous and the normative? We also examine select modern film adaptations of canonical works as part of the evolving history of critical reception. (HL) Kao.

ENGL 251 - British Literature in an Age of Global Expansion, 1660s-1790s

ENGL 252 - Shakespeare

ENGL 253 - Southern American Literature

ENGL 254 - Jane Austen: The Works and the Phenomenon

ENGL 255 - Superheroes

ENGL 256 - Southern Women Writers

ENGL 260 - Literary Approaches to Poverty

ENGL 261 - Reading Gender

ENGL 262 - Literature, Race, and Ethnicity

ENGL 285 - Reading Lolita in Lexington

ENGL 291 - Seminar

ENGL 292 - Topics in British Literature

FDR: HL
Credits: 3 in fall or winter, 4 in spring
Planned Offering: Fall, Winter

Winter 2014 Topic:

ENGL 292: Topics in British Literature: Representing Queen Elizabeth (3). This course focuses on the figure of Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603) and the ways in which she has been represented in literature and film. We read works written during her lifetime that address her, or that directly or obliquely represent her, by authors such as Shakespeare and Spenser. However, the majority of the course examines works about the public and private Elizabeth since her death; those works include dramas, poems, fiction, operas, films (starring actors such as Helen Mirren and Bette Davis), children’s books, etc. A key component of the course is a large group project to research and collect such representations, organize the data and write commentaries, and ultimately construct a website–employing exciting, new tools of the digital humanities–as both a learning exercise and a resource for interested students and scholars. (HL) Dobin.

Fall 2013 Topic:

ENGL 292-01: Topics in British Literature: Romanticism and Landscapes (3). This class is an introduction to Romantic poetry through a focused attention to one of its central themes, the natural world and its landscapes. The course begins with some examples of important precursors to the Romantic landscape in Milton, Pope, and Cowper, but the bulk of our attention is to how the Romantic theme of imagination was grounded in the personal experience of the natural world and emphasizes the poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats. We conclude with how these themes were later transformed in Mary Shelley’s gothic horror fiction Frankenstein and Jerome K. Jerome’s comic travel novel Three Men in a Boat. (HL) Adams.

ENGL 293 - Topics in American Literature

FDR: HL
Credits: 3-4
Planned Offering: Fall, Winter, Spring

Winter 2014 Topic:

ENGL 293: Topics in American Literature: American Short Story (3). This course is a study of the evolution of the short story in America from its roots, both domestic and international, tracing the main branches of its development in the 20th century. We also explore more recent permutations of the genre, such as magical realism, new realism, and minimalism. Having gained an appreciation for the history and variety of this distinctly modern genre, we focus our attention on the work of two American masters of the form, contemporaries and erstwhile friends who frequently read and commented on each other’s work–Hemingway and Fitzgerald. We examine how they were influenced by their predecessors and by each other and how each helped to shape the genre. (HL) B. Oliver.

Fall 2013 Topic:

ENGL 293-01: Topics in American Literature: History, Trauma, and Human Rights (3). In this course on contemporary American literature, we focus on works by writers of Asian, South Asian, and Middle Eastern descent that bear witness to historical displacement–both national and international. Given the political divisions between America and their countries of origin, it is perhaps no surprise that so many of these writers organize their creative work around the idea of trauma. The psychic dislocation within these writers’ communities, and its artistic dramatizations, is at the heart of this course. We investigate the ways in which characters and individuals within various cultural productions navigate between their ancestral and American homes and, in so doing, contribute to debates on immigration, assimilation, and national identity. Attending to the transnational aspects of their work, we also consider how some of these writers engage with contemporary human rights struggles in such places as China, Palestine, and Iran. Major reading selections may include Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor Was Divine. Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Shahriar Mandanipour’s Censoring An Iranian Love Story, among others. (HL) Darznik.

ENGL 294 - Topics in Environmental Literature

ENGL 295 - Spring-Term Seminar in Literary Studies

ENGL 299 - Seminar for Prospective Majors

FDR: HL
Credits: 3
Planned Offering: Fall, Winter

Winter 2014 Topics:

ENGL 299-01: Seminar for Prospective Majors: Stuck on the Dixie Express: William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor (3). In this seminar, we study two of the South’s greatest writers, talking about the picture of the South they have conveyed to the world and the problems it has caused. Is the South a Gothic land of dilapidated old mansions, freaks, murder, incest, rape, and mental torture destroyed by moral evils, or a glorious land of mint juleps, learning, culture, civility, and honor we prefer to reenact at Washington and Lee? Why did Faulkner and O’Connor tell their gruesome stories? What have we who live in the South gained and lost because of their literary power? And how do Southern readers and writers get rid of these stereotypes now and move on, so everyone is not stuck forever on this version of the Dixie Express, but can tell other stories that paint the South in a more positive light? (HL) Smout.

ENGL 299-02: Seminar for Prospective Majors: Speculative Poetry (3). “Speculative fiction” encompasses science fiction and fantasy, but can it include poetry, too? In this gateway seminar, we read recent poetry that departs from consensus reality and estranges the status quo. As students study verse by James Merrill, Tracy K. Smith, and others in conjunction with theories of the fantastic, they also practice the skills of research writing in stages, preparing for the essay requirements of upper-level English courses. (HL) Wheeler.

Fall 2013 Topics:

ENGL 299-01: Seminar for Prospective Majors: The Brontës (3). This class studies the lives and literature of the three Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne. We focus on Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and the poems of Emily Brontë, asking how young women living relatively secluded lives beside the Yorkshire moors produced works of imaginative brilliance. Other authors, read in excerpted form (Byron, Scott, Austen), provide a literary context for the Brontës’ achievement. We also consider how the Brontës’ work commented on political and social issues in Victorian England, such as Caroline Norton’s divorce case, The Custody of Infants’ Act of 1839, the education of young children, and working conditions for the poor. (HL) Brodie.

ENGL 299-02: Seminar for Prospective Majors: American Indian Literatures and History: The Storyteller Writes Back (3). Indigenous literatures outside the European canon are the focus of this particular section, and we take as our guide this anonymous statement: “History is written by the victors. Literature is written by the survivors.” With few exceptions, non-natives have usually narrated the story of being Indian in America. With the start of the Native American Literary Renaissance in the late 1960’s, however, Indian writers have been using fiction, memoir, poetry, creative non-fiction, film-making and music to re-write U. S. history from a Native point of view. This course examines specific Native American novels, creative non-fiction and poetry to see how Indians present that re-visioning, asks questions about how that re-visioning is translated into literature, and the effectiveness it has in helping all U. S. citizens re-imagine ourselves in contemporary times. (HL) Miranda.

ENGL 307 - Advanced Creative Writing: Poetry