1.    Course Description  

Explorations introduces students to the joy of studying the liberal arts while cultivating the skills needed for future academic success. Each course investigates a subject of faculty choosing from beyond a single disciplinary approach, incorporating multiple ways of understanding that subject and working with evidence from different academic and popular sources. Students will engage in scholarly practices foundational to inquiry and future academic success, including reading, annotating, and taking notes on texts; analyzing and evaluating sources; drafting, revising, and editing writing; and working with peers. Assignments and activities will cultivate students’ abilities to think analytically.

2.    Student Learning Outcomes

Upon successfully completing the course, students will be able to

Section Descriptions

Adams, Sarah:

Interesting People Are Interested People 

Alan Watts, extremely funky English philosopher and counterculture guru, wrote “It is obvious that the only interesting people are interested people.” In other words, Watts suggests that the people you want to be around, who you can’t wait to talk to, who challenge, engage, and excite you, are usually folks who are deeply curious about the world around them. In this course, we will try our best to become those kinds of interesting and interested people.

To cultivate interest, we’ll explore a variety of different “texts,” including Crystal Wilkinson’s The Bird’s of Opulence, articles from the New Yorker magazine, and a Convocation presentation or performance. Along the way, we’ll ask ourselves questions about getting interested: What does it feel like to be curious? Why can it be difficult to stay interested in a subject, text, or event? How can we get interested when we might not automatically feel interested? How might we think of curiosity as a practice not a personality trait?

To work through these texts and questions, as well as to spur on our curiosity, we will write—a lot. We’ll write for various purposes: to question, to wonder, to observe, to reflect, to analyze, to evaluate, and to argue. And we’ll write in various forms: notes, lists, poems, paragraphs, and essays. Moreover, we’ll write for various readers: ourselves, our classmates, and people we’ve never met. We’ll be so curious, and we’ll write so much that by December, we’ll all be more interesting and more interested people.

Brown, Jarrod:

Appalachian Cultural Landscapes

This course delves into the rich and complex cultural landscapes of Appalachian Kentucky, employing inquiry-based learning to explore the dynamic interplay between people and place. We will move beyond stereotypes, examining how history, ecology, cultural values, and social forces have shaped the region’s unique character. Through engagement with landscapes, archival research, use of geographic information systems, community engagement, fieldwork, and exploratory readings on culture, Appalachia, nature, and environmental philosophy, students will investigate and reflect upon diverse terrains as they attempt to imagine a landscape that reflects the values and hopes of Appalachian people. This course encourages students to consider their own relationship to place and to engage with the complexities of cultural heritage and environmental change. No prior experience is required, only a willingness to inquire and explore.  This course will require two Saturday engagements for off-campus travel and will include some non-strenuous hiking.

Bouma, Jill:

Walking: Pilgrimage of the Personal and Political

Tell me who you walk with, and I’ll tell you who you are,” a quote by Esmeralda Santiago, provides an invitation to discover who we are and understand the experiences that shape us.  In this course, we’ll write about and engage in various walks as we explore a history of walking and its myriad benefits. We’ll begin by discussing how walking and other forms of exercise can help us deal with stress. Next, we’ll explore paths to personal pilgrimage, from walking our way through problems to discovering new passions. As we engage in our own walks, we’ll share the various health benefits we’re discovering, bolstered by research and informal presentations.  And finally, we’ll end by exploring the power of mass movement for political solidarity, from Civil Rights marches to recent social movements important to you.  Throughout the course, we’ll examine the physical, emotional, and spiritual benefits of walking to inspire our writing and the ways we engage the world.

Butler, Jim

Words are Lying to You

Given the abundance of disinformation and misinformation in the world right now, one might ask: How in the world do people fall for all this nonsense? Do people really think that: The world is flat? Vaccines contain 5G microchips? President Kennedy is still alive and returning to Dallas (where he was shot)???

Part of the problem is that people do not focus on how these memes are communicated: through language using words. “But hey”, one might respond, “words and language are easy; We have all been using them since we were infants.” But to those who pay attention, sentences (and the words within them) are incredibly complex. For instance, words can have multiple meanings; be vague or precise; sentences can communicate truth, falsity, feelings, quotes, sarcasm, jokes, and even make promises.

This class will take a careful look at language and how it functions as part of a liberal arts education, in communication, reasoning, interpretation, and rational discourse. As part of this investigation, we will read essays from various academic disciplines, including Kurt Vonnegut, and Harry Frankfurt’s essay, “On Bullshit”. We will also focus on some non-academic sources like Monty Python and the Daily Show.

