Faculty Programs

Recent Duren Courses

Professor Michael Cunningham, Psychology: “New Orleans’ Youth: Resilience and Vulnerability in Tomorrow’s Leaders”

Professor Cunningham, who was recently named a Weiss Presidential Fellow for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, designed this course to introduce students to the multifaceted lives of public school adolescents. The course has several objectives: students will learn about the rewards and challenges of growing up in New Orleans; students will learn how to understand and critically evaluate linkages between the basic needs of being an adolescent and the social dynamics that exist concurrently; students will connect abstract theoretical ideas with both empirical and real life examples; and students will learn how to analyze empirical data, write scientific research reports, and write reports for lay audiences. Students in the course will create brochures and pamphlets for local school parents and teachers, fulfilling part of the university’s Public Service requirement. Professor Cunningham’s Duren class was recently featured in this New Wave article.

Professor Barbara Jazwinski, Music: “Creativity and Obstacles to Creativity: A Discourse on Music as a Creative and an Intellectual Pursuit”

In this new course, Professor Jazwinski will encourage her students to examine various concepts in music that have the potential to fire their imaginations, and to allow them to discover and try to unravel the mysterious connections between the arts and the sciences. They will consider the correlation between mathematics and the arts, as embodied in the extraordinary beauty of fractals or in the mathematical precision of a fugue. The course will include a series of field trips to concerts and art galleries. Through this exploration, students will learn more about problem solving methods that can help remove obstacles to creativity. For example, the most talented composition students often experience the greatest obstacles to creativity because they do not have appropriate auditory tools and compositional technique to handle the exceptionally difficult process of “translation” of the sophisticated sonorities that they hear in their minds, to notes on paper. In short, they do not have the tools to convey to others the artistic vision that is uniquely their own. As a consequence, in Einstein’s words, they need to “figure out how to think about the problem." This course intends to help them do so.

Professor Gaurav Desai, English/ADST: “Africa and the Politics of Culture”
In this course on the politics of culture in Africa, students engaged with a number of debates on ethnic and national identities, the relationship between Africa and its diaspora, the long term global contacts between the continent and spaces across the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, and the ways in which gender and class inflect political struggles on the continent. One of the highlights of the course, made possible by the Duren funds, was a day-long class trip to Jackson, MS. to visit an exhibit on the "Legacy of Timbuktu." This exhibit, presented by the International Museum of Muslim Cultures in Jackson, highlights the history of the golden age of Timbuktu and the scholarly and cultural accomplishments that highlighted that era. Students had a chance to examine a number of manuscripts and artifacts collected in Timbuktu that have been preserved in the collection. They also received a personalized guided tour of the exhibit by the Curator. The course concluded with students individually reading a different travel narrative and reporting on it to the class. The thematic of travel, both physical and epistemic, framed the discussions throughout the semester.

Professor Harry Howard, Linguistics: “Computer Programming through Robotics”
The goal of this course is to introduce students to the principles of computer programming by programming a small mobile robot. The class will start out with the Lego Mindstorms NXT robot and advance to the 3D virtual world of Webots. Students are strongly encouraged to participate in the SocioCognitive Robotics lab, so the course will gravitate towards Prof. Howard's interests in linguistics and cognitive science. However, it is an introduction and does not require any knowledge of computer programming, robotics, cognitive science, or linguistics, though more advanced students with a knowledge of computer programming can be accomodated. Specific projects include programming a small imaging platform that the lab will send aloft on a high altitude balloon called HASP (there is a good possibility that this work will be incorporated into the navigation component of a vehicle that is going to the Moon), and looking at the Android programming platform for cell phones that Google has just released for the not-yet-existent Google cell phone.

Professor Peter Cooley, English: “Introduction to Creative Writing”
Classes are devoted to discussions of modern and contemporary work with attention to reading as a writer—i.e., learning to borrow of others’ work to enrich one’s own—and to workshop sessions on writing exercises in fiction and poetry designed to stretch the imagination and to ground the beginning writer in the basics of the craft: characterization, point of view, scene, summary, plot, structure, rhythm, sonics, and voice. A number of accomplished writers visited during the semester to review and discuss student work. Each also gave a public reading with a reception following, allowing for informal interaction with students and the community.

Professor Michael Mislove, Mathematics: “Computational Problem Solving”
Most mathematics courses teach students about a particular area of mathematics. This course taught problem-solving skills in general using Scheme, a functional programming language, as a means to enforce rigor while providing dynamic feedback. Students were able to see patterns in the problems they solved, in turn learning how to reuse and adapt one problem’s solutions to other problems.