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Core Matters: History

This essay by Dr. Brad Franco, Associate Professor of History at UP, is part of a series of short pieces that offer faculty across the campus an insider’s tour of one of the courses that make up UP’s Core program. Since the Core involves almost a third of the curriculum for every UP student, faculty can benefit from these discipline-by-discipline essays, to better understand the breadth of their students’ campus experience.

Undergraduates at the University of Portland are required to take one history class as part of the university core. There is great diversity in what students can take, as all 200 and 300 level history classes satisfy the core requirement.

At first blush, having such a broad requirement might seem deeply problematic, as it means that students are studying wildly different topics to fulfill the same prerequisite. Indeed, we offer core classes that span five continents and three millennia; some of these classes emphasize social and cultural history, others focus more on gender, identity, and race, while still others are more oriented toward political or military history.

With such a wide range of core course offerings, one might wonder what students, regardless of which course they take, gain from the core history requirement. To begin, students gain an understanding of what the discipline of history actually is and why it matters. Dispiritingly, many of our students enter their first college history class still believing that history is rooted in memorizing names and dates or in learning about famous battles. Instead, our goal as a department, collectively, is to help students recognize that the value of history, like all disciplines in the humanities, is to help us better understand human nature, human societies, and the present.

Whether one studies the ancient world, early modern Europe, or modern America, to cite some of the subfields within which we offer classes, history provides endless insights about humans and societies that are directly applicable to understanding our world today. For example, any history class within the core will provide students with a greater understanding of how power functions, particularly at the institutional or societal level.

Closely connected to this, students learn the role of culture in shaping societal values and beliefs, the fluidity of gender norms and how they are used to regulate behavior, how societies “other” minority groups, reasons societies go to war, as well as how propaganda works.

The examples that we use to elucidate these topics (and many others) obviously varies dramatically depending on the focus of each course. For example, students studying medieval Europe, learn how “othering” was used to justify wars against religious minorities, ethnic groups, and even fellow Christians (as heretics). While the marginalization of minority groups as a means of strengthening one’s political power certainly looks different in a modern context (or even a pre-modern context), the use of such strategies can be found in nearly every society. Similarly, speeches from the Peloponnesian War (which led to the fall of the first democratic government in history in Athens) demonstrate how demagogues undermine public debate and the democratic process through misinformation, undermining political opponents, using emotional appeals, fear, and othering.

While these debates took place in a world very different from our own, the lessons that can be learned from studying these ancient speeches are remarkably applicable to anyone living in a democracy today. In fact, more broadly, one of the crucial insights that history offers is that nearly all human societies face many of the same kinds of challenges. By studying the past, we can glean all kinds of relational insights about our own world related to issues of justice, power, gender, culture, authority, and more.

In effect, the core history requirement offers students a set of lenses that offer access to entire other worlds full of answers to our own struggles and challenges today. The study of history makes students more curious about learning by exposing them to all kinds of new ideas and ways of thinking about the world that often, they didn’t even know existed.

Moving beyond any specific insights, historical inquiry promotes (or even requires) critical thinking and reading. Analyzing primary sources created in societies with different values and cultural beliefs than our own is extremely challenging because it requires students to move beyond their own worldview and value system. Students must learn to identify authorial intent and bias, and consider questions of genre, audience, and historical context before they can determine what particular primary sources reveal about the society in which they were written.

Closely connected to this, all core history classes help students to become better writers. While college writing is certainly part of many core classes, history papers present the unique challenge of requiring students to practice using primary source material as their evidence. They quickly discover the challenges of recovering the past (as we are limited by the sources that survive and the information or perspective these sources provide). This practice of analyzing evidence (written for a very different audience living in a radically different historical context) to create an argument and then write a persuasive paper rooted in the available evidence helps them to hone a set of skills that will be useful throughout the students’ lives.

In sum, the history core requirement opens students’ eyes to the importance of the past and its value in helping them make sense of our world; it makes them more intellectually curious; it helps them improve their critical thinking skills and become more effective writers. These are just some of the many things students gain from the core history requirement.

         -Dr. Brad Franco

 

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Core Matters: Mathematics

This essay by Dr. Stephanie Salomone, Associate Professor and Chair of Mathematics at UP, is part of a series of short pieces that offer faculty across the campus an insider’s tour of one of the courses that make up UP’s Core program. Since the Core involves almost a third of the curriculum for every UP student, faculty can benefit from these discipline-by-discipline essays, to better understand the breadth of their students’ campus experience.