Carlevale, John

Home and Away

Maybe you have seen the movies, maybe you have played the games. Perhaps you have survived the sanitized middle-school summaries and the YouTube musicals. Every now and then, you hear a seductive ad for a questionable product described as a “siren song,” a trusted guide as a “mentor,” a pair of equally hazardous options as “Scylla and Charybdis,” a drug that makes you forget yourself as “Lotus,” or the home you can’t find your way back to as “Ithaca.” It is time you read the Odyssey, all of it from start to finish. We’ll try to figure out why people have been reading and remaking this book for over two-and-a-half millennia. Is it a timeless classic, a harmless antique, or a toxic time capsule preserving values we should be relieved to have outgrown?

Christopher, Karina:

Cookbooks: An Expression of Who We Are and Where We Have Been

Description: The oldest cookbooks can be traced back to Mesopotamia around 1700 BC. Since that time, cookbooks have been a means of communicating history, politics, identity, nationhood, diet trends, ethnicity, food memories, culinary science, and food systems. This class will examine a variety of cookbooks and recipes to determine the messages and stories they are meant to deliver. Students will explore their own food memories or interpretations of food through reflection and writing. Writing will include narrative and descriptive writing.

Crachiolo, Beth

Stories of the Past

What is the relationship between storytelling, literature, and history? Most of us wouldn’t think that history lies in a novel or in the stories our grandparents tell us or even in our own memories. This class is going to explore some narratives of history that are found outside of traditional history books and ask whether those narratives tell us what we want to know. We will look at the more traditional sources as well as primary historical documents, so that, by the end of the semester, we will be able to see that the past is ever-changing and that our relationship with the past is never simple.

Crum, John

Reading, Writing, and Thinking with Homer’s Odyssey
Faced with political turmoil, climate change, and the rise of artificial intelligence, our society faces
an urgent question: what does it mean to be human in a changing world? Fortunately for us, we
aren’t the first humans to confront this uncertainty. Since our earliest days as a species, humans
have used stories to communicate ideas about who we are, and what we owe to one another. This
course uses Homer’s Odyssey, in the acclaimed translation by Emily Wilson, as a guide to reading,
writing, and thinking through these questions—skills foundational to a liberal arts education.

Feagan, Beth:

Freedom to Read

America is a contradictory place. We say we believe in freedom of speech, but every year thousands of books are challenged, censored, and banned. And Tango Makes Three, Captain Underpants, Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, Looking for Alaska, and The Perks of Being a Wallflower: from picture books to novels, these books have been banned right here in the USA. What does that mean? Why does that happen? What can we learn from these books? We will read a variety of banned books and wrestle with these questions. It’s a complicated conversation, and it’s been going on for a long time. Censorship is nothing new. Freedom of expression has been under attack since the founding of our country. We’ll learn how to unpack arguments, do thoughtful research, and make smart arguments of our own. We’ll also work on overcoming procrastination. Does writing freak you out? It’s actually just thinking on the page. That sounds abstract until you put it like this: I think something, I go find out what others think about it (reading and research) and then I let them know what I think (writing). Good writing is always in conversation with others. The conversation we will explore and join is about freedom of expression and the power of your voice.

Feifer, Megan

Where We Stand: Class (STILL) Matters

In Where We Stand: Class Matters, feminist scholar and cultural critic bell hooks argues, "Breaking the silence – talking about class and coming to terms with where we stand – is a necessary step if we are to live in a world where prosperity and plenty can be shared, where justice can be realized in our public and private lives." (viii). Throughout the semester, we will do the work of "breaking the silence" around our class positionalities. Through close readings of academic, fiction, non-fiction, podcasts, and theory, alongside our own personal and academic writings, we will work toward a better understanding of the influence of class positionality on our individual process of self-creation and survivance. Together, we will sharpen our awareness and reflect on the importance of our positionalities when responding to systemic oppression and navigating the world and our place in it.

Gift, Wes:

The Business of Storytelling:

Storytelling is more than entertainment—it's strategy, persuasion, and power. This course explores how narrative functions as a dynamic tool across diverse industries including creative writing, marketing, politics, tech, and beyond. Students will examine how stories shape perception, influence behavior, and drive outcomes in real-world contexts. Through academic readings, multimedia analysis, writing challenges and more, we’ll uncover the mechanics of compelling narratives and the ways they're adapted to meet the goals of different fields.

