Interdisciplinary Studies (INTR)
INTR-100 Learning Community Symposium
1 Credit
Lecture: 1 hour per week
Offering: Fall and Spring Only, All Years
In this course, students will receive instruction and practice in defining personal, educational, and career goals; connecting curriculum across disciplines; implementing a designed educational plan, developing intellectual curiosity; and designing practices for academic, personal, and career readiness. The content for each symposium may change with each unique learning community, allowing students to repeat the course.
Prerequisites: CLC-100
INTR-200 
Interdisciplinary Seminar
3 Credits
Lecture: 3 hours per week
Offering: Fall and Spring Only, All Years
This course integrates a range of disciplines, including social sciences, the arts, history, literature, philosophy, and natural sciences, to explore issues related to community, sustainability and/or humanity's role in maintaining public and environmental health in the 21st century. Utilizing experiential learning, writing across the curriculum, reading, research, and special projects, students use problem-solving skills to explore these issues. This course is the same as HUMS-200.
Pre/Corequisites: ENGL-101
INTR-250A 
Death and Dying: A Sociocultural, Historical, and Biological Perspective
3 Credits
Lecture: 3 hours per week
Offering: Fall and Spring Only, All Years
This course explores the social, cultural, historical, and biological nature of human death and dying through the application of social scientific research methods. Topics include: decomposition, death rituals, cultural construction of death, mourning and bereavement, end of life issues, and the ethical implications of death and dying. Students will examine the variety of socio-cultural responses, historically and today, to the biological fact of death. In the process, students will be exposed to a diverse array of disciplines and apply knowledge gained to develop a community based research project.
Prerequisites: 30 credits (level 100 or higher)
INTR-250B
Physical and Virtual Environments
3 Credits
Lecture: 3 hours per week
Offering: Fall and Spring Only, All Years
This course explores the ways humans live in, experience, process and record the physical environments in which they dwell. Through the lens of literature and philosophy, students will discover different ways that writers and thinkers have experienced their environments and recorded those experiences, along the way engaging in inquiry about how the digital age is shifting humans' sense of physical belonging-in-place. How has our cultural shift to the virtual (through video games, cell phones, social media, email, etc.) changed our perceptions of what it means to be in the world? This is the central question that the class will explore.
Prerequisites: 30 credits (level 100 or higher)
INTR-250C
Integrative Business and Value Creation
3 Credits
Online: 3 hours per week
Offering: Fall, Spring, and Summer, All Years
This course explores how organization and individuals turn resources and opportunity into value. It examines the functions and activities of business in contemporary society. Emphasis is placed on the terminology necessary to understanding business principles and practices. The course also includes an exploration of business environments, human resources, management, marketing management, finance, management information tools, and international marketing. Focus is on critical factors essential to understanding the interdependence between different facets of business operations. This course is useful for those non-business majors who need an overview of what the study of business encompasses.
Prerequisites: 30 credits (level 100 or higher)
Recommended Prerequisites: MATH-108
INTR-250D
Juvenile Justice
3 Credits
Lecture: 3 hours per week
Offering: Spring Only, All Years
This course introduces students to the social issues related to juvenile justice by applying a philosophical and sociological lenses. The course reviews the central reasons for society's treatment and understanding of juvenile offenders. The philosophical roots of belief systems regarding practices and treatment of juvenile offenders will be explored by completing a historical analysis of juvenile law and punishment. Philosophical and sociological theoretical models are applied to understand the causes of criminal behavior by examining the social factors that influence and shape belief systems and behaviors. Finally, the course concludes by examining theories for prevention of juvenile crime by understanding the interdependent role between juvenile justice systems and society, which will be demonstrated through a learning product, project, or presentation.
