UCI-Santa Ana Teachers Institute

2001 Seminar Descriptions

1. IDENTITY AND COMMUNITY: AN INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACH TO THE HUMANITIES

John H. Smith, Professor, German; Director, Humanities Center

The goal of this seminar is twofold. In terms of the content, we will explore concepts and practices that have defined "identity" and "community" predominantly in Western culture during the past two thousand years. We will explore the way issues such as race, class, gender, and sexuality intersect to define an individual’s identity, always within a community and always in relation to some "Other." In terms of the approach taken, we will examine and practice ourselves an interdisciplinary approach to the Humanities, using literary, historical, and philosophical texts. Tentative readings: Euripides, The Bacchae, Plato, The Symposium, Augustine, The Confessions, Marx/Engels, The Communist Manifesto, Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior

2. WHAT ARE THE CHANCES? PROBABILITY AND STATISTICS IN EVERY DAY LIFE

Amelia Regan, Assistant Professor of Transportation Systems Engineering, Civil & Environmental Engineering

In this seminar participants will learn the basic probability and statistics necessary for examining the following:

1. Some famous counter intuitive problems in probability (the Monte Hall Problem, the sex of puppies, the prisoner’s dilemma etc.)
2. Learn how to construct and test simply hypothesis
3. Learn to read popular press articles with a critical eye. How and when are statistics used to manipulate the public?
4. What do they mean by margin of error? How accurate are polls?

3. MUSIC AS EXPRESSIVE CULTURE

Robert Garfias, Anthropology

Few of us ever think much about trying to come up with a definition of music, just as few could probably think of any reason why we might require one. Still, it is useful to think about this ubiquitous form of human expression which many class as entertainment, fun or cultural refinement and yet which most of us are seldom without for very long. It would seem, from looking around the world and looking at history, that music may be much more important than we have given it credit for. What are music’s parameters, how does it function in society and/or in the service of man? What is it that we communicate by means of music besides its own sound? Can we be certain that other humans receive the same message as that which has been sent? There are even more forms of music expression than there are human cultural or linguistic groups on earth, since most cultures have more than one form of music and many have several. By looking at music across many cultures and including our own we may learn not only how it is used and has been used by man for as long as we know about, but we may also understand something about how we ourselves use it today.

Participants will be able to access the on-line text book for this seminar at:

http://aris.ss.uci.edu/rgarfias/courses/musexprs/webbook/readings.html

4. HOMER'S ODYSSEY

Julia R. Lupton, English and Comparative Literature

Transcribed around 725 BCE, Homer's Odyssey has been a foundational text for Western narratives of discovery, exploration, national identity, and home-coming as well as a storehouse for literary types and topics. Because of its monumental location at the very base of the literary canon, the Odyssey is a required text for high school students and a key work in many introductory and advanced university humanities courses. By the time students get to college, a certain familiarity with this work is almost assumed. The sooner students learn about the Odyssey, and the deeper their engagement with it, the greater their chances are for a sustained and successful relationship with literature in high school, college and beyond. Yet do our students really enjoy reading the Odyssey? Is the poem simply too important (and too old) to be fun and interesting to them? This seminar offers participants a chance to reread the Odyssey collectively, in the context of historical, literary, and visual research and resources that can open this work up to teachers and their students, increasing both our appreciation and our knowledge of this key work so that we can share our joy and our learning with our students. Emphasis will be on themes of real scholarly significance that can also connect Homer's world to our own. These themes include: hospitality and cannibalism; love, marriage, and the single-parent household; monsters, strangers and other familiar faces; Muses, memories, and the creative process.

5. LITERATURE, HISTORY, GENDER: ANCIENT CIVILIZATIONS AND THEIR AFTERLIVES

Jane O. Newman, English and Comparative Literature

This seminar is designed to introduce teachers to recent debates in Feminist Studies about the complex culture of ancient Greece, on the one hand, and to investigate its multiple afterlives in the post-classical world, on the other. The example of Greece will thus serve as a test case for new approaches to the study and teaching of ancient civilizations in general. We will concern ourselves with both the historical place of women (and men) in ancient Greek culture, and with the ways in which gender issues are visible within those texts with which most of us are familiar, namely the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. The afterlives of originally Greek scenarios in the Latin plays of the Roman playwright, Seneca, and the differing contexts of another ancient culture of central importance to the west, namely ancient Rome, will provide an interesting counterpoint. Participants will then be asked to research additional traditions (Latin American, African, African-American, etc.) in which similar scenarios are played out. As we read the Greek plays--and reread them with an attention to gender--we will study the material conditions of theatrical production, the place in state religious festivities and civic culture that the plays occupied, as well as questions of funding, sponsorship, and audience and audience response. And we will investigate the implications of the fact that nearly all of the tragedies that survive from Athens in particular feature women characters (played by male actors) either engaged in or faced with negotiating their role in bloody conflicts of gender-, class-, and international and domestic strife. Why use women's bodies--particularly when these bodies were in fact male--to investigate these tensions? Where do issues of gender, citizenship, and democratic political and cultural identity intersect? Lectures and discussions will cover the implication of the ancient Greek culture so often claimed to be the very basis of „western civilization‰ in the greater political and cultural economies of the ancient Near East, Asia Minor, and northern Africa, and will ponder the role of teaching the legacy of these particular ancients in our post-modern world. All readings will be in English.

