Faculty-Led Programs

This one-week, intensive program will provide participants a comprehensive view of Germany’s economy and business environment.

This seminar in Barcelona is designed to expose students to a completely different environment of Spain, developing "unique human skills" to thrive in global environments that are becoming more and more the norm than the exception. The way students will achieve those goals is through real-time impactful consultancy projects with creative, intensive, challenge-based learning in contemporary coworker spaces.

• $3,500 (includes lodging, ground transportation, some meals, and excursions)
• Airfare TBD (This program will require a group flight and bill airfare to Student Accounts.)

The aim of the course is to introduce you to some of the fundamental questions and debates discussed by the ancient Egyptian philosophers. You will develop skills in reconstructing and evaluating arguments, develop critical communication skills through discussions and writing philosophy papers, and acquire a familiarity with the major themes of ancient Egyptian philosophy. 

This course investigates Medieval and Early Modern Christianity. In particular, we will be studying medieval Celtic Christianity. Any time a religious tradition is introduced into a culture, both the tradition and the culture are changed; this is what happened when Christianity encountered the Celtic cultures of the lands off the northwest edge of what we now call Western Europe. Some of the changes would have a profound influence on Christianity far beyond the time and space in which they arose, and that influence has experienced a renewed popularity for many Christians today. Our overarching goal in this class is to discover possible answers to the question: “Is there something that we can call ‘Celtic Christianity’?” If the answer to that question is “yes,” we will follow it up with a second: “What does Celtic Christianity look like, and how can we identify it?”

This course introduces you to Japanese society and culture. Japan has been one of the most economically advanced countries since the rise of globalization, yet unlike Europe and the U.S., it is a country of no Western origin. While globalization has accelerated the process of Americanization, Japan still retains uniquely Japanese customs, values/beliefs and social institutions. The first half of this course will examine Japanese society/culture and the impact of globalization on it through documentary films, academic articles, popular magazines and internet sources. The second half of the course will familiarize students with the key media sources in Japan, including newspaper, television, anime/manga, and film as well as introduce students to Japanese journalism, advertising, and entertainment industries. Right after this semester, students will visit Japan for approximately two weeks to directly observe interactions of Japanese people, experience Japanese life style, and visit Japanese media sites. Students are expected to stay in Japan as a college student ethnographer and share their observations and thoughts during evening meetings.

This course will offer a narrative of the formation of modern German national identity over the last 2,000 years. The course will take an interdisciplinary approach, covering the history, culture, language, literature, and philosophy of Germany, especially as it developed from 13th to the 20th Century. The course will consider the important German contributions that improved the human condition but also the human failings that culminated in the historically catastrophic 20th century.

This course examines the seemingly hidden policies that have created the cities we have today. Not only are our urban centers home to vast cultural diversity and technological advancement, but they are also centers of endemic problems including shortages of affordable housing, income inequality, and racial discrimination. At the end of the semester, we will spend a week in Washington, D.C., where we will learn about the unique history, policies, and events that created the neighborhoods and urban life of our nation’s capital.

This program provides candidates with the opportunity to examine educational policy and practice in an international setting. The focus of the course will be on comparative educational policies and practices and their relationship with economic development, and educational quality, standards, accountability, and reform. The study tour will include visits to educational organizations (P20) in Merida, Mexico.

The Migration and Remittances course is an in-depth and experiential learning seminar, based in Oaxaca, Mexico. Through interviews and meetings with return migrants and local leaders, students will learn about the challenges in the lives of people from Oaxaca. While migration between Mexico and the U.S. is a complex issue spanning centuries, this course focuses on more recent policy changes and how they have impacted flow of people and money between the two countries.