Prerequisites: 30 credits (level 100 or higher)
INTR-250E
Writing in the Wild: Literature and Language of Natural Spaces
3 Credits
Lecture: 3 hours per week
Offering: Fall and Spring Only, All Years
This course explores various frameworks writers have used to contemplate and respond to natural spaces. Students will be encouraged to situate themselves as individuals and as a community within these frameworks and to create their own texts in response to the natural spaces around them both independently and collaboratively. Using the lenses of literature, ethics, and political discourse, students will encounter different ways of seeing natural spaces, and then will venture into nature to draft their own individual and collaborative creative texts in response to what they see while looking through these same lenses.
Prerequisites: 30 credits (level 100 or higher)
INTR-250F
Integrative Inquiry: The Art of Presence
3 Credits
Lecture: 3 hours per week
Offering: Summer Only, All Years
This course is designed to develop reflective intrapersonal communication via the praxis of mindfulness, creativity, and reflection by grounding experiences through the integration of communication, psychology, and art. In this course, students will employ diverse forms of art as a means to develop self-awareness and mindful presence and to experience an authentic encounter between self and other via a process that requires self-knowledge and self-acceptance. Creativity is one of the ways that the self can learn to become more present, as the act of creation requires the full attention of the self, immersed fully within the present moment.
Prerequisites: 30 credits (100 level or higher)
INTR-250G
Teaching and Learning in the Outdoors
3 Credits
Lecture: 3 hours per week
Offering: Fall Only, All Years
This course explores how humans' interests, attitudes, beliefs and skills are developed outside the walls of a schoolroom. Topics include: experiential learning, teaching, lesson design, assessment, quality assurance, safety, patterns of learning and development, standards, and ethical considerations for experiential education. The key question students will investigate: How do people teach and learn outside of the traditional classroom? In the process of active inquiry, students will be exposed to a diverse array of disciplines and apply knowledge gained to collaboratively design and implement a developmentally appropriate and challenging outdoor learning experience for others.
Prerequisites: 30 credits (level 100 or higher)
INTR-250H
Manufacturing Desire: Persuasive Marketing and Message Creation
3 Credits
Lecture: 3 hours per week
Offering: Fall and Spring Only, All Years
This course course provides students with copywriting, advertising campaign planning and messaging strategies in various circumstances as one would experience in a typical advertising agency or client-side marketing team. Through the lenses of business marketing and English composition rhetoric, students will create for themselves a professional portfolio which showcases their copywriting abilities for web, print, broadcast, direct mail, sponsorship, and other advertising platforms (this portfolio is typically required by potential employers for students pursuing copywriting careers at agencies and in-house marketing positions).
Prerequisites: 30 credits (level 100 or higher)
INTR-250I
Page to Stage: Making Theatre From Scratch
3 Credits
Lecture: 3 hours per week
Offering: Fall and Spring Only, All Years
This course follows the creation of a theatrical production from the writing of a short play all the way to its production in front of an audience. Techniques and skills in writing, design, acting/performance, and technical theatre will be explored and developed. Students should be prepared for meeting outside of regular class meetings.
Prerequisites: 30 credits (level 100 or higher)
INTR-250J
Psychology of Marketing
3 Credits
Lecture: 3 hours per week
Offering: Fall Only, All Years
This course is designed to investigate how social and behavioral science informs and impacts business and marketing fields. Psychology of Marketing will integrate sociological perspectives, analyze and evaluate consumer behavior from a psychological framework, and then address, from the perspective of both distribution and consumption, the strategies that are implemented by companies and organizations. The course culminates in a learning product, project, or presentation that connects these multiple ways of knowing to the intricacies of marketing and consumer behavior.
Prerequisites: 30 credits (level 100 or higher)
INTR-250K
Art and Social Justice
3 Credits
Lecture: 3 hours per week
Offering: Fall and Spring Only, All Years
This course explores the intersection of social justice and the arts. Through the lens of sociology, literature, and fine arts, students will examine theories of social justice, analyze a range of literary and artistic texts, explore the ways in which artistic expression interacts with social movements, and apply their knowledge in a collaborative culminating project.