Huck, Dan

Murder?

This course explores contemporary American law concepts related to criminal homicide in its various forms. Early in the semester, students will be presented with a crime scene that includes a homicide and all of the relevant evidence surrounding that event. As the semester progresses, students will be asked to evaluate physical evidence, to interview and assess the testimony provided by on-scene and background witnesses, and to construct and finally present their case as part of a defense or prosecution team before a jury in a simulated courtroom. All witnesses and jurors in the case are Berea faculty and staff members, while all students in the course serve as either defense attorneys or prosecutors. The course requires deep and ongoing attention to the detail of the case, constant attention to writing short analytical evaluations of various aspects of the evolving case, and intensive group-based work aimed at fully analyzing and then presenting the final case during a simulated trial. Students will draw from the humanities, the social sciences, and even the natural sciences in completing their analytical written work and oral arguments for the course.

Mack, Felicia:

In this section of L & I 100 we will read The Skinny House: A Memoir of Family that shares the story of Nathan Seely, an African American man, whose drive and determination led to him becoming a prominent homebuilder in New York. At the height of his fame and fortune he loses everything in the Great Depression; however, he is determined to avoid joining the growing ranks of the unhoused-- so he uses resources available to him to build a home.  

We can all relate to needing resources to help us reach our goals  which is why you decided to further your education at Berea College.  Throughout the course we will engage in numerous writing activities designed to help develop skill sets needed to write for an academic audience. Coupled with reading and writing activities you will be introduced to many resources available at the college, so like Nathan Seely, you can achieve your academic and professional aspirations.

McDonald, Verlaine

How to Win Friends and Influence People (Circa 2025)

This course shares part of its title with one of the best-selling books of all time, written by Dale Carnegie, a teacher and motivational speaker.  Although the book is nearly 90 years old, it concerns a question that is timeless: how can we build better interpersonal relationships and have an impact on those around us? In this course, we’ll consider and critique Dale Carnegie’s advice; we’ll make connections to contemporary research from the disciplines of communication, business/marketing, psychology, and sociology; and together, we’ll create a 21^st century reboot of the principles in the book.

Meadows, Richard

Fighting Poverty in Appalachia & Inner Cities

Initially, rural Appalachia and nearby inner cities seem very different.  Yet people from both areas—including most Berea students and their families and friends—confront many of the same obstacles, such as poverty, unemployment, poorly-funded schools, inadequate healthcare, substance abuse, and negative stereotypes.  Fortunately, many people in Appalachia and nearby inner cities are seeking and finding ways to overcome or help eliminate these obstacles so that their families, friends, and communities can prosper.  We will analyze and debate competing attempts to explain these obstacles as well as competing plans to overcome or eliminate them.  We will evaluate ideas from the U.S.’s political left, right, and center as well as ideas from other countries and from fields as diverse as economics, education studies, health studies, psychology, sociology, communication, biology, religion, and philosophy.  Thus, the course will give you a taste of many different fields to help you choose a major, minor, and/or other areas you want to explore.

Mishra, Amrita

The Search for Utopia

College is often described and marketed as the best years of your life, a utopian place where everyone hangs out on the quad, an idyllic place where you meet lifelong friends, realize your dreams, and don’t have to worry about the “real world” until your time here is over. Berea College, in particular, as a liberal arts institution with a pretty unique history, often frames itself as a “utopian experiment” for its radical mission back in 1855 in educating Black and white students together. What makes a place or way of life a perfect place, a utopian place? How have utopias been imagined and dreamed up over the past few centuries? For whom are utopias built and designed for? What’s the difference between a utopia and a dystopia? Could they be more similar than we think? This section of L& I 100 grapples with the question of utopia by exploring how utopias/ dystopias have been imagined in literature and what a liberal arts education is and how it tends to be framed as utopian. Together we'll ask: how have writers and artists used the idea of utopia to think about liberation, make sense of environmental catastrophe, and dream of a different world? In addition to reading utopian and dystopian fiction and sharpening your critical reading and writing skills, you'll work on conceptualizing your own utopia: what would it look like? Feel like? What would it make it the good place? 

