The University of Denver requires undergraduate students to take foundations and core courses in the interest of building their interdisciplinary, liberal arts education. Faculty in the Department of Human Communication teach several UREQ courses which students interested in communication may take to meet their First-Year Seminar (FSEM), Creative Expression (CREX), Social Sciences Foundation (SOCS), and thematic core (CORE) requirements.
FSEM
At DU, all incoming first-year students are required to take a seminar of their choice. The seminars offer a unique opportunity for students to explore a topic in-depth with their faculty mentors, joining an intellectual community which will help them adjust to academic life at DU. Visit the Student Life web-page for more information about the FSEM program, including current course offerings: http://www.du.edu/studentlife/fys/
FESM 1111 Race, Place, & Public Memory (Willink)
This course examines the role of cultural memory in contemporary society. We will explore the dynamics between remembering and forgetting in the process of constructing individual, cultural, and national narratives. Students will analyze how communities (selectively) remember their past in order to create a sense of shared sensibilities in the present. Specifically, we will consider how shared memories of events and experiences in the past are produced and reproduced through culture and social practices i.e. through texts and images, objects and sites, rituals and ceremonies, institutions, and the practices of everyday life.
FSEM 1111 The Meaning(s) of Work (Lair)
This course explores a series of theoretical, historical, and popular perspectives on and representations of work and its various meanings. In doing so, this seminar aims to not only help students understand the role that work will play in their lives, opening up a critical space for students to make deliberate choices regarding their career aspirations, but also to help students gain a greater understanding of the role that work will play in the lives of others engaged in different types of work across the socio-economic spectrum.
FSEM 1111 Exploring the Rhetoric of Anarchism and Conservatism (Foust)
In the last five years, two deeply-rooted historical movements have experienced a political and cultural resurgence: conservatism and anarchism. Evidenced by the successful Republican Revolution in American federal government, as well as efforts to include a conservative worldview in educational and media institutions, conservative rhetoric is becoming increasingly salient to the American populace. At the same time, ignited in part by the expansion of free trade across the globe, anarchist rhetoric has become an integral part of activism: As anthropologist and activist David Graeber asserts, the creative energy for radical politics is now coming from anarchism. Initially, anarchism and conservatism appear as polar opposites: one advocates for the cultivation of traditional values and institutions, the other for a total dismantling of government and other stifling figures of authority; one is often associated with chaos and violence, the other with stodginess and control. In spite of the obvious differences in worldview and rhetorical style, both conservatism and anarchism are impassioned, dynamic, symbolic movements to win the hearts and minds of contemporary citizens. We will explore the rhetoric of conservative and anarchist advocates, reaching a richer understanding of these pervasive, complicated movements.
CREX
For most undergraduate majors, a foundational course in creative expression is required. The HCOM Department is home to several speaking courses which meet the CREX requirement. Students taking the Speaking Out CREX courses advance their abilities to speak in a variety of settings, including interpersonally and in groups, publicly and in performance. Students also advance their critical thinking and research skills around significant themes and topics. Please consult the current class schedule on myweb to see which CREX courses are offered this quarter.
CREX 1211 Speaking Out: Communication through Literature
This course is about learning how to interpret diverse forms of literature and is aimed at making student's strong performers and effective public speakers. Emphasizes critical understanding in the interpretation of prose, poetry, drama through careful research. In addition to the dramaturgical elements of interpretation that will be emphasized in this course, students will learn how to contextualize serious public issues through the literature we use.
CREX 1212 Speaking Out: Ideas the Matter
The purpose of this course is to assist students in becoming more competent and comfortable when speaking about our opinions. Students will learn how to deconstruct and develop rhetorical arguments, including the full range of the speech-making process, but especially how to support those opinions we assert. Class discussions and course materials will provide students with a foundation of knowledge on which to build skills useful in a variety of contexts. Course format will vary with content.
CREX 1213 Speaking Out: Special Occasions
This class is designed around speaking in a variety of unique yet everyday situations. Unlike other public speaking courses aimed at speaking in political or civic arenas, this course is designed to teach approaches to speeches in special contexts. Examples include: introductions, presenting or accepting awards, and commemorative speeches.
CREX 1214 Speaking Out: World Affairs
This course is designed to help you speak your mind on global issues and current events that matter to you, our community, and our world. These issues and current events will be the base from which you will build the confidence to speak in front of an audience. This course emphasizes critical thinking, in-depth research, and communication skills in order to engage your listeners in a meaningful way, as well as concentrating on the ability to successfully listen to and evaluate a speakers message. Effective delivery skills will be explored; however, this course is not solely about performing in front of an audience. It is also about building awareness of, and becoming able to critically communicate about global affairs.
CREX 1215 Speaking Out: Gender and Voice
Sex, sexuality and gender affect who speaks out, how ideas are voiced and how ideas are received by audiences. This course gives students the opportunity to experience varied means of creative expression and become familiar with personal and political issues related to gender. At the same time, students learn critical thinking, in-depth research, and communication skills which will help them find their own voice, and ethically listen to the voices of others who differ from them.
CREX 1216 Speaking Out: Technical Discourses
Technical communication and oral presentation require a complex set of skills. This course is designed to help students develop critical thinking, organizational strategies and presentational methods about and based on new technologies.
CREX 1218 Speaking Out: Deliberative Discussion
Students in this course learn communication skills for creatively and successfully engaging in impromptu, small group discussion. In this deliberative process, students effectively facilitate and/or lead discussions as well as participate in meaningful ways to gain understanding, reach conclusions, make decisions, and problem solve. Additionally, as part of the course, students learn conflict management, democratic decision-making, meeting conducting, and consensus building. In order to maintain the spontaneous quality of deliberative discussion, group-planning meetings outside of class are discouraged. This course is designed to help students construct their ideas in the moment and as naturally occurs in public and private group processes.