Prerequisites: 30 credits (level 100 or higher)
INTR-250L
Artistic Expression in the 20th Century
3 Credits
Lecture: 3 hours per week
Offering: Fall and Spring Only, All Years
This course explores changes in the arts occurring in the early 20th Century that freed visual artists, writers, and musical composers to express new ideas in innovative and abstract ways. Reviewing 19th Century developments in technology, such as the camera, telegraph, and phonograph, along with the ideas of influential thinkers of the time, sets the stage for studying artistic, literary, and musical works of such people as Pablo Picasso, T.S. Eliot, and Igor Stravinsky. Students will respond aesthetically to and will make connections among visual art, literature, and music through individual and cooperative assignments that include options for artistic expression.
Prerequisites: 30 credits (level 100 or higher)
INTR-250M
Eastern Europe: Society Through Film
3 Credits
Lecture: 3 hours per week
Offering: Fall Only, All Years
This course explores the politics and social history of Eastern Europe through the analysis of motion picture media. Drawing upon social science context and research methods, various topics will be presented as they correspond with issues presented by key Eastern European films. Such topics include: foreign occupation, Sovietization, political economy, political movements, regime change, cultural and religious identity, separatism, civil wars and contemporary political institutions.
Prerequisites: 30 credits (level 100 or higher)
Recommended Prerequisites: ENGL-102, History or Political Science course
INTR-250N
Mathematics and Aesthetics of Musical Tuning
3 Credits
Lecture: 3 hours per week
Offering: Spring Only, All Years
This course will track the development of musical tuning from the ancient world through the advent of equal temperament. Students will examine the philosophical and aesthetic implication of these changes in terms of musical performance, our mathematical understanding of the world, and our world view in general. What is elegant? What is consonant? What is ugly? What is dissonant, chaotic, or asymmetric?.
Prerequisites: 30 credits (level 100 or higher)
Recommended Prerequisites: College-level Math or Physics course
INTR-250O
Leadership in Interprofessional Healthcare
3 Credits
Lecture: 2 hours per week, Lab: 3 hours per week
Offering: Fall and Spring Only, All Years
This course prepares students across disciplines to work collaboratively to address issues in healthcare. Students will analyze how various forces in healthcare drive change. Topics include economics, evidence-based practice, quality improvement, and a culture of safety. Students will work collaboratively to solve problems in patient case studies and examine contributions across disciplines. Students will reflect on their learning processes and how they can utilize communication, teamwork, leadership, and change management skills effectively to contribute to solving issues.
Prerequisites: 30 credits (level 100 or higher)
INTR-250P
Common Read
3 Credits
Lecture: 3 hours per week
Offering: Fall, Spring, and Summer, All Years
This course focuses on the Common Read, a book chosen to represent a two-year campus-wide theme to encourage diversity awareness, critical thinking on ideas from the book, and dialog about social, cultural, economic, political, and other aspects of the book for readers, including students, members of the NIC community, and the wider world. The emphasis of the course will vary depending on the faculty teaching it, reflecting their disciplinary expertise, and the selected materials adopted for exploration of the book.
Prerequisites: 30 credits (level 100 or higher)
INTR-250Q
Honors in Action
3 Credits
Lecture: 3 hours per week
Offering: Fall Only, All Years
This course will explore leadership, research, writing, and service learning strategies within the framework of a major interdisciplinary, collaborative project. Students will investigate, plan, and research a topic of inquiry within a broad frame of issues confronting humanity, such as justice, identity, creativity, economics, or technology. They will review the research conclusions to develop and implement an action project that engages campus and outside communities and will assess and reflect upon the process of collaborative research and the impact of the community project. The course follows the Phi Theta Kappa honors society's Honors In Action project.
