Instr:                  Greg Jay
Office:                GAR 324,   229-6327
e-mail:                gjay@uwm.edu
Office hours:    by appointment

Course Information:                     TTh     1:30-2:20        BUS N146    (Main Class Meeting)
                                                      Discussion sections: 150-601 Th 3:30 Blaeser;
                                                                                            150-602 Th 3:30 Jay;
                                                                                            150-603 Th 3:30 TA

Course Description

Satisfies both Humanities and Cultural Diversity General Education Requirements
Team taught by Professor Greg Jay, Professor Kimberly Blaeser, and Professor Genevieve McBride
 

The United States has always been a diverse society, composed of people from many cultural, ethnic, and racial backgrounds. Yet too often the study of American history and literature has not done justice to this diversity, or faced honestly the conflicts and challenges that it presents. Today, more than ever, all of us need to expand our understanding of cultural differences and gain new skills in cross-cultural communication.

This course will provide students with a candid look at social diversity and multiculturalism in America, using a unique, interdisciplinary, team-taught approach. The study of history and literature will be combined in units that focus on the experiences of America’s diverse groups, including African Americans, Asian Americans, Latino/a Americans, and Native Americans as well as Americans of European descent (Irish, Italian, Jewish, etc.).

Our main history textbook will be Ronald Takaki’s A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. Takaki’s lively narrative begins with the European encounter with Native Americans and provides vivid accounts of such topics as slavery, Irish immigration, the Mexican American experience, and Asian American struggles against discrimination.

Our literature textbook will be American Mosiac: Multicultural Readings in Context, ed. Barbara Roche Rico. The readings here provide a comparison of different ethno-racial and cultural groups as they face the common challenge of lost and found cultural identities, of immigration and migration, of political and economic struggle, of dreams achieved and dreams deferred. Our journey will bring us to the changing face of America today, including multicultural Milwaukee.

In order to gain real-life competency in cross-cultural learning, students will be required to complete a Service Learning assignment as part of the course. This assignment will involve approximately 2 hours a week on average for seven or eight weeks in a placement coordinated by the UWM Institute for Service Learning. Students will thus have an opportunity to get to know Milwaukee’s diversity better, and to compare the stories from literature and history with the real life stories found all around us in our city. Students wising to devote more time to this assignment can sign up for an extra one credit add-on by enrolling in English 350-298-001.

For students wishing to strengthen their work in this course, we are coordinating this class with a special section of Reading Proficiency for College Students II (course number 272-112-003).