GSTR 210

This course is designed to develop and build upon the reasoning, writing, research, and learning emphases of GSTR 110 while engaging all students on issues close to the historic mission of the College—race, gender, Appalachia, and class. Each section initially explores the story of Berea, including as it relates to the unifying themes of GSTR 210. Each section of the course involves explicit, continuing attention to writing, reasoning, research, and reflective engagement with various texts, including instruction in the processes of producing a research paper.

Learning Outcomes

Successful students will:

Section Descriptions

Below are section descriptions for all instructors who regularly teach GSTR 210. Not all of these instructors listed here teach the course each term. Please refer to the schedule of classes for the term in question to see which instructors will be offering the course.

GSTR 210- Edelman, Adam: Writing About Visual Art and Community. We often look at visual art as individuals, focusing on how it makes us feel, or whether we “like” an artwork or not. But art also has the important role of connecting us to others through a feeling of shared experience. Unlike written language, visual art can be understood and appreciated by people from various cultures and backgrounds without having to be translated or explained. In this course, students read a variety of current articles, essays, and opinion pieces that discuss how works of visual art and communities intersect, interact, and for what purposes. Students enter the public discussion by writing about specific movements in visual art or specific artworks in order to explain how their features build a sense of common experience among individuals. The course culminates in a research paper on a topic of students’ choice that address some aspect of a need for community building and how visual art has responded to this need, or how it can better respond in the future.

GSTR 210- Heyrman, John: America Imprisoned. Well over two million Americans are in federal or state prisons or county jails in the Unites States. This section will take that fact as its starting point and consider the course themes of race, sex, class, and Appalachia as they intersect with the criminal justice system in the U.S. The course will consider both causes and effects of the vast number of American in jail, including issues such as the war on drugs to the disenfranchisement of ex-felons. The class as a whole will pick a few specific topics among these broad issues to research and debate.

GSTR 210- Webb, Althea: Emerging Adulthood and the College Experience. This course provides and in-depth study of the physical, cognitive, and social-emotional growth of the emerging adult during the transition period of the college years. We will examine the college experience across a number of dimensions, including culture, ethnicity/race, gender, socioeconomic status, and sexual orientation. We will also explore the contexts of the higher education institutional environment (e.g., community college, private, public, and/or elite institution) that influence development. Throughout the course, we will relate theory and research to practical concerns and current events. We will connect academic research on emerging adults to the lived experiences of young people today. Students will link the theoretical to the practical by conducting an interview with an individual who attended college in order to write a research paper on a selected topic related to course content. Students will need to interpret the interview responses based on research articles and explain how the responses are/are not supported by the research articles.