Faculty – Crown College

Crown College Core Courses

GENERAL COURSE INFORMATION

An Intro to University Discourse

All entering frosh take a first-year core course, Crown College 1, as one of their three classes this fall.

Your core course is an introduction to university discourse, and it is designed to prepare you for the styles of critical reading, thinking, and engagement that you will encounter throughout your university experience. The course subject matter is distinct to each of the colleges; each course is designed to build unique intellectual communities, bringing entering first-year students together around distinctive themes and questions.

Ethical and Political Implications in Emerging Technologies

Crown College 1: Ethical and Political Implications of Emerging Technologies, introduces students to university-level thinking, reflection, and inquiry by actively engaging with texts, each other, and the Instructor.

Each week is devoted to an aspect of how emerging technologies are transforming our world, including:

transhumanism
artificial intelligence
privacy-surveillance
globalization
challenges on a planetary scale
impact on democracy

Engagement

Students will work through the texts by responding to specific prompts on Canvas, which will launch discussions and debates in class, both in small-groups and with the entire class. Students will read actively as participants in a guided conversation between text and reader, empowered to find meaning in the texts they read—reading with or against the grain. Students will form an opinion on what a text is advocating–its point of view, key concepts, purpose, and perspective. To record their personal engagement with the texts, strategies used to engage with texts, and how each text resonated with them, students will also keep a log.

Collaboration

Students will collaborate with peers from the very onset of the course. They will choose a research area and work on a research project within an affinity group of 5-6 students. This project will be scaffolded for topic selection and group members’ roles—with progress checkpoints and Group meetings with the Instructor. Each Research Group will present its findings at the end of the quarter and will have the opportunity to turn their project into a podcast by taking a 2-unit class in Winter that fulfills a PR-C general education credit.

Encompassing Involvement

Students will have the opportunity to hear authors and other relevant figures in the field speak through our plenary series at the Provost house and Social Fiction Conference. They will also be able to enact a play based on George Orwell’s 1984 by taking Crown 96: Theorizing Culture and the Future.

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