Way back when my boys were 3, 5, and 8, I took them to a community event in Cathedral Park that was focused on saving the Willamette River. From what, I didn’t know, but we were promised food carts and bubbles and that was all I needed to say to convince the littles that we should go check it out.

The St. John’s Bubble Guys were there, and were surprisingly grumpy about all the children running around popping bubbles, which made no sense. It was as if they expected to show up at a community gathering, where children would be gleefully enjoying the sunshine, and those same kids would keep their hands off the hundreds of bubbles floating around. It was as if the Bubble Guys had never met children. It was as if the Bubble Guys had never been children.

This was an event with a message, though, and so while the boys romped in the grass under the St. Johns Bridge, I checked out the booths. Beyond the elephant ears and the face painting, there this claim: we have polluted our waterway with shipping, with manufacturing, and with the detritus that comes from being a modern human. It was a stark contrast to the message the kids were sending: we are joyful, free, and happy to be bursting these bubbles.

Eventually, the Master of Ceremonies got on the makeshift stage, and into the mic he shouted, “The Willamette River is 95% polluted,” and yes, that sounded really alarming. It also sounded totally unbelievable.

I wondered so many things.

Did they take 100 samples from a single spot and 95 of them had some level of pollution in them? Or maybe 100 samples from different spots? If they did that, did they account for the fact that the water is moving? Does this matter? How many samples did they take? How many samples is enough to make that kind of claim, and how would I test their claim? What would make this result replicable? Do they mean by volume? If I pulled out 100 gallons of water, would 95 gallons be not water but actual pollutants? No. That can’t be. There are fish in the Willamette, though I wouldn’t eat them. But they’re alive, and there is no way they could survive if the river were 95% pollutant by volume. What is the threshold for any sample to be considered “polluted”?

If the claim is true, what are we going to do about it, and maybe more importantly, who is “WE”? Even if the claim is only a half-truth, something needs to be done, and when I considered the kinds of people I’d want looking at and for solutions, I decided that the solvers would need confidence in asking tough questions and discerning what questions to ask in the first place. They would need strong problem-solving and critical-thinking skills. They would need to question claims and parse and evaluate evidence. They would need to take risks, and be willing to be wrong, and they would have to be the strongest of communicators, so that once they found a solution (or maybe many solutions) they could convince even the harshest skeptics that they’d done it.

Children, in their way, are great at this. They’re natural question-askers and information-seekers. They challenge authority (or at least, my boys do), and because so many things are novel to them, they try new things all the time without worrying so much about doing it right the first time. Children wonder and they ask why, and why, and why because their curiosity about how things work is never sated. Children aren’t great communicators, but they are malleable, and can be trained to be polite. To explain their thinking. To reason. And to do so with the same glee that they show us when they’re running after bubbles.

This is not to imply that I anticipate that children will solve major environmental crises, but that they have the right mindset to do so.

In the core mathematics courses, our focus is simultaneously on content and mindset. We can empower students to know statistics and calculus, but we can also train them to apply concepts and to leverage their knowledge to solve difficult and perhaps critical problems. We want our students to see that struggling with mathematical concepts is normal and temporary, and that we believe that they will succeed.

Students succeed when they can look in disbelief at quantitative claims, and demonstrate willingness to seek to prove or disprove them. Mathematics students find patterns, take large problems apart into smaller ones, and then combine solutions to the small problems to solve the whole. In the core, we help students establish a learning community, and to ask how they can use their considerable strengths (even, perhaps especially, the nonmathematical ones) to succeed in a world that is more and more dependent on data and technology, reasoning, and computation.

Our mission is to evoke curiosity about new ways of thinking, and connect to, collaborate with, and challenge one another as we invite students to contribute to our mathematics community. Through inquiry, creativity, and vital, relevant conversation, we instill habits of abstract and applied mathematical thinking and examine the impact of mathematics on our world.

We believe that all students will make contributions that make our world feel, and perhaps be, more whole and less fractured. We believe that the core mathematics courses teach students to apply a critical lens to conjectures about global and local issues, boost curiosity, increase confidence, and establish the need for a growth mindset. And our sincere hope is that our students can re-establish the absolute joy of learning. It’s just like the joy of popping bubbles, without the slimy soap film.

 -Dr. Stephanie Salomone 

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Core Matters: Fine Arts 207 Introduction to the Arts

This essay by Dr. Nicole Leupp Hanig, Associate Professor of Music, and Dr. Mead Hunter of Theater at UP, is part of a series of short pieces that offer faculty across the campus an insider’s tour of one of the courses that make up UP’s Core program. Since the Core involves almost a third of the curriculum for every UP student, faculty can benefit from these discipline-by-discipline essays, to better understand the breadth of their students’ campus experience.

