• Prospective Students
• Students
• Faculty/Staff
• Alumni
• Community Partners
• Parents

• Core Curriculum
• Learning Objectives and Assessment
• Featured Faculty
• For students
• Core Requirements
• Core Substitution
• For Faculty
• Boards AND Committees
• Contact

Featured Faculty

Faculty featured on this Web page are outstanding teachers who support and value a general education. As champions of undergraduate instruction, we appreciate their efforts and celebrate their contributions to the University’s Core Curriculum.

Featured faculty for the Spring 2009 semester include: David Ake, Neal Ferguson, Cheryll Glotfelty, Don Pfaff, Paul Starrs, and Rosemary Dixon

David Ake, Associate Professor, Department of Music and Dance

Core courses taught:
MUS 121: Music Appreciation
MUS 122R: Survey of Jazz
MUS 123R: History of American Popular Song

Students who enroll in Prof. David Ake’s classes walk away with more than an ear for John Coltrane (or Beethoven or Public Enemy). Since 1999, Prof. Ake’s goal when teaching Core courses is “to have students see how the course material relates to their life.” In fact, Prof. Ake tells students how all classes offered at the University have the capacity to change one’s perspective on things.

Prof. Ake believes that a general education is valuable because it fosters students’ abilities to think and express themselves critically. Students are encouraged to “take a position and to care about what they say or write…to care about what they do in the world.” It is through a general education that the Liberal Arts ideal happens. “I love teaching Core classes.  It’s college in the best sense of the word.”

Here, at the University, “students can get exposed to a broad range of ideas, disciplines, belief systems.” If we funnel students too quickly into a career path, Prof. Ake argues, they lose the opportunity to embrace a true Liberal Arts education. This is why, says Prof. Ake, the Core Curriculum is a fundamental part of the UNR experience.

 

Neal Ferguson, Associate Professor, Department of History
Director of the Core Humanities Program

Core courses taught:
CH 201: Foundations of Western Culture
CH 202: The Modern World
CH 203: The American Experience and Constitutional Change

Since 1991, Prof. Ferguson has been cultivating student’s familiarity with many of the great ideas and concepts that have shaped the world as represented in the humanities’ academic disciplines. Perhaps the most notable discovery students make in Prof. Ferguson’s classes is that “they appreciate in a different way that the world didn’t begin with their births!”

Prof. Ferguson believes that one of the challenges facing college students today is recognizing how they can fit into our complex, fluid world.  The world, he observes, is “a work in progress.  We have neither a perfect understanding nor control over it.” His courses push students to question what beliefs and attitudes they share with other peoples and what ones, in turn, makes them unique individuals. In doing so, Ferguson addresses what he believes is the value of a University Core Curriculum:  “Without some understanding of the Big Picture, you function less well in this challenging world.”

Prof. Ferguson is pleased with the University’s support and resources placed behind the Core Curriculum. “The University has gone far beyond what most public universities do in regard to what is often lamely referred to as general education,” says Ferguson.  “That’s one reason we call it the Core Curriculum here.”  The University needs to “stay the course” and continue to offer a demanding Core Curriculum education program that helps produce, as the data suggest, knowledgeable and capable graduates. 

Back to top

 

Cheryll Glotfelty, Associate Professor of English

Core courses taught:
ENG 102: Composition II
ENG 300: Nevada in Literature
ENG 427A: Women in Place
ENG 431: Old and Growing: Aging and Identity in America
ENG 490: Globalization and the Environment
ENG 493: Ethnicity, Gender, and American Identity
ENG 491A: Amazonia in the Arts
CH 203: American Experiences and Constitutional Change

Since 1990, Prof. Glotfelty has embarked on a journey to awaken students’ interests in literature, culture and the environment. “I want students to know that ideas and social patterns have origins and to have an appreciation for the different fields of knowledge.” Furthermore, Prof. Glotfelty wants students to examine an issue and try to figure out the underlying assumptions. This ability is called critical thinking “and the Core makes it a point to purposefully include critical thinking skills,” says Glotfelty.

In addition to teaching students how to think critically, Prof. Glotfelty is confident that a general education enriches students’ lives by improving one’s proficiency in the areas of writing (or other forms of communication) and research. “We teach students to have a real awareness of their writing context—to be able to target their message to different audiences.” She adds that having the capacity “to learn how to learn” instills confidence in students—an ability that students can take with them anywhere, regardless of their major.

Prof. Glotfelty enjoys the different perspectives her students bring to the classroom. “You get a wide spectrum of students taking Core courses. You have students with different backgrounds and the reasons for being in college are really different.” This makes Core courses especially interesting for Glotfelty because “you have the opportunity to work with quite a diverse group.”

University support is needed to assure a robust Core Curriculum experience. One way to augment student’s learning  experience in Core courses, says Prof. Glotfelty, is to have smaller classes because “students learn best in an interactive environment.” In fact, Prof. Glotfelty believes “there is no substitute for interaction and conversation in the classroom.”

Back to top

 

Donald Pfaff, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics and Statistics

Core courses taught:
MATH 120: Fundamentals of College Mathematics
MATH 126: Precalculus I
MATH 127: Precalculus II
MATH 181: Calculus I

Prof. Pfaff’s approach to teaching Core Mathematics courses involves making mathematics accessible to students, while helping them to think more clearly with abstractions. It can be a “major hurdle,” says Prof. Pfaff, given the wide range of mathematics backgrounds and interests that students bring into the classroom. Prof. Pfaff has unquestionably met this challenge since the establishment of the UNR Core Curriculum, over twenty years ago.

