L & S College Courses

The College Courses Program in the Letters and Science brings together undergraduates looking for challenging and unusual courses with the most highly regarded teachers on the faculty. All College Courses function as introductory courses satisfying L & S breadth requirements, but do so in innovative and often interdisciplinary ways.

The College Course LS120, "The Poetics of Time and Place: Viewpoints on the Millennium," offered in the fall of 2000, did just that. The instructors, anthropology professors Ruth Tringham, Rosemary Joyce, and Margaret Conkey (pictured above, far right), used the concept of the millennium as a starting point to explore the different ways in which cultures construct their worlds.

The final project for the course was as unique as the subject matter. Instead of assigning a term paper, the professors asked the students, many with little or no computer experience, to produce internet- or CD-ROM-based multimedia presentations examining ways in which cultures conceive of time and place. At the end of the semester, seven student groups presented their modules in a gala presentation. The impressive presentations can be viewed at http://mactia.berkeley.edu, the web site of the Multimedia Authoring Center for Teaching in Anthropology.

Genevieve Shiffrar photo