“How many of you consider yourself to be a creative person?”

The professor scans the students for faces eager to respond, but only two hands embrace this description. They turn out to be from a graphic designer and an animation artist.

The professor continues. “So the other 33 of you are not creative?” She moves on to asking people what majors they’ve declared, and she gets a typically broad spectrum: Sociology, History, Literature, Languages, Theology, Economics and many more. Nursing and Engineering are prominently represented.

“Those of you who are engineers and nurses. You know you’ll need to be creative at your work, right? Creativity and even artistry aren’t confined to the Fine Arts and the Performing Arts.”

Later in the term, this professor will involve her students in a classroom game called “Engineer or Artist?” Students will view a series of objects with striking visual power—objects that evince artistic interest but which also have a practical function. For each object, students will attempt to arrive at a decision: Who designed it, artist or engineer? They will be surprised many times, and gradually come to realize the distinctions between the two categories break down in the face of human ingenuity.

This is FA207, Introduction to the Arts, a core course that all UP students take early in their careers here. Like all core curriculum studies in the humanities, the course can be defined in varying ways. Perhaps the simplest definition is the study of how human beings respond to and record the human experience. We learn to analyze the human experience through painting, sculpture, photography, architecture, dance, music, theater and film. All these subjects are offered as discrete, full-semester course offerings, but in FA207 we examine them collectively. In this way we come to understand the intersectionality of human expression among artistic disciplines, as well as the intersections of the humanities such as history, politics, religion, science, technology and more.

The goals of FA207 are simple: to expose students to experiences with the arts and to provide tools through which they can analyze what they experience and communicate that analysis. Students attend gallery shows, along with music, dance and theater events, all drawn from the culturally rich environment that is Portland. At the same time they learn how to see and understand the building blocks used to create specific art forms. For instance, components used in painting and many other visual arts include color, line, mass, shape and texture. Music too has many building blocks including tempo, dynamics, rhythm, tonality, melody etc. Film is put together using pan shots, crane shots, close-ups and dozens more to create the illusion of a seamless narrative. In teaching students to see complete works of art as the sum of their parts, we learn about human perceptions and associations with these parts, which then add to our analysis of the whole.

An example of this can be found within the area of color theory, which analyzes what humans associate with specific colors. Interestingly, humans from all cultures have similar perceptions of the primary colors: red, blue and yellow. When we go beyond these primary colors, perceptions start to differ by culture. Red is a color all humans identify with love, blood, anger and passion, which are in direct contrast to perceptions of other colors.

Humans have different relationships to asymmetry versus symmetry, as well as perceptions regarding shapes that are organic as opposed to geometric. Our collective and cultural perceptions of these components combine to create more complex perceptions of completed works. The ability to identify components, and to learn how we as humans have similar understandings and associations with these components, gives us a greater level of understanding in terms of how these artworks shape our lives.

Fine Arts 207 is taught by a variety of different artist/educators. Instrumentalists, actors, painters, art historians, theater designers, singers, dramaturgs, conductors and directors all teach this core class. All see the arts through the lens of their own disciplines, so the class varies significantly depending upon their own artistic métiers and, of course, depending on experience of the students in the class. Some students have extensive experience in one or more areas of the arts or can speak to rich cultural traditions that are outside the narrow confines of western art. In addition, some students have begun to see the world through the lens of their chosen academic major.

With such diverse ways of analyzing and knowing present in the room, dynamic discussions arise that take on such questions as “what is art?” We go further and ask what separates a designer from an artist, as well as analyzing what separates art from technology. Why is applied art—art created to fulfill a purpose in addition to being decorative—traditionally done by women? What do a city’s largest, most expensive buildings tell us about the people who live in those cities and their priorities? Why do we house the many artistic traditions all over the world in categories such as “World Music” or ”Folk Dance?” How does the intersection of art and commerce affect the art being created in our time? How is art used by governments, religions and commercial ventures to further their aims? What is the monetary worth of art, and how is that value established? We also ask about the validity of the art forms themselves in their ability to serve as documentation of historical record, reflecting the experiences and lives of humans from many time periods and civilizations.

Often freshmen arrive at University of Portland eager into delve a specific field of study not fully understanding why core classes like FA207 are necessary. On that all-important first day of classes, those of us who teach within the core face some students who are unsure of how this contributes to their major. But those same professors have learned to appreciate delayed gratification.

Students finish FA207 glad they got to take it. Commonly heard statements at finals time are: “I’ll never look at a building again without noticing how its form follows its function.” “I love noticing how film technique brings me into the storytelling experience.”
“It’s fun listening to popular music and knowing how it achieves it effects.”
And best of all: “This course has changed the way I see the world.”