6. LAW AND JUSTICE AT THE MILLENIUM

Seminar Leaders: John Dombrink, Professor, Criminology, Law and Society and

Mark Petracca, Chair/Professor, Political Science

"Law and Justice at the Millennium" will explore the current changes which are taking place in legal doctrine and practice across a range of topical areas. Topics include federalism and the Bill of Rights, personal autonomy and the law, the state of criminal justice policy in California, developments in manufacturers' liability, law enforcement in a diverse California, and the impact of information communications technologies on the law.

• —Introduction: Emerging, Evolving and Contested Law in 2001
• —Federalism and The Bill of Rights in 2001
• —Personal Autonomy and the Law
• —Getting Tough: The State of Criminal Justice Policy in 2001
• —Butts and Guns : The Future of Manufacturers’ Liability
• —Policing a Diverse California: the Challenges of 2001
• —Information communications technologies and the law

7. NON CANONICAL WRITERS FROM MEXICO AND LATIN AMERICA

Jacobo Sefami, Chair/Professor, Spanish and Portuguese

Although it is difficult to define "canonical writers" (Juan Rulfo could be a canonical writer within Mexico or Latin America, but "non-canonical" when viewed from the perspective of the U.S., for example), this seminar will try to go beyond familiar names in Latin American literature (writers such as Gabriel García Márquez, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes), and expand the knowledge of teachers about other interesting writing, so that they can innovate the contents of their classes. In addition, this seminar should provide a wider perspective of Latin America, by discussing literature that offers new perspectives and diverse ways of representation.

I would like to establish the list of writers after the first meeting, so that I make sure that those teachers taking the seminar have little knowledge of them, i.e., so that Fellows approach the writers we select together from the freshest possible vantage point. All texts will be in Spanish. However, curriculum units may be written in either Spanish or English. A tentative list includes:

8. INTRODUCTION TO BIOETHICS

Salme Taagepera, Lecturer/Academic Coordinator, Developmental and Cell Biology

Bioethics, or the study of medical ethics, is the study of moral issues in the fields of medical treatment, research and the life sciences. The 21^st century will present an unprecedented number of technological advances and opportunities. In little more than a generation, our definition of life and death is likely to be radically altered. Is our society prepared to accept the responsibility thrust upon us by these advances?

This seminar series would analyze current ethical issues by first understanding the underlying basic biology involved, and then discussing the ethical questions raised by these topics. We will look at what bioethics means, how it is studied and where it can take you. Possible subjects to be covered by the seminar are listed below:

• —Research ethics
• —Defining death
• —End—of—life care
• —Assisted suicide
• —Reproductive medicine
• —Human genome project
• —Economic issues
• —Society versus the individual
• —Shift of global agriculture to "indoor agriculture"
• —Transgenic bacteria, viruses, plants (Frankenfoods) and animals
• —Animal and human cloning: replacing reproduction with replication
• —and many more…

9. THE NATURAL HISTORY OF ORANGE COUNTY

Seminar Leader: Peter Bryant, Director, Developmental Biology Center & Professor, Developmental and Cell Biology

In this seminar we explore the natural history of Orange County and the threats to the survival of habitats and the species that depend on them. The County provides examples of terrestrial, riparian and coastal habitats, and supports a variety of endangered and threatened species, but also supports one of the fastest-growing human populations in the nation as well as a thriving economy supporting urbanization, habitat destruction, resource consumption and waste. The goals of the seminar are to help Fellows recognize the extent of biological diversity in natural habitats and the degree to which this is lost in urbanized areas, the aesthetic, cultural and material values of natural resources, and the legislative, political and regulatory issues involved in preserving natural resources in the face of urbanization. Fellows develop a variety of curriculum units, most of which explore different natural habitat types in relation to these conflicts with human encroachment.

In the process of researching and creating curriculum units, Fellows learn to use the Internet and the resources available there. The following two web sites are intended to be particularly useful:

http://darwin.bio.uci.edu/~sustain/bio65/Titlpage.htm (Peter Bryant’s hypertext book on Biodiversity and Conservation.)

http://mamba.bio.uci.edu/~pjbryant/biodiv/Teachers/index.htm

10. THE HARDY PERSONALITY IN THEORY, RESEARCH, AND PRACTICE

Salvatore Maddi, Professor, Psychology and Social Behavior and Deborah Khoshaba, Lecturer, Psychology and Social Behavior; Director, Program Development, and Training, Hardiness Institute

Hardiness training was discovered and perfected during 20 years of research and practice. Hardiness training focuses on a particular combination of attitudes and skills that facilitate resiliency under stress and adversity. Through hardiness, people are able to turn stresses and adversity from potentially debilitating circumstances into opportunities, thereby maintaining or enhancing their performance, conduct, morale, stamina, and health. There are now powerful techniques for training hardiness. The founders and developers of hardiness training, Drs. Maddi and Khoshaba, conduct the seminar.

The seminar has two aims. The first is to communicate the nature of hardiness by tracing its history in theory, research, and practice. In particular, the effectiveness of hardiness training in increasing retention and grade point average with high-risk community college students is detailed. The second is to convey specifics of hardiness training by having participants go through some of the exercises used with working adults. Further, in the spirit of collaboration, Drs. Maddi and Khoshaba encourage feedback from participants as to the use of hardiness training with K-12 students. The majority of the curriculum units produced by Hardiness Fellow each year focus on helping students develop academic perseverance.

Revised: Thursday, September 13, 2001