Spring 2026 Course Search

An herbarium is a museum of pressed plants, a record of flora following a system that dates back to the 16th century. Large herbaria at institutions like D.C.’s Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Chicago’s Field Museum, Cambridge’s Harvard University, and London’s Kew Gardens contain millions of specimens, collected from around the world. But, most herbaria are small herbaria, with less than 10,000 specimens.

This course will provide knowledge and skills to offer effective education to students with a range of learning and behavioral characteristics, in a variety of settings. Emphasis will be placed on building an equitable environment for all ages and grades, preK-12, to implement in the future. We will consider how to structure classrooms and plan teaching that is conducive to meeting diverse needs, including those of students with disabilities and English language learners.

Introduces the fundamentals of guitar playing, including: posture, hand positions, tuning, chords, strumming, finger-picking, songs and tunes, major scales, and beginning to read music. History of the guitar and its past and current artists will be shared.

Instrumental Study on Guitar. Continued studies from Beginning Guitar. Advanced study in fret-board harmony and theory, play in different tunings, increase chord vocabulary and repertoire.

A comprehensive course in learning musical skills on the ukulele. We will learn the history of the uke, from its Portuguese and Indigenous Hawaiian origins, and both traditional and contemporary styles. Music theory and playing techniques will be learned and practiced. Awareness of traditional styles of playing the instrument will be furthered through a listening component and ensemble playing with other instrumentalists. Repertoire will be drawn from traditional and original Hawaiian songs, as well as contemporary music from the past 60 years.

Celtic history and music from Ireland, Scotland, Bretagne, Galatia, and Cape Breton will be experienced, studied, and performed using instruments and voices. We’ll find and cross the musical bridges between regions–from the ballads of Ireland, Scotland and Wales to the Alalas of Spain, through the Scottish Gaelic speaking Highland and Islands to the dance tunes of Brittany. An end-of-term presentation will be prepared drawing on inspiration from traditional forms.

In this course, we will focus on developing the statistical skills needed to answer questions by collecting data, designing experimental studies, and analyzing large publicly available datasets. The skills learned will also help students to be critical consumers of statistical results. We will use a variety of datasets to develop skills in data management, analysis, and effective presentation of results.

Accessibility describes the practice of freeing a space or an event so it might be visited by more people in more ways than one could ever presume at the outset. In this course, we will explore the litany of practices that allow more people (and in particular, disabled, mad, and chronically ill people) into all spheres of public life with a particular focus on performance events.

The seventeenth-century Flemish painter-diplomat Peter Paul Rubens is at the heart of a course that proposes the intrinsic baroqueness of diverse strains of high modernism. Our transdisciplinary project crosses entrenched nationalistic and chronological borders between modern and early modern art and artists including Bacon, Guston, Manet, Newman, Picasso, Bearden, and Titian in addition to Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008), himself a more conceptually various and possibly more prolific artist even than Rubens (1577-1640) to whom some 3,000 paintings and drawings have been attributed.

This intermediate to advanced-level course is for students who are interested in exploring more complex vessel forms. Using various building techniques, students will make vessels with multiple elements. Forms this class may explore include cups with handles, covered jars, baskets, and pouring pots. Students will be asked to expand their form vocabulary and further integrate their vessels and fired surfaces. Considerations will be: What space does a vessel occupy and contain? What is the vessel’s relationship to utility?

In this course, we will explore various projects that aim to connect people with their surroundings and communities.
We will also explore the strategies that various artists have implemented to increase their audiences and interest in the arts.
We will analyze and design projects that seek sustainability, diversification, and access to the experience of art and culture.

By evaluating environments we could design artistic projects that promote art, artistic education, and the promotion of cultural products as actions to build community, identity, and a creative economy.

Clay responds directly to touch, retains memory and is forced through the dynamic process of firing to fix a point in time. This class will introduce students to a variety of hand-building techniques to construct sculptural and/or utilitarian forms. Students will develop their skills by practicing techniques demonstrated in class. Through making, students’ skills will increase, granting more confidence, and allowing more control over the objects they wish to realize.

This course will look into the use of the kiln as an integral tool and part of the creative process in ceramic art. We will explore various different kilns and firing techniques, learning the roles of fire and atmosphere in transforming glaze components into desired surfaces. We will also discuss the history of kiln technology and how it has influenced the development of wares, kiln building, and the theoretical basis for kiln design and firing. Students will be expected to develop and produce work independently outside of class time for use in the firings.

In this course, students will gain experience with using simple programmable robots and how they can be utilized in STEM education. The focus of this class will be on learning and designing lessons for K-12 students utilizing these robots. This class is accessible for students at all levels of computer programming experience (including none). 

This class will investigate various pedagogical approaches to food studies by examining curriculums, topics and discourses being taught at some academic institutions. More importantly, we will put focus on researching art collectives, contemporary civic engagement practices, and other non-institutional models developed by creative practitioners and activists, which engage with food as a conduit to undertake social, political and cultural identity issues and to enhance their community cohesion.

This class is an introduction to using the potter’s wheel as a tool for generating clay forms, emphasizing pottery making. While focusing on throwing skills, students will explore various possibilities for assembling wheel-thrown elements and experiment with functional and non-functional formats. Students will be introduced to the ceramic process from wet working to glazing and firing. Historical and contemporary ceramic vessels will be shown and discussed; this general survey of ceramics will include many cultures and periods.