-Dr. Nicole Leupp Hanig + Dr. Mead Hunter

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Core Matters: ENV – The Science of the Sustainable Gourmet

This essay by Heather Carpenter, Lecturer in the Department of Environmental Studies at UP, is the fourth in a series of short pieces that offer faculty across the campus an insider’s tour of one of the courses that make up UP’s Core program. Since the Core involves almost a third of the curriculum for every UP student, faculty can benefit from these discipline-by-discipline essays, to better understand the breadth of their students’ campus experience.

Everybody eats. We define ourselves by what we eat. We say: I’m a meat and potatoes guy, or I love spicy food, or even shellfish or mushroom haters unite! It’s pretty easy to answer when someone says: I’ve got kimchi or toum in the back of my fridge, or Old Bay in my cupboard, can you guess where I’m from? Clothes change, language adapts, but if you want to really know a person: find out what they eat. The personal nature of food is the starting point in ENV 160, the Science of the Sustainable Gourmet, where students explore how their individual choices shape the world we all live in. This is one of the many options students have to fulfill their science core, all of which try to reveal the relevance of science to our daily lives.

We all share an interesting emotional vulnerability when it comes to our food. If a student tells their parent to say, pump up their car tires to save gas and be better for the environment, they might not listen but they won’t get mad.  On the other hand, if a student tells their parent they want to go vegetarian for environmental reasons the reactions range from confusion, disgust, to plain old guilt: is the food I cook (slave over the hot stove) for you not good enough? It’s never, is the car I drive not good enough? Friends, and even strangers get involved too.  In ENV 160 I have students change their diet for a class project and almost all of them report the hardest part being the ridicule and teasing from their friends.  And count the side eyes and arched eyebrows when you order no bacon bits on the salad…

What we eat is personal. It’s based on culture, family, religion, even genetics (does cilantro taste like soap to you?). It’s how we show love: chocolates for romance, cake on your birthday, or grandma’s extra serving on an already full stomach (that one goes both ways).  It’s also how we show empathy during grief: food at a wake, ice cream for a break-up, or drowning our sorrows. And food is trendy right now.  Chefs are household names, and young people join the culinary field with the express interest in getting famous. The only reality show that you will like everyone on is the Great British Baking Show.

But here’s the thing, food is also one of the easiest ways we interact with the environment and where our choices make a tangible difference. We have control over what we choose to eat.  We can’t just place the blame on the big greedy agricultural corporations. We could just buy from our local farmer.

Modern industrial food production has ties to present-day slavery, habitat destruction, and climate change.  Agriculturally, we are spending our children’s inheritance. We are losing arable soil, running out of clean water, decimating the oceans, and wasting a very limited supply of usable phosphorus. When combined with our growing population, we reach a rather uncomfortable ethical conundrum.

It’s pretty hard to be apathetic about your culpability and argue that this has nothing to do with you.  Regardless of your major or career plan: english, engineering, theology, we all eat. As an informed eater, you have the real opportunity to minimize your impact and this can lead to many levels of joy. In the words of Wendell Berry “eating with the fullest pleasure – pleasure that is, that does not depend on ignorance – is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world.”

I tell my students that the point of a core education is to be able to join any dinner party and not make a fool of yourself.  After a quality liberal arts education, you should be able to participate in any social level of conversation, be it about art history, social welfare, or climate change.  You don’t have to be that computer scientist who only wants to debate the merits of Java vs C++, the historian that doesn’t have a clue about modern issues, or the psychology major that can’t stop psychoanalyzing their conversation partner. Instead, you could leave your dinner companions wondering just what your major was. In my sustainable gourmet class, you also learn about the impact of the dinner being served.  It makes for some scintillating conversation. Just remember, people will take it personally.

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Core Matters: Chemistry

Chemical smokeThis essay by Steve Mayer Ph.D., Professor and Chair of Chemistry at UP, is the third in a series of short pieces that offer faculty across the campus an insider’s tour of one of the courses that make up UP’s Core program. Since the Core involves almost a third of the curriculum for every UP student, faculty can benefit from these discipline-by-discipline essays, to better understand the breadth of their students’ campus experience.

My calculus professor once said, “Anyone who has not taken a course in mathematics has not been liberally educated.” Mathematics is the language of science and anyone who desires to know our universe in a way that goes beyond simple observation must approach it with the tools provided by mathematicians. While advanced courses in physics and chemistry require sophisticated mathematical tools, core courses only require basic math skills, yet students can gain tremendous insight into how the universe works by using these simple tools; consider how much scientific understanding humans mustered before the invention of calculus (c. 1660 CE).

