Knox College Moodle

This course will review models, etiology, assessment, and intervention for various developmental and acquired disabilities. This course is organized through a lifespan developmental approach beginning with etiology diagnosis and moving through early intervention, special education, dating and sexuality, vocation, community involvement, and healthcare. Specific disabilities will be examined through a biopsychosocial lens. Autism spectrum disorder, AD/HD, intellectual disability, learning disabilities, traumatic brain injury, spinal cord injury, acquired blindness, and related conditions will be covered.

The transformation of sound into digital data has profoundly affected the creation, production and distribution of music. With the vast majority of music now mediated by some form of digitization, it has shaped even our most basic modes of listening. This course grapples with the implications of this technology, its history, and its broad range of uses and tools. In doing so, students will utilize the Knox Electronic Music Studio to explore the foundational techniques of audio production, synthesis, sampling, podcasting, film scoring, and interactive software development.

Many of us are attracted to science because of the wonder of discovery and the (supposed) purity of the pursuit of knowledge. In this course we will wrestle with some of challenging questions that arise in the practice of science.

Our technological prowess has opened vistas for humanity to dream bigger, or perhaps it has simply revealed the cosmically (comically?) short timeframe of human existence and hence led us to imagine new ways for that existence to end. Extinction or evolution, one way or the other humanity is poised for transition. Will climate change force us to colonize other planets? Will we merge with machines by adding cyborg implants or, more radically, uploading our minds into robotic bodies?

The fear of human extinction and the promise of radical salvation through technology intertwine in a religious worldview unique to the contemporary world. We will explore this worldview and discuss the political and social implications of transferring our religious impulses and hope of salvation into technological forecasting.

This course will explore various forms of children's literature, including domestic and historical fiction, the picture book, fantasy and realism, and the young adult novel.  We will analyze children's literature using the same critical standards we apply to literature for adults, while at the same time recognizing the unique needs and responses of the child-audience.  In addition, we will consider what it means to be a "reader" of children's literature; how we define a "classic"; the lack of representation in children's literature and publishing; the changing landscape of children's literature; our cultural assumptions about and fictional representations of childhood, home, and family; and the truths we offer children through literature.  The class will follow a discussion rather than a lecture format.  

This course provides an introduction to the art, visual culture, and architecture of colonial, modern, and contemporary Latin America. The first half of the course will examine early contact between Europeans and Indigenous Americans, with an overview of the importation, adaptation, and responses of European artistic models in the Americas. We will analyze the transformation of Indigenous artistic traditions as a result of the European colonial project in the Americas (1492-ca–1820) through a variety of materials and topics, including, religious architecture, painting, prints, sculpture, and manuscripts drawings. The second half of the course will examine art from the early nineteenth century to the present, considering the role of the arts in building independent nations and creating shared artistic legacies constantly adapting and/or responding to outside influences. By analyzing current art historical debates, in the field of Latin American art, between national vs. cosmopolitan aesthetics, Hemispheric and Inter-American projects for continental unity we will see how Latin American artists negotiated issues of identity and contributed to the development of modern and contemporary art. We will explore twentieth-century Latin American visual arts through photography, manifestos, magazines, performances, exhibitions, and ephemera with a special focus on new technologies and global changes.

Kant’s work marks a decisive turn for modern thinking. In this course, we trace different ways of responding to two basic Kantian insights: that freedom depends on acknowledging our ability to give ourselves laws and that contemporary reality is best analyzed in terms of forms of experience and the conditions that make particular forms of experience possible. We trace these responses in the works of Wollstonecraft, Hegel, Marx, Douglass, DuBois, Emerson, Nietzsche, and others. Our emphasis in reading these texts is on identifying ways in which these thinkers offer tools for helping us to better understand contemporary forms of experience.

In this introductory course, we will explore the range of literary expressiveness including fairy tale, poetry, the conventional novel, the visual or graphic novel and the short story, as well as the classification of literature into specific genres; overall, of course, our main interest will be in exploring the source material for making textual and visual literary art with a focus on narrative “DNA”, i.e., the primary materials and impulses that generate story telling.  Additionally, we’ll look at the arrangement of elements such as  plot, narration, character, setting, language, voice, tone, theme, etc., comprising literary forms.  Finally, we’ll consider a variety critical strategies for reading and thinking about the literary arts, as well as the power and significance of our own interpretive role. 

In this introductory course, we will explore the range of literary expressiveness including fairy tale, poetry, the conventional novel, the visual or graphic novel and the short story, as well as the classification of literature into specific genres; overall, of course, our main interest will be in exploring the source material for making textual and visual literary art with a focus on narrative “DNA”, i.e., the primary materials and impulses that generate story telling.  Additionally, we’ll look at the arrangement of elements such as plot, narration, character, setting, language, voice, tone, theme, etc., comprising literary forms.  Finally, we’ll consider a variety of critical strategies for reading and thinking about the literary arts, as well as the power and significance of our own interpretive role. 

The general course description can be found in the syllabus, located here on moodle or in print from me.

This online supplement to the course is designed to give students the ability to submit work in one place, see after-hours (i.e. not during class) announcements regarding course work or scheduling, and engage in online discussion of course topics or material.