Video Introduction from
Dr. James Pappas
Dean of the
College of Liberal Studies
6:46 
LSTD 3353 - Women and Consumer Culture
To stroll through a shopping mall, scan a newspaper, or flip through the channels on a television set is to confront the ubiquity of consumerism in contemporary America. Demonstrating the pervasiveness of consumption is easy. But making sense of consumer culture is a far more complicated and far more important task. And, as scholars, writers, and critics have increasingly realized, gender is central to consumption. This course analyzes the relation between gender and consumption by drawing on captured the attention of scholars in the social sciences and humanities. in social and cultural history, as well as scholarship in literature, cultural studies, economics, anthropology. It also encourages students to apply the theory, method, and knowledge they have acquired from assigned readings and web-based research to their own lives and experiences.
This course will give students an opportunity to analyze women's relationship to consumption and consumer culture. At the end of the course, students will be able to take a position and defend it with respect to various controversial arguments or ideas about women's relationship to consumption and consumer culture.
LSTD 3363 - Ethics in Social Sciences
This course reviews ethical theory and issues in applied ethics. It reviews current issues, while looking at both sides of each argument. Each unit contains a set of guiding questions which are used in order to direct the student to look at the entire ethical view of each issue. Many basic questions must be addressed in order to help attain a decision on each issue. This website purpose is to give the student a chance to look at each issue in a broad sense, while trying to develop your own view point on each topic.
LSTD 3373 - History of the American Public Intellectual
The American Intellectual is different from his or her European counterpart in his/her simplicity and ability to communicate profound truths to the average citizen. This course examines the unique and diverse styles of four important Americans from four different eras in order to determine the impact these individuals had on society and posterity.
LSTD 3623 - Conflict Resolution
This course is designed to give students the opportunity to understand human needs, behavior of self and others. In this course, you will explore how conflict originates, processes by which it escalates, and alternative methods for dealing with it.
LSTD 4233 - Personal and Family Narratives
This course offers students ways of exploring their own and their family's past and, if they wish, with larger cultural and historical contexts.
The process of writing memoir is complex, but it need not be difficult. A memoir is what you can remember, and in the course of completing these units, you will find that one memory of an event, location, or person will trigger many others. This is a crucial step, and even as an end in itself it can be enormously satisfying.
Of course, it need not be the end of the process. Put into narrative form, memoirs are not only a way of passing information to others--children, grandchildren, extended family, and friends--but of understanding the story of one's life and of one's place in the context of local and even national history.
LSTD 4243 - Road Trip of the Mind
This course has as its primary objective the development of an understanding of various points of views and mindsets in the global community, with an end to developing writing skills, enhancing creative problem-solving abilities, improving an understanding of cultural diversity and conflict resolution, and enhancing one's awareness of how values, ethical positions, perspectives manifest themselves and how they evolve over time.
Road Trip of the Mind contains an analysis of how images, archetypal narratives, and various types of “authority” exert a deterministic influence on readers and audiences, and contribute to the “managing” of meaning. These processes can occur in overt ways, as in propaganda, or in more subtle ones, as is the case in films and advertisements.
At the end of the course, the student will have had several opportunities to examine perspectives that may be very different than his or her own “framework,” and will have analyzed the process by which conclusions were reached and knowledge generated.
LSTD 4313 - Global Security and Justice
This course is designed to help the student understand how governments deal with the problem of securing the “homeland.” After the tragic events of 9/11, for example, the US government created the Department of Homeland Security to deal with this problem on a national scope. This might suggest that the government had not dealt with homeland security in the past. Nothing could be further from the truth. The US, like all societies, has engaged in homeland security since its inception. The advent of DHS was merely the first time that the efforts had been coordinated under one centralized agency. This class will examine what terrorism is, how America has traditionally dealt with homeland security, and how that perspective is evolving. Once we understand what terrorism is, the focus of the class will be on how law enforcement and the courts have taken on the challenge of providing global security while ensuring justice.
LSTD 4323 - The History of Slavery
The main goal of the course is to increase your familiarity with the brutal history of bondage and to build the students skills in analyzing past events, especially through writing. Other goals include: To introduce students to a variety of slavery materials; To teach students the basic methods employed in historical research; To explore the possibilities for research and publishing on the Internet. Your grade will be based on writing assignments and a research project published on the Internet.
LSTD 4413 - The Great American Prairie
Grasslands cloak central North America with prairie and plains extending across the U.S. and into southern Canada and northern Mexico, but scattered grasslands occur across the continent. Other native grasslands occur in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and South America, typically between 30° and 45° latitude. Grasses are, however, cosmopolitan--they occur in all terrestrial biomes, including forests and deserts, and on all the continents. The history and evolution of humans and grasses and humans and grasslands are closely intertwined. Three domesticated grasses (wheat, maize, and rice) provide about 70% of our species calories and rye and barley along with the above three cereals are important in brewing and distilling spirits. Our livestock consume grains and graze on grasslands. Grasses are also used to bind soils, as construction materials, and to soften the landscape. Many grasses, in turn, are dependent on human society for their propagation.
LSTD 4633 - Cultural Diversity
Managers, supervisors, training professionals, and educators must be able to effectively recruit, train, manage and promote a culturally diverse work force. However, few have been trained to do so. Throughout his book, Dr. Henderson presents ways to manage and value diversity in the workplace.
According to projected demographic changes in the United States, America's workplace will experience a dramatic change within the next decade. These changes will include increases in women, immigrants, and minorities within the workplace, as well as higher proportions of individuals between the ages of thirty five and fifty four in the working force. This course is designed to promote a better understanding of diversity, as well as prepare you for managing culturally diverse employees.
LSTD 4953 - Study in Depth
This course is designed to assist you in the completion of your study in depth paper, the capstone experience in the Bachelor of Liberal Studies Program. The course will focus on developing your thesis statement, locating and evaluating references, writing and organizing your paper, and putting your paper into its final form, including the list of references cited. This course is faculty driven with full flexibility for the director of the study in depth to manage the task in accordance with the subject undertaken.
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