That said, Sir Isaac Newton catapulted our collective understanding of the universe into a new age of discovery with his publication of Principia. The resulting increase in knowledge lead to the brilliant set of equations postulated by James Clerk Maxwell (c. 1860 CE) that describe the connection between electricity, magnetism and the wave nature of light. This understanding delivered us to the doorstep of quantum mechanics where our collective minds were blown!

Our understanding of the universe through the lens of quantum mechanics is everywhere apparent; consider the smartphone. These devices employ the theory of quantum mechanics in the design of the CPU, flash memory and display. Also, the clocks onboard the GPS satellites that are necessary to locate your phone on the surface of the earth all use the quantum states of Cesium (bonus: the precision of the clocks is so great that the theory of relativity must be taken into account in order for them to be synchronized). I would riff on my calculus professor’s sentiment to say, “Anyone who has not been introduced to the quantum mechanical nature of the world has not been liberally educated.”

While quantum mechanics is clearly within the domain of physics, chemists rely on this theory to describe atomic and molecular structure. In fact, all of our courses communicate the importance of understanding the universe at the quantum-level. When we use the term “quantum-level” what we mean is describing the dynamics of very small particles (e.g. electrons) be they bound to an atom or freely traveling through space.

The chemistry department offers several core science courses that range from applying chemistry to our lives – Chemistry in Art and Chemistry of Food and Cooking – to discovering the science that all informed citizens should know – Science for Future World Leaders.  In Chemistry in Art, students explore the chemistry involved in the creation and analysis of art. Topics include paints and binders, glass etching, acid-base chemistry (involved in frescoes and chemical identification of pigments), oxidation-reduction reactions (involved in the etching and coloring of metals), color and light, analytical methods for identifying pigments, light-activated reactions in blue-print art (cyanotypes), determination of authenticity (carbon-14 dating, anachronistic presence of pigments), historical inks, dyeing of fabrics, and chromatography.

In Chemistry of Food and Cooking, Students apply fundamental concepts from biology and chemistry within the context of food and cooking using guided inquiry activities to cover topics such as chemical bonding, protein structure and cell theory. The food-focused topics include meat, vegetables, spices, chocolate, and dairy that students can work on in teams under the guidance of the instructor allowing students to practice critical thinking about the principles of chemistry and biology. Students learn hypothesis design and apply the scientific process to fermentation, cheese making, analyzing food components, and other hands-on exercises. To understand the role of lactase in metabolism of milk and lactose intolerance, students carry out a simple fermentation experiment using baker’s yeast by measuring the amount of carbon dioxide formed.

In Science for Future World Leaders, students are introduced to topics of immediate concern to world leaders (and to all of us on the planet) such as global climate change, renewable energy sources, nuclear theory, weapons of mass destruction, quantum computing and exploration of our own planet and beyond. The students use equipment in the chemistry department, such as spectrometers to directly measure the absorption of infrared (heat) radiation by greenhouse gases (e.g., CO2 and CH4). The primary goal of this course is to cultivate scientific literacy in the students, one of whom might one day become President of the United States!

A recent addition to our list of offerings is a unique, team-taught course called Communicating Science in Public. This course, taught by Jeff Kerssen-Griep from the Communication Studies department and Steve Mayer from the Chemistry department, examines how science and communication intertwine in the practice, dissemination, and reception of empirical discoveries in STEM disciplines. Via hands-on experiments using equipment in the chemistry and physics laboratories and investigating others’ studies and popular discourse, students learn ways to understand, accomplish, and more effectively communicate about modern science in light of this knowledge set. The course utilizes both scientific and communication scholarship to help students draw conclusions about those interconnections. The students learn to

  • Build scientific literacy through finding reliable resources, evaluating information and making use of that information.
  • Connect scientific principles and technologies with events affecting our everyday lives.
  • Develop skills and attitudes for communicating, working and making decisions with people of diverse knowledge and identities.
  • Understand practices and concepts explaining how scientific thought influences and is shaped by the perceptions of various key stakeholders.
  • Explain how we know and why we believe key concepts in the natural sciences and be able to use scientific reasoning, laboratory methods, mathematics and technologies to solve problems.
  • Demonstrate theoretically based translation of complex scientific ideas, findings, and implications for lay audiences through writing and presentation aloud.

Through these courses, students are introduced to a scientific view of the universe and through this learning experience, we hope that they will bring their gifts and talents to bear upon society to make the world work better.

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