CC100 & CC120
Taken during a student's first semester, the first-year foundations course sequence (CC100: Critical Inquiry Seminar & CC120: First-Year Writing Seminar) serve as the foundation to CC's General Education plan.
As a sequence, these courses provide an introduction to disciplinary scholarship, the nature of the liberal arts, and learning on the block. In the first block (CC100), students begin to understand the liberal arts as a specific kind of community comprised of various epistemological and methodological cultures. The goal of this class is to help students understand that different fields of study construct and organize knowledge differently, each with its own paradigms and assumptions. The second block (CC120) builds on the outcomes of CC100 to engage students in understanding the relationship between disciplinary practices and writing. The goal of this class is to help students understand that each discipline operates within specific discourse communities each with their own structures, styles, and forms.
All CC100 & CC120 courses are linked, meaning that students in the same CC100 course will move into the linked CC120 course as a cohort. These links serve to reinforce the social connections developed in the first block and allow students more time to learn together on the block.
CC100 courses are also grouped into "thematic clusters." These clusters are designed to help facilitate students' thinking about disciplinary knowledge production in a comparative framework. Courses are clustered around a shared topic, question, or theme. Although students are enrolled in a single CC100/CC120 course sequence, courses in a cluster will offer periodic "convergence experiences" that offer students the opportunity to engage across courses to compare the different approaches to knowledge creation taking place in their respective courses in relationship to the shared topic.
thematic clusters
Body-Mind Connections
Courses in this cluster will explore how embodied experiences and cognitive processes shape what it means to be human, will make knowledge through moving and being active in bodies, and see bodies as a way into larger scientific and social inquiry.
Comparative Ideologies
Courses in this cluster will consider the histories and legacies of different political ideologies such as communism, post-communism, and fascism.
Crisis and Sustainability
Courses in this cluster will explore climate change using different disciplinary insights from literary studies, mathematics, and environmental studies.
Global Exchange
Courses in this cluster will explore global cultures through an interdisciplinary lens, think comparatively about cultural and aesthetic traditions, and invite scholars to consider what it means to think and act in a global community.
Literatures and Cultures
Courses in this cluster understand storytelling as an important form of cultural production and a way to shape cultures across the world. Courses in this cluster will think comparatively across geographic locations and historical time periods, engage with literary traditions and forms, and consider how storytelling brings cultures together.
Making Sense of Life
Courses in this cluster will consider the meaning of life across scales: from genomes to biomes, from protons to primates. Courses in this cluster will explore human and non-human ecosystems, consider the epistemes that shape what we think of as “human,” and explore how STEM disciplines taxonomize and organize life.
Power, Culture, and Resistance
Courses in this cluster will use literature, film, interviews, and data sets to explore how disciplines make sense of systems of power in the U.S., how research-based inquiry can solve problems of inequities, and how literary and cultural theories can imagine and build more equitable worlds.
Seeing Ourselves, Watching Others
Courses in this cluster explore the various ways of seeing and ways of being in cultures that rely on surveillance and suspicion, the relationships between performance events and the social, and the role of spectacle in shaping our understanding of the world around us.
The Stakes of Learning
Courses in this cluster will explore the histories of educational models, unpack the philosophies behind educational systems and pedagogies, and invite students to see the impacts of educational systems.
Super Sleuthing: Science and Investigation
Courses in this cluster will explore how scientific methods, data collection, and the stories we tell using that data can solve crimes, make truths, and broaden what counts as evidence.
Technologies of Empires
Courses in this cluster will explore how technological developments are complicit in colonial and global violences, how technologies authorize structures of domination, and how progress narratives attempt to displace other counter narratives of which lives are seen as grievable and liveable.
Troubling Boundaries
Courses in this cluster will invite shared inquiry from intersectional feminist modes of knowing, questions of race and religion, and historical perspectives on colonial and anti-colonial aesthetics in order to think critically about questions of power and knowledge. By bringing together perspectives that are too often wedged apart, this cluster seeks to trouble the boundaries between knowledge and art, history and the everyday, material objects and writing.