Prof. Pfaff has a simple message for students: “How can you hope to do well on Jeopardy! if you don’t have a wide variety of knowledge?” This is one reason why Prof. Pfaff values a general education. Another, more profound reason is that “knowing something about a lot of different areas gives a depth to your life and makes you more sympathetic to the difficulties in our world.” Courses in the Core Curriculum “can really affect you…if you let them,” says Pfaff.

Sometimes it can take years for his students to realize the value and applicability of the course material he teaches. He knows this because students do thank him…eventually. But Prof. Pfaff is comfortable setting in motion future events: “Twenty, twenty-five years from now, these people in your MATH 120 class are the people in your legislature, or business leaders in your community—and they will have a certain pull.” What Prof. Pfaff hopes is that these individuals feel good toward their University experience and in turn, show their support for higher education.

Back to top

 

Paul Starrs, Foundation Professor, Department of Geography

Core courses taught:
GEOG 106: Introduction to Cultural Geography
GEOG 418: Geographic Thought
GEOG 477: Geography and Film

What would you do if you were dropped far away from home into some unknown city or countryside? If you have the skills taught in Prof. Starrs’ geography courses, then you know how to begin to gain an understanding about the culture and society surrounding you. Since 1994, Prof. Starrs has demonstrated to students how ethnicity, religious identity, and material culture relate to the landscape in enduring ways. This is done, argues Prof. Starrs, by teaching students how to think and write critically.

Prof. Starrs believes that it is a general education program that makes these life-coping skill sets available to students. Simply stated, “The Core Curriculum really matters.” And, while professors needs to make sure the material presented in Core courses is interesting and relevant to today’s students, Prof. Starrs thinks students also need to commit to their Core courses: “You need to throw yourself into it [the Core] and motivate yourself as best as you can. It will pay off.”

"Faculty across the University take on a sense of duty over the Core," says Prof. Starrs. Yet, recognition is lacking for the people and departments that routinely impact hundreds of students each semester. Letting departments and individuals know that it is worthwhile to have faculty teach Core courses instead of major requirements is something that the University could do better. Still, the University continues to ensure that a quality Core Curriculum is in place for all students, making Prof. Starrs exclaim how “teaching at this place is truly a joy.”

Back to top

 

Rosemary Dixon, Lecturer and Advisor of Women’s Studies/Ethnic Studies/Holocaust, Genocide & Peace Studies/Religious Studies

Core courses taught:
WMST 101: Introduction to Women's Studies
WMST/SOC 453: Gender and Society
WMST/SOC 461: White Indentity, Race and Racism

The following featured story celebrates outstanding achievement in online course design and delivery. The course authoring team includes Rosemary Dixon, Alina Solovyova-Vincent and Shannon Brown.

In 2003, Prof. Dixon took on a challenge proposed by the Office of the Core Curriculum to offer capstone courses online. Together with her course co-designers, she worked diligently over the next year to transform a traditional face-to-face course into an engaging—and now award-winning—online course. This spring, Prof. Dixon’s course WMST/SOC 453: Gender and Society received international recognition as a 2009 Blackboard Exemplary Course, an honor shared with only five other recipients world-wide.
“It is so exciting to get your work rewarded,” says Prof. Dixon. “We’re the only ones in the state to have won this award; we feel pretty good about that.” Though no doubt feeling excitement over winning this award, Prof. Dixon is equally pleased to be offering an online Core capstone and diversity alternative to students at UNR. “The most exciting thing for me is that my students are working moms, soldiers serving overseas, or students who live elsewhere. Having an online course is brilliant because it’s a great opportunity to expand our pedagogy beyond the face-to-face classroom.”

However, Prof. Dixon cautions that online courses are only successful when they are of high quality. It takes time to carefully design all of the necessary components of an online course. For example, when students log on to Prof. Dixon’s Gender and Society course they have a number of resources at their fingertips. Called “learner support tools,” students can click on video tutorials, a course glossary and student self-tests, in addition to having access to the necessary course assignments, assessments and discussion forums. More importantly, instructors have to be very intentional about what they want students to get out of online course material, says Dixon. “It makes you really clarify the material, which is an interesting exercise.”

Instructors also need to plan every single week in advance, but still allow for unstructured discussions to take place. In her Gender and Society course, students look at the intersections of gender, race, class, sexuality and identity in terms of institutions. Contemporary culture topics add a unique course component and invite students to become engaged with each other, discuss their assumptions, and apply gender theory to support an argument. “In an online course, you are required and expected to have meaningful conversations. You’re not allowed to sit in the back of the classroom and never talk.”

Prof. Dixon encourages other Core faculty to re-design a traditional course onto an online format, especially because the University has the resources to make it happen. In fact, even if a course is already being offered online, “Instructors should submit their courses for a course make-over. You’ll get so much feedback. To me it was like a dream having someone with the tech knowledge help you like that,” says Dixon of her course co-designers, Alina Solovyova-Vincent (Teaching and Learning Technology) and Shannon Brown (Independent Learning). It is well worth the effort to offer online courses, says Prof. Dixon. “I can now be very up-to-the-minute technologically speaking. I’d love to teach other faculty how to do it.”

Back to top