Syllabus

We are running 7 sections of this course in Summer 2020. To avoid confusion, each instructor is sharing a detailed syllabus directly with students through the Blackboard learning management system.  What you see below is a very stripped-down version of that syllabus for quick reference.

Course Description

As the SARS-Cov-2 virus sweeps the globe, the resulting pandemic has caused a major disruption in day-to-day life. Culture has become virtual overnight. Issues of politics, leadership, education, race, and class are revealed in ways that are usually obscured. As people curtail their movements and abandon public spaces, animals are moving back into those places. Pollution has fallen dramatically in urban centers. The structure of employment, medical care, and family life is immediately and visibly present in daily life. This course will use the social, economic, and environmental disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic as a mirror to broadly examine contemporary American and global life.

The course will be taught by a community of scholars from a range of disciplines in the sciences, arts, and humanities in conversation about intersecting issues raised by this crisis. Students will prepare for class each week by watching 20-minute lectures from a pair of faculty members and preparing questions for a live conversation with those faculty members each Thursday at 7pm. Students will adapt the information most pertinent to their experiences and produce a final project to be shared with a community of their choosing.

Course Format

Content for this online course will be delivered asynchronously. Recorded lectures from visiting scholars, recorded discussions with visiting scholars (centering on student questions), and contextual materials are available on the course website. Course discussion is facilitated through a combination of synchronous, whole-course conversations hosted in a Zoom webinar, and synchronous conversations within individual sections, hosted on the standard Zoom platform. The webinar discussions with visiting scholars will be recorded; individual section discussions will not.

Learning Outcomes

After successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

• Articulate observations about the way the pandemic relates to society.
• Formulate questions about the way social issues are revealed by the response to the pandemic.
• Contextualize individual experiences of social structures with different disciplinary perspectives (political, cultural, economic, environmental).
• Propose solutions to social problems exacerbated by the pandemic for their local communities.

Major Assignments & Grade Breakdown

• 25%: Weekly Questions, due each Wednesday by 11:59pm 
• 25%: Weekly Reflection; due each Sunday by 11:59pm       
• 50%: Final Project                      

Course Schedule
(see presentations by week for details)

Week 1:  (June 11)