Welcome to IS 4220.07 Rethinking Disability! For the Fall 2024 semester, we’re meeting in Rounds Hall 303 from 4:00-5:40 PM on Tues and Thurs each week.
Professor Nic Helms (they/them) (nrhelms@plymouth.edu)
I’ll be in touch daily this semester via email and MS Teams (an Office 365 app available in my.usnh.edu). For drop-in appointments, I’ll be in my office in Ellen Reed 14 (top of the main stairs on the left) on Tuesdays & Thursdays from 10:00 AM – 1:45 PM. If you’d like to schedule a meeting for another weekday, contact me.
I try to respond to all communications within twenty-four hours, except on weekends. (I treat the weekends as days of rest for me and for you! If something breaks over a weekend, let me know, but don’t worry: it can always wait until the following Monday.)
IS 4220 Signature Project (4 Credits)
In this student-driven capstone course, students will collaborate across disciplines to create signature projects that address a significant problem, issue, or question. Prerequisites: Junior Status (students should be at or near the end of their General Education program) (INCO)
Course Topic: Rethinking Disability
How do we understand dis/ability today? In recent decades, interdisciplinary and intersectional work has shifted conversations about dis/ability from terms like ‘deficit’ and ‘disadvantage’ to concepts like ‘access’ and ‘care.’ In this course, we will explore topics, issues, and changes facing contemporary society across different dis/ability domains: education, healthcare, artistic representation, and more. Students will draw on methods of inquiry from multiple disciplines to develop a collaborative project that addresses a significant issue or question about dis/ability today.
What will the class be like? The early weeks of this course will build in literary readings from premodern literature alongside contemporary readings on disability. As the semester moves on, we’ll schedule more and more time for your small group projects. Projects might take on questions like: “How might medieval women’s mystical writing inform our contemporary understanding of pain management and gender discrimination?” and “How might plays like Shakespeare’s Macbeth be used to treat PTSD for military veterans?” In the style of INCAPs, of course, the small group projects you set out to design and complete are completely up to you. Student choice and interdisciplinary thinking are two big pillars of the INCAP.
If you’ve got any questions, concerns, or recommendations, do please reach out and we’ll talk! I’m especially keen to see how best I can frame and support the small group projects in this course, which are a required part of INCAPs. I expect a few of you may have anxiety about group work. I know I have anxiety about group work! But please know that I’m thinking up front about access, introverts, and neurodivergence for this course.
General Education
This course carries INCO status in the General Education program: We live in a world where scholarship is increasingly interdisciplinary. The educated person recognizes the challenges and rewards of drawing connections between fields of knowledge and of applying alternative methods of inquiry to solve problems. Students take a three- or four-credit Integration (INCO) course (either within the major or not) which brings content or methods of inquiry from two or more disciplines or perspectives to bear on a problem or question. The integration course is a General Education capstone course, taken in the junior or senior year. As such it should require substantial, although general, background and a high level of proficiency at most or all of the General Education skills.
Course Goals
Students will articulate, develop, plan, and implement a signature project that addresses the topic of the particular section of the course. A signature project:
- Is transdisciplinary: The project integrates knowledge from multiple disciplines and sources to create something new that could not be created without all of them.
- Is completed collaboratively: The project is large and complex enough that it requires input and work from more than one person to be successful.
- Is student-driven: While faculty, staff, and community partners provide guidance and coaching, student agency and independence move the project forward.
- Requires metacognitive reflection: Students reflect on what and how they learn and how their learned knowledge, skills, and dispositions might be transferable to other contexts.
- Reaches beyond the walls of the classroom: The work of the project touches the world outside the classroom in some way.
- Has an external audience for project results: The results of the project are presented to someone who is outside of the class.
- Is completed ethically and respectfully: Work on the project engages internal/external audiences and/or partners with mutual benefit.
As a course designed in part from a literary studies perspective, this INCAP has additional course goals from the English program. Students will:
- Use cultural, historical, and aesthetic contexts to inform their understanding of all kinds of texts.
- Display analytical skill in their written responses to texts.
- Write fluently and understand writing as an artistic and/or intellectual process.
- Understand the conventions of literary genre as creative writers and critics.
- Capably use research to accomplish their reading, writing, and thinking goals.
- Understand the role of emerging digital technologies in writing, literature, and communication.
- Draw connections between literature and contemporary society, tracing back the roots of present-day systems of oppression.
Learning Outcomes (Habits of Mind)
Habits of mind are a set of four usual ways of thinking or ways of engaging with the world. These habits of mind equip students to succeed in their lives and work after college. As students take courses within the General Education program, they develop and practice the Habits of Mind in various meaningful contexts. Because this course is the capstone of the General Education program, the Habits of Mind are also the learning outcomes for the course.
Students are expected to have reached the summit level of achievement in each of the Habits of Mind by the end of this course. Details of the Habits of Mind can be found here: https://psufys.pressbooks.com/chapter/habits-of-mind/
In this class, students will:
- Communicate purposefully
- Practice and employ problem-solving strategies
- Recognize and integrate multiple perspectives
- Regulate their own learning
Signature Work Activities/Characteristics and Learning Outcomes
An x indicates that the student will be practicing the particular learning outcome when engaging in the signature work activity/characteristic.
Sprockets and Springes 