Jeraldy Garcia’s Profile Student Toggle navigation

Topics include functions, limits, differentiation, and tangent lines, L’Hôpital’s Rule, Fundamental Theorem of Calculus and Applications. Avatar designed at logomakr.com.

Topics include functions, limits, differentiation, and tangent lines, L’Hôpital’s Rule, Fundamental Theorem of Calculus and Applications. Avatar designed at logomakr.com.

This class aims to build upon your skills as a writer, reader, thinker, research, and composer in a 21st century context. The class will practice close reading and will learn how to approach, read, think about, and compose texts from a variety of genres. We will also critically engage what it means to write about, within, and through community. The class will involve assignments that allow us to engage with many types of media and we will explore issues and problems that matter to us in our modern world. We will be able to develop our own ideas about writing that we can take with us into future academic and professional experiences. Students will engage in class discussion to strengthen critical thinking and develop the language to respond to a wide variety of texts, ideas, and societal issues. Above all, we will apply critical thinking to all of the various texts that we read, write, and compose.

This class aims to build upon your skills as a writer, reader, thinker, research, and composer in a 21st century context. The class will practice close reading and will learn how to approach, read, think about, and compose texts from a variety of genres. We will also critically engage what it means to write about, within, and through community. The class will involve assignments that allow us to engage with many types of media and we will explore issues and problems that matter to us in our modern world. We will be able to develop our own ideas about writing that we can take with us into future academic and professional experiences. Students will engage in class discussion to strengthen critical thinking and develop the language to respond to a wide variety of texts, ideas, and societal issues. Above all, we will apply critical thinking to all of the various texts that we read, write, and compose.

Feminist philosopher Judith Butler famously theorized over a quarter century ago that a person’s gender is an ongoing performance: “there is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; […] identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results” (Gender Trouble 25). Rather than being determined in some divine or legal sense, then gender is socially constructed: it is what it is because of how individual people behave and impose (or refuse to impose) limits on others. In this class, we take ideas like Butler’s as part of a deep investigation into gender and gender-bending in music (as well as other performative spaces like movies, drag, and stand-up comedy) from the 1950s to today. We’ll consider questions like: What is gender, and how have different creative and cultural artists, academics, activists, and thinkers subverted and even upended gendered expectations? How is gender expression expected of people? Why do we believe there is a gender binary, and what does white supremacy have to do with it? How do the ways society enforces gender impact your life and what can you do to shift it? This course is an adventure in collaborative and student-centered learning (often called student-centered pedagogy). That means that we all share responsibility for the quality of discussion and kinds of learning that we do (and it also means that you will invest in your learning in this course in ways that might be new or unfamiliar to you). Part of my job is to help you learn to express ideas cogently, reasonably, and effectively, and part of your job is to enter into that learning enthusiastically and whole-heartedly (which doesn’t mean you have to love it, just that you should engage as best you can). Part of learning to write on the college level is taking these kinds of responsibility, by diving in, by asking questions, and by sharing your knowledge as you work with each other (and me) to learn. (IMAGE: Ella Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monroe at a Hollywood nightclub, November 19, 1954.)

Feminist philosopher Judith Butler famously theorized over a quarter century ago that a person’s gender is an ongoing performance: “there is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; […] identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results” (Gender Trouble 25). Rather than being determined in some divine or legal sense, then gender is socially constructed: it is what it is because of how individual people behave and impose (or refuse to impose) limits on others. In this class, we take ideas like Butler’s as part of a deep investigation into gender and gender-bending in music (as well as other performative spaces like movies, drag, and stand-up comedy) from the 1950s to today. We’ll consider questions like: What is gender, and how have different creative and cultural artists, academics, activists, and thinkers subverted and even upended gendered expectations? How is gender expression expected of people? Why do we believe there is a gender binary, and what does white supremacy have to do with it? How do the ways society enforces gender impact your life and what can you do to shift it? This course is an adventure in collaborative and student-centered learning (often called student-centered pedagogy). That means that we all share responsibility for the quality of discussion and kinds of learning that we do (and it also means that you will invest in your learning in this course in ways that might be new or unfamiliar to you). Part of my job is to help you learn to express ideas cogently, reasonably, and effectively, and part of your job is to enter into that learning enthusiastically and whole-heartedly (which doesn’t mean you have to love it, just that you should engage as best you can). Part of learning to write on the college level is taking these kinds of responsibility, by diving in, by asking questions, and by sharing your knowledge as you work with each other (and me) to learn. (IMAGE: Ella Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monroe at a Hollywood nightclub, November 19, 1954.)