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SCHOOL FOR NEW LEARNING	2007-2008

Arts and Ideas Category

READING AND INTERPRETING SHAKESPEARE.

William Shakespeare is one of the great names in Literature, a major dramatic experience in life. This course makes Shakespearean drama accessible, open to direct audience reading and appreciation. Class participation in imaginative critical interpretation is stresses so that the reader and potential playgoer without previous experience, can both be comfortable with the Bard. Emphasis is on literary immediacy, class reading, and interpretation rather than on research. Representative plays will be chosen for study. Video taping will be used as we read Shakespeare aloud.

ETHICAL DECISION-MAKING.

Ethical decisions are often difficult to make, not because there are no right choices, but because there may be several right choices. This course will go beyond WHAT is right or wrong to examine WHY we say something is right or wrong. In first part of the course, students will gain the intellectual tools and insights to lay bare their own reasoning processes and those of others. In the second part of the course, students will apply these tools to a consideration of the ethical issues raised by the high technology of current health care.

CREATIVE INK-THE ART OF WRITING.
Writing is one of the supreme ways people can learn about themselves and the intricate worlds that surround them. Not only is writing, in it creative moments, a path of deepcommunication and their experience using the perspective and heuristic tools provided by social psychology. We will examine how social characteristics and communication pattern shape us. Literature and artistic works will be sources for illuminating the human condition. Changes in attitudes, values, and goals that occur as we develop as adults, will be viewed through the lens of our membership and interaction with groups.

TWENTIETH CENTURY AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS.

The breadth and diversity of African-American women’s writing in
the 20^th century makes this literature especially challenging and exciting. In class, we will read and discuss works of fiction and poetry by writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Anne Petry, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, Paule Marshall, Sonya Sonchez, Nikki Giovanni, Toni Cade Bambara, Gloria Naylor and others, Through discussions, presentations, films, recordings and close reading, we will look at how these works break through historically imposed silences, stereotypes and stigmas, celebrating alternative ways of seeing and being.

ARTISTIC ISSUES IN INSTANT IMAGE PHOTOGRAPHY.

The aesthetic, cultural, intellectual, historical, and technical issues that animate contemporary photography will be explored through the use of Polaroid pictures created by class members using their own Polaroid cameras. Photographic ideas will be presented, discussed and addressed in classroom critiques of the images created. Personal artistic visions will be explored, encouraged and revealed. Students will learn a language for discussing these pictures and develop the necessary personal and intellectual distance from their own artistic creations in order to critically analyze them.