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other pages this page The best you can
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Welcome! Let's start by
unpacking the course title: HUM 300 The Arts in Society.
Note on April 19, 2012
definition: Reference.com's dictionary
The Free Dictionary (based on the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language)
Humanities 300. The HUM courses are set apart from the departments that house your majors: Education, Vet Tech, Sports Management, Media Communications, and the rest. The Humanities courses are courses that every student may take, and they are general enough not to fit neatly into related designations such as art, communication, English, history, philosophy, or social sciences. The 300 means that it is a course that you should take in your last two years of college, not the first two.
As an upper-level course, it also expects more effort, more time, and more
sophisticated researching, thinking, and writing than your
freshman and sophomore courses.
We are saying that this course is important enough that anyone may take it, but it is advanced enough that you shouldn't take it until you've had a little more experience. What is so important and advanced about it?
The Arts. The arts are everywhere. They've been around as long as humans have been human. On the short list of things that most clearly distinguish humans from other animals, art sticks out like 20,000 people at a Goo-Goo Dolls' concert in Niagara Square. Since the 1960's, English has become the most common second language worldwide not because of ideals or armies or transnational capitalism, but because pop music in English is so compelling to listen to that people worldwide are gradually learning the language.
However, this music, and following from it English-language movies, TV, and literature, have met some rich and powerful artistic traditions that have developed in comparative isolation from each other for thousands of years. These local arts co-exist with the English-language forms and often a hybrid has resulted, for example, the Bollywood movie industry whose blockbusters dwarf the audience for popular movies in the U.S.
This course is all about you opening your ears and eyes to the pop hybrids and the traditional arts upon which they are based. Some of them are going to sound and look very different from what you have ever heard and seen. After you pass through that feeling of strangeness, you are going to have to open your mind and concentrate to do your best to experience that culture without actually being there. Fortunately, we have a fairly large screen and some good speakers in the classroom.
While we cannot cover all the arts in this course, we will pay attention to music, video, dance, and the visual arts.
Society.
By society, this course invites you to learn about the political, economic, and social life of the country as a
context for its arts.
This is only a three-credit college course, so there is no way we can cover all the arts in all societies. (That's Spain in the photo upper left and the Netherlands on the right.) Happily, because of the Internet, we can access the same online resources that people in other countries can. We are going to research one country per student in groups of three.
I have on purpose chosen mostly developing countries. The most prosperous country on this list is South Korea. Except for South Korea, again, the educational levels in these countries are relatively low. They are less industrialized, poorer, and in many cases less democratic than the U.S. and the Western European countries where most of the grandparents and great-grandparents of your classmates were born.
Countries for Spring 2012 (two students per
country)
| South America | Brazil, Argentina |
|---|---|
| Sub-Saharan Africa | Nigeria, S. Africa |
| North Africa |
Morocco,
Egypt |
| Mideast |
Turkey, Iran |
| South Asia |
India, Pakistan |
| East Asia |
China, S. Korea |
Your attitude determines the
persistence of your learning.
You can't be too internationally aware.
You can't be too technologically adept.
Listen.
Listen intently, with open
ears and mind, to music that is different from anything you have
listened intently to before.
Look.
Look intently, with open eyes and mind, to images of foreign places and
foreign people. The differences between you and them will be easy to
see. So look for the similarities.
Why take this course? When will you ever use it?
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In high school, you no doubt heard the phrase "college
will broaden your horizons." Well, HUM 300 will do that more literally
than any other course you will take.
Here's how I envision the
best that this course can do. Do
you see the open table in the picture on the right? It's waiting for you.
That's the Blu Jaz Cafe in Singapore. You're sitting at that table with several other people. You are there for your job, and so are they, and you were all strangers yesterday. But you're getting along very well. None of them are American, but English is the common language. You don't know for sure, but you don't think any of them are Christians. The group of you have been out doing some sight-seeing and now you're sitting down for something to eat.
After the waitress leaves to get your Tiger Beer and Seafood Mee Goreng (left), someone turns to you and
asks, "What did you think about that singer we heard this afternoon?
And the way she danced!"
You reply with something interesting, insightful, and
thoughtful that makes the others say to themselves, wow, she's
intelligent and sophisticated.
Right at this moment in January 2012, could you put
your finger on Singpore on a blank map of the world? No? The best that
HUM 300 can do is set you on a path
that leads you to the Blu Jaz Cafe
and that
insightful reflection based on
your careful observation of the sights and sounds of Singapore.
If you have trouble imagining yourself in Singapore, this course can also:
help you feel more at home on an increasingly
interconnected and crowded planet
give you some context when
you encounter references to other countries and cultures in your daily life
give you a destination for your next vacation or a topic for your
senior thesis
permanently expand your tastes in music. Listen and
enjoy!
One of the important, consequential ideas relevant to
this course is the struggle throughout the world between the traditions
of the past and the glitter of the future. The two stories below will
help illustrate this. People from the traditional world represented by
the story on the left are going to be able to leapfrog the
industrial revolution
and connect themselves to the media-saturated world represented by the
story on the right. In an extreme example, in remote villages, poor,
illiterate people (who live on less than a dollar a day and can't read
words) are going to connect to the Internet via pictures and sounds --
both of which they "read" quite well. They will never experience an
ink-on-paper, dead-tree "book".
Note that I say "are going to be able to". That doesn't mean they all will. But millions of the billions who are poor and illiterate now, surely will soon.
Are you going to be ready to communicate with them?
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from The
Cultural Dimension of International Business
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from Everything
Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making
Us Smarter |
In addition to this welcome page, the course web has four other pages and a wiki.
Find out all the official stuff. How is this course described in the college catalog? What are you going to know more about and know how to do better? What's the self-assessment all about?
This is the page to bookmark. It will change often and be the place to learn what we're going to do in class and what you should do before class. The syllabus has some supplementary pages that function like the textbook for this course: the countries |intercultural sensitivity | history | criticism | analysis | religions | politics.
What do you have to do for this course, what are my expectations, and how will your work be evaluated? This page explains all the assignments, the wiki for your research and writing, and the presentations.
This page is the best way to keep track of what you have to do for this course. The oral presentations and the written assignments that you have completed on the wiki. What are the other students doing? When is yours scheduled?
Printer-friendly version of the Course
Disclosure Statement
In addition to this welcome page, the offical course disclosure, and a week-by-week syllabus, this course web has a large and growing wiki (direct link). It will act as both the textbook and the place for you to complete the writing assignments for the course. The specific software package that we are using is the Tikiwiki (logo on right). Our wiki's gateway page has details and instructions.
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A
U. S. fertilizer manufacturer headquartered in Minneapolis decided to
venture into the vast potential of third-world markets. They sent
a team of agricultural researchers into an East African country to test
soils, weather conditions, and topographical conditions in order to
develop locally effective fertilizers. Once the research and
manufacturing of these fertilizer products had been completed, one of
the initial marketing strategies was to distribute, free of charge,
100-pound bags of the fertilizer to selected areas of rural farmers.
Imagine
an alternate world identical to ours save one techno-historical change:
videogames were invented and popularized before books. In this parallel
universe, kids have been playing games for centuries—and then these
page-bound texts come along and suddenly they’re all the rage. What
would the teachers, and the parents, and the cultural authorities have
to say about this frenzy of reading? I suspect it would sound something
like this:
Only a small portion of the brain
devoted to processing written language is activated during reading,
while games engage the full range of the sensory and motor cortices.
These new
'libraries' that have arisen in recent years to facilitate reading
activities are a frightening sight: dozens of young children, normally
so vivacious and socially interactive, sitting alone in cubicles,
reading silently, oblivious to their peers.