This semester, I am teaching a course that is both crazy and a lot of fun. It's not a political science course, but explicitly interdisciplinary course, listed under UM's "UC" division. (That means "university courses," not University of California.) It's a course developed as part of the "sophomore initiative," the purpose of which is to acknowledge that sophomores get the shortest end of the stick: freshmen get a lot of attention, and by the time you are a junior, you'll have chosen a major and found a home of some kind.
This particular course hopes to introduce the students to the wide variety of ways academia understands knowledge. It's called "22 Ways," and the idea is this: we pick a theme and then haul in fabulous teachers from around the university to talk about how their particular discipline addresses (or doesn't address) that discipline. We actually don't haul in those folks: we beg and plead and are incredibly grateful when they come. Because they don't have to.
The first time this course happened, in the fall of 2011, its theme was food, and the instructor my colleague Phil Deloria. My course's theme is "the games we play." Just think of the interdisciplinary possibilities! I wish I had gotten all the guests I invited, but the folks who are coming are fabulous. And I want to leave it up to the students to be imaginative and think beyond the approaches the course offers.
After all, part of what makes games fun is the ability of the player to determine what happens.
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