Prerequisites: 30 credits (level 100 or higher)
INTR-250R
250 Years of Protest
3 Credits
Lecture: 3 hours per week
Offering: Fall, Spring, and Summer, All Years
This course examines social/political protest in the United States. When does a protest qualify as civil disobedience? Are some protests that go beyond civil disobedience morally justified? Students will be exposed to a wide diversity of subject matter and perspectives by exploring the spectrum of protest tactics from picketing and petitioning, through civil disobedience and radical activism. Examples include the Boston Tea Party, anti-war protests, PETA, anthem kneeling. Using the lenses of philosophy, literature, political science, and journalism, students will analyze such examples of protest and how the media covered them. Ultimately, students will apply theory from classic civil disobedience literature and moral philosophy to determine which ones are morally justified.
Prerequisites: 30 credits (level 100 or higher)
INTR-250S
The Health Benefits of Nature
3 Credits
Lecture: 3 hours per week
Offering: Fall and Spring Only, All Years
This integrative course explores how spending time in nature can help relieve stress and anxiety, improve concentration, and boost feelings of happiness and wellbeing. Students will learn the physiological and psychological benefits of time spent in nature.
Prerequisites: 30 credits (level 100 or higher)
INTR-250T
Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood
3 Credits
Lecture: 3 hours per week
Offering: Fall, Spring, and Summer, All Years
This course invites students to examine a variety of classic and contemporary fairy tales in order to investigate how these tales define and expand the genre of children's literature, connect to childrearing techniques, and to educational practices. Fairy tales are perceived as stories created to entertain and delight young children, but they are so much more. Through the lens of Child Development and Literature, students will collaboratively explore the interconnectedness between author, characters, and audience to the morals, values, and lessons they teach.
Prerequisites: 30 credits (level 100 or higher)
INTR-250U
Science Fiction
3 Credits
Lecture: 3 hours per week
Offering: Fall and Spring Only, All Years
This integrative inquiry seminar explores themes in science fiction through literature and cinema arts. From early literary works such as Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus to more resent films like Ridley Scott's Prometheus, humanity's questions about science and technology generate imagined dystopias and utopias, reflecting visions of the future.
Prerequisites: 30 credits (level 100 or higher)
INTR-250V
Media Literacy in the Digital Age
3 Credits
Lecture: 3 hours per week
Offering: Fall and Spring Only, All Years
This course aims to enhance the media literacy skills of students by analyzing the pervasive nature of mass communication and its influence on thought and behavior. Students will learn skills to become critical consumers of information from a variety of sources, including social media. In addition to defining and exploring the tenets of media literacy, this course will incorporate library science skills to enhance students' ability to seek and use credible information sources.
Prerequisites: 30 credits (level 100 or higher)
INTR-250W
The Meaning of Life
3 Credits
Lecture: 3 hours per week
Offering: Fall, Spring, and Summer, All Years
This course examines multiple responses to the timeless question, "What is the meaning of life?" Is there meaning or purpose built into the universe? How have humans answered this question over the centuries? Is there a god? If not, how does that affect our worldview? How can philosophy, science, and literature inform our worldview? Students will be exposed to a wide diversity of subject matter and perspectives by exploring various mythological, religious, philosophical, literary, and scientific approaches to these questions.
Prerequisites: 30 credits (level 100 or higher)
INTR-250X
Resilience in Today's World
3 Credits
Lecture: 3 hours per week
Offering: Fall, Spring, and Summer, All Years
This course employs neuroscience, mindfulness, and positive psychology to develop twelve vital inner strengths to feel less stressed, pursue opportunities with confidence, and stay calm and centered in the face of adversity. The course will focus on recognizing what is true in compassion, mindfulness, and learning. Topics will include resourcing ourselves and developing grit, gratitude, and confidence. Students will learn to focus on regulating their thoughts, feelings, and actions and developing calmness, motivation, and intimacy in their lives. Students will be able to relate skillfully to others and to the wider world, beginning with courage in communicating with others, aspiration, and generosity.
Prerequisites: 30 credits (level 100 or higher)