ISP (0187) 201 - Analysis of Global Issues

Credits: 3.00

Students will engage in multi-disciplinary and comparative regional analysis of global issues, such as terrorism, nuclear proliferation, gender inequality, human rights, climate change, energy, trade and finance. Students will survey these issues from different regional and disciplinary perspectives, including history, anthropology, economics, political science and geography. (General Education Learning Goals: L and CW; Distribution Reqs: SS)

Gen Ed Learning Goal 1 INFORMATION LITERACY Gen Ed Learning Goal 2 COMMUNICATION–WRITTEN

Course Learning Goals: 1. Honing critical thinking: Students will be able to critically analyze academic texts, international news, maps, histories, and their own received ideologies and received wisdom for assumptions, political and cultural points of view, and stated and unstated biases.
2. Understanding core concepts of multiple disciplines: Students will have a basic competence in the core concepts of each of five disciplines—history, geography, anthropology, economics and political science–including an awareness of how these disciplines frame problems, and how the disciplines can complement one another.
3. Applying disciplinary contexts: Students will explore how to use historical background, geographical context, political systems, economic structures, and socio-cultural milieu to better understand regional and global issues.
4. Building Bibliographic and Information Literacy Skills: Students develop core liberal arts skills: undertaking bibliographic research to find scholarly and official documents related to a research topic; reading unfamiliar information and making sense of it; thinking critically about what they are reading; synthesizing material; coming to a conclusion about it; and articulating that conclusion verbally and in writing.
5. Appreciating Interdependence and Diversity: Students develop knowledge, skills, and attributes needed to live effectively in a world possessing limited natural resources and characterized by ethnic diversity, cultural pluralism and increasing interdependence. Students will gain an awareness of international diversity and learn to think about what global issues might look like from other disciplinary and cultural perspectives.
6. AU Communication Written Goal: courses meeting the university’s Written Communication goal must include assignments composed of discrete set of stages making up a clear writing
process, during which students are required to produce at least one first draft, receive oral or written feedback, followed by revision. The research project is comprised of multiple stages that allow for feedback and revision, culminating in the final research project. In this course, students complete several steps in the process of completing a multidisciplinary analysis of a global issue with several research and written assignments over the course of the semester. At each stage, students will revise and rewrite based upon instructor feedback. Each assignment builds toward a single research proposal. Students should not simply add the next assignment, but revise at each stage.
7. Social Sciences Distribution Goal. This course meets the undergraduate general requirement
for the social sciences (SS).