Montgomery, Jesse

The Art of Paying Attention

Attention has been defined both as the act of applying the mind to something or someone and as regulating what enters our consciousness. In a world when technology enables intense competition over what we pay attention to, the concept has taken on a renewed importance. Our attention is valuable, sacred, and increasingly under threat. This course will explore our changing understanding of attention as well as its importance. To do so we will examine texts from a variety of disciplines across the arts and sciences, including psychology, sociology, literature, and film. We will also put this thinking into practice by experimenting with and writing about different methods of attentiveness. Over the course of the semester you will be asked to analyze and practice writing from a number of genres. (This writing will involve multi-step processes, all of which will be evaluated.) Ultimately, our goal will be to both understand and experience attention in new ways and connect our examination to the challenges of life in college.

Norris, Ian:

Designing a Life Worth Living. 

Where do you want to go, and how will get there? But, more importantly, why there? What is worth wanting, and how do you know? Our culture is obsessed with efficiency, effectiveness, and achievement. But we often don't stop to ask what we value and why. This class will help you determine how to maximize the potential of your Berea College education: How to design the life you want for yourself. But it will continually force you to ask what philosophers have called "The Big Questions." Why are we here, and for what purpose? What is your purpose, and how can your education enable you to fulfill it? Prepare yourself for an interdisciplinary experience integrating lessons from psychology, design thinking, entrepreneurship, philosophy, and religion.

Norton, Colby:

American Popular Music: Sound, Society, and the Cultural Pulse of a Nation

This course on American popular music offers students an exploration of music from a liberal arts perspective, cultivating skills that are foundational for academic success. Through this survey of diverse musical genres, including rock, jazz, funk, country, hip hop, and death metal, students will engage with the music itself, as well as its cultural and societal impact. The course encourages an interdisciplinary approach, incorporating evidence from both academic and popular sources, allowing students to analyze the evolution of music in the United States from multiple perspectives.

Students will engage in scholarly practices such as reading and annotating texts, evaluating and analyzing various sources, and applying critical thinking skills to understand the sociocultural influences on music. The assignments and activities will help students develop their abilities to think analytically, draft, revise, and edit their writing, while also fostering collaboration through peer interaction. This course provides a rich foundation for understanding how popular music reflects and shapes American society, while building skills essential for future academic success.

Sirianni, Lucy

Education as Liberation?

"The academy is not paradise. But learning is a place where paradise can be created. The classroom, with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility. In that field of possibility we have the opportunity to labor for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades, an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. This is education as the practice of freedom."
—bell hooks

In this course, we'll explore the ways in which education has both empowered and oppressed people with marginalized identities. How have educational systems and practices both advanced

and worked against the cause of justice? Together, we'll explore the stories of enslaved, Indigenous, and disabled individuals, among others, each of whom fought to attain an education within systems built to demean and dehumanize them—and each of whom went on to both

proclaim the liberating value of education and decry its profound inequities. We'll also think about Berea's history as an institution premised on the link between learning and equity—and

about how you as new present-day Bereans can use the education you're receiving to help work toward a more just world.

Warren, Wendy Zagray

Safety, Belonging, Dignity: Cultivating Connection

“Safety, belonging, and dignity. These are the inherent needs in human beings…We are at our best when we have, and can offer, all three.”

      --Stacei Haines, The Politics of Trauma

Throughout this course, we will be thinking together, carefully and collaboratively, about what conditions allow people to thrive. We will use writing and inquiry as a way to process both complex information and our own thinking. Our voice is our power, so we will strive to write and communicate clearly as a way to share our ideas, our learning, and our values. We will learn about writing by reading and studying various styles and genres and especially What It Takes to Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World, by podcaster, writer, and somatic practitioner Prentis Hemphill. 

Organizing questions include:

*What does it mean to experience safety, belonging, and dignity?

*How are these needs sometimes targeted to oppress people?

* How do beings adapt when these needs are lacking?

*What can we learn from studying how people have healed from situations where these needs have been stripped away?

*How can we create these conditions for ourselves and in the groups and organizations to which we belong, including Berea College?

We will draw from many disciplines and cultural ways of knowing as we explore some of life’s biggest questions about what it means to be human.

Webb, Althea

Why College? Issues in Higher Education.

This class will examine higher education in the United States of American.

Students will learn the history and evolution of higher education institutions (e.g., community college, private, public, and/or elite institution) over time. Students will examine opportunities and selected paths for those leaving high school. We will explore the life changes that students navigate while attending college. This course will help students to develop an understanding of the influences, external and internal, that impact attending college given today’s economic landscape. Anticipating potential barriers and strategies for success will be addressed to support resiliency. Examination of vulnerable populations (pertaining to diverse factor: race, class, gender, and Appalachia regionality) related to success in college will be considered.