UCOR Section Descriptions

Course Description

This course introduces students to creative inquiry and expression through the study and practice of key genres in creative writing: poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction. Students' principal work in the class will consist of the production of original works in each of these three genres. In support of this work, students will respond to model poems, stories, and essays, and they will engage in artistic discussions about the areas where genres overlap. Assignments will include both written and oral components. This course introduces students to creative inquiry and expression through the study and practice of key genres in creative writing: poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction. Students' principal work in the class will consist of the production of original works in each of these three genres. In support of this work, students will respond to model poems, stories, and essays, and they will engage in artistic discussions about the areas where genres overlap. Assignments will include both written and oral components.

Course Description

Introduction to Music Theory is a creative Core course designed to increase a student’s abilities in creative thinking and expression through music composition and performance. This class will teach the fundamentals of music by engaging students through group activities and individual performances such as singing, playing instruments, and dance. Students will learn and explore rhythm, pitch and counterpoint.

Course Description

This course introduces students to creative expression through the study and practice of writing poetry and short stories, paying special attention to gender in a variety of cultural settings. Students will study the production and appreciation of poetry and short stories through a variety of exercises and responses to published poems and short stories and will work carefully with language, image, concision, and form. Students will draw on their positionally and their lived experiences to produce poems and short stories as an expression of the political, social, and cultural moment. They will compose brief analytic response essays, present your work in class, and attend a public literary event.

Course Description

Class Piano is designed for students who have no previous experience in piano playing. The course introduces basic keyboard and musicianship skills that enable students to be musically creative and expressive, as well as enable them to enjoy the process of creating music. Emphasis is placed on developing listening skills, performing skills, and a few useful elements of music theory. Beyond developing basic playing skills, this class will enable students to develop the confidence to make aesthetic judgments, express themselves creatively through the piano and interpret and analyze music.

Course Description

This course will both broaden and deepen your understanding of music through the study of—and hands-on experience with—experimental approaches to contemporary popular music composition and production across a wide range of styles and genres. A strong emphasis will be placed on the development of listening skills, the ability to write critically and meaningfully about connections between music and culture, and creative engagement with the musical tools and techniques we will be covering.

Course Description

In this course we will be addressing the identity of the Asian/Asian-American through literature, film, and Critical Race Theory. Students will be introduced to key concepts that help us better understand the historical condition of the Asian/Asian-American persona including assimilation, model minority myth, shame, vulnerability, and others, that continues to change with generational differences.

Course Description

Do video games matter? How do they make meaning? We'll explore the ways in which various video games communicate messages to audiences, focusing on their words, design, and play. Addressing matters ranging from console design to specific games and the people who play them, this class will investigate how video games communicate and why that process of media representation is meaningful.

Course Description

Do we live in a posthuman (or transhuman) world? Is the category of the human no longer expansive enough to account for all the ways in which we live today? Virtual existences, scientific advancements, and philosophical investigations have pushed us to what some would consider the "limit" of a purely human existence. However, the category of the hybrid, the marvelous, the cybernetic has been a topic of literary investigation for hundreds (if not thousands) of years. This course reads some of those literary texts alongside the concepts of both humanism and posthumanism-interrogating the literary texts for the ways that they frame and respond to the category of the human.

Course Description

This class examines the technologies by which images and visual forms are produced, circulated and received, as well as the theories of seeing that make the visual world intelligible. It will introduce students to the social role of images and visuality (the structures and power relations of society), with a particular focus on frames of race, gender and sexuality.

Course Description

Stories are the vocabulary necessary to "cultural literacy." We need stories to read with. Without stories, the world is uninterpretable. In this course, students will explore a story archetype that they will quickly recognize in their own lives. It is the lived story, provocatively told in great films and literature, of our approaching, pushing, and transgressing boundaries.