SOCS
SOCS 1210 Understanding Communication
Undergraduate students may fulfill a Social Sciences Foundations (SOCS) requirement by taking SOCS 1210, Understanding Communication. The course explores different conceptualizations of human communication in a variety of contexts, including communication among individuals, in interpersonal or relationships, groups and organizations, and symbolic interaction at larger community, cultural and global levels. SOCS 1210 also considers special issues in communication such as freedom of speech and the press, new communication technologies, political communication, international communication, public relations communication management, etc.
Thematic Core
As juniors and seniors, most DU students must take one courses in each of three thematic core areas: Communities and Environments, Self and Identities, and Change and Continuity. The courses offer students an opportunity to explore topics of interest from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, while enhancing critical thinking skills. Faculty in the HCOM Department offer a variety of CORE courses (check the current class schedule on myweb to view up-to-date offerings). Students must also take one writing intensive CORE course as part of their university requirements.
Communities and Environments
CORE 2465 Environmental Controversies (Foust)
What is the environment? How do we (as humans, citizens, Colorado residents, etc.) define our relationship with it? How should we construct our relationship with it? By interweaving various perspectives from rhetorical theory, a history of environmental discourses, and contemporary environmental controversies, this course explores answers to these basic questions. Through readings, discussions, and assignments, we will foster a critical orientation toward environmental rhetoric. This will include interrogating the persuasiveness of arguments and evidence deployed in various environmental controversies; considering the ethics of various advocates rhetorical expressions; and considering perspectives that may differ from our own. As this course cultivates critical thinking skills, it also seeks to help you find and enhance your own voice as an informed citizen and advocatenot by simply repeating others discourse, but by thoughtfully considering the quarters various rhetorical perspectives, and coming to your own decision about important environmental issues.
Self and Identities
CORE 2509 Communication & Production of Cultures (Calafell, Mendoza)
Profound changes in the last two decades on the global, national, and local scales have brought about a collapse in peoples traditional sources of self-definition, notably, those ethnic, racial, geographic, sexual, and national bases of group belonging and identity. Given such undermining of the old certainties, answers to the question Who am I? have become more tenuous, if not totally up for grabs. Fragmentation of identities, ethnic conflict, social alienation and a loss of a sense of grounding are only some of the noted hallmarks of the present time. This course is designed to address the implications of this shift in signification from identity to difference for the dynamics of identity formation and the search for alternative bases for consensus-formation in the new millennium. Using the lens of communication and the notion of production in unpacking the complexities of everyday formation in the 21st century, it hints at the larger forces at work on the construction of cultures and identities. Representation in particular, media representation is critically examined for its role in the process of culture and identity production.
CORE 2526 Communication in Close Relationships (Morr Serewicz, Suter)
Communication in Close Relationships emphasizes the relationship between the self and others at a personal level. We will examine research from a variety of disciplines, including communication, psychology, sociology, family studies, and history, to increase our understanding of relationships from diverse perspectives. The three main perspectives we will investigate show how relationships affect and are affected by their context, the individuals involved, and the relational system. The goals of this course are for students to increase their skill in: Explaining how knowledge about context, individuals, and relational systems increases understanding of communication processes in a variety of relationships between the self and others; and evaluating critically the information about relationships that we encounter in our everyday lives, while asking and investigating questions about real-life relationships
Change and Continuity
CORE 2620 Inventing America (Hicks)
This course is a selective rhetorical history of how political oratory has shaped the public culture of the United States. The course focuses on the transformations in the meaning of democracy by reflecting on significant moments of political discourse that have established the conditions of US citizenship and the justifications for excluding some from political franchise. In doing so, this course attempts to foster an appreciation for the ways that the justification of and challenges to public policy expands and limits the public vocabularies and symbolic resources available to citizens to fashion a genuine democratic culture. For the purposes of this course, political oratory includes speechmaking, declarations, pamphlets, magazines, newspaper articles, public letters and debates.
CORE 2647 Work in Popular Imagination (Lair)
This course explores the representation of work in popular cultural texts and the influence of such representations on both the social organization of work and the identities of workers. While the course is broadly historical in its scope, covering a wide range of representations of work over the last 150 years or so, it will be organized thematically, exploring historical changes in the representation of work across several domains, including: the nature of the American Dream and its relationship to work; gendered representations of work, particularly images of both working women and womens work; images of class and the social division of labor; and resistance, agitation, and the role of popular representations of work in influencing social change.
CORE 26XX (Writing Intensive) The Long Civil Rights Movement (Willink)
As Hall (2005) argues in her definitive critique and elaboration of the Civil Rights Movements history, the long Civil Rights Movement, took root in the liberal and radical milieu of the late 1930s, was intimately tied to the rise and fall of the New Deal Order, accelerated during World War II, stretched far beyond the South, was continuously and ferociously contested, and, in the 1960s and 1970s, inspired a movement of movements that def[ies] any narrative of collapse (p. 2). This course explores the Long Civil Rights Movementfocusing on the ongoing struggles for racial equity in education. While the course is broadly historical in its scope, covering debates about public education over the last century, it will explore historical and cultural changes in education by focusing on three primary struggles: 1) the African American quest for equal education, 2) the Mexican-American fight for bilingual education; and 3) Native American pursuit of self-determination through education. The conclusion of the class will explore how Halls investment in complicating privileged narratives of history argues for a multiracial, not biracial understanding of the movement and envisions solidarity across movements. Throughout the course we will consider how these historical struggles echo in contemporary debates of race, education, and equity.