Vassar Moodle

Description: This course examines the key concept of ‘place.’ We will examine the evolution of how a place is understood through geographic inquiry and how the concept has grown to include a variety of experiences, voices, and historical events. Students will explore how being “on” and “with” lands in the Lenape diaspora (which are also claimed by both New York State and the United States at large) builds a relationship and understanding of place. We will also study recent interventions from scholars working in a range of disciplines and geographies, including scholars and practitioners from Native nations around the world.

Key Themes: Place, space, positionality, human-environmental relations, interdisciplinary ecologies, Indigenous geographies, environmental justice

Archaeologists study the material remains of humans across time and space. From the stone tools of the earliest humans to the landfills we are contributing to today, the study of things allows us to write histories of peoples and places that are often left out of official records.

Prof Martha Kaplan
Course meets Thursdays 6:30-9:30pm Blodgett 105

This course invites students into the world of playwriting through the lens of queer storytelling and live performance. We’ll explore the art and craft of writing plays that center LGBTQ+ voices, experiences, and lineages - stories often pushed to the margins but born for the stage. Through readings, writing exercises, and workshop discussion, students will engage with the foundational elements of dramatic storytelling: character, dialogue, conflict, structure, and theatricality, with particular attention to how these elements can challenge, subvert, or queer traditional forms.

We’ll study contemporary and historical plays by queer playwrights alongside student work to examine how writers bring radical, intimate, and expansive narratives to life. The course culminates in the creation of a one-act play, a ten minute play or substantial scene, offering each student the chance to develop an original piece rooted in their own vision and voice. No
prior playwriting experience is required - only a willingness to experiment, question, and reimagine what theater can be.

This introductory immigration course is about undocumented people in the U.S. and will be situated within a historical, academic, legal, political, racial, social, cultural, and economic context. The course will take a historical look at immigration law and legal enforcement, with a particular focus on the (mis)construction and criminalization of undocumented immigrants.

This advanced seminar examines American urban education reform from historical and contemporary perspectives to understand the recent impetus to push towards privatizing the public educational system, culminating most recently in the federal policies aligned with Project 2025. This course will help you think about the origins, philosophies, and implications of recent public school reform initiatives that are generally driven by neoliberal market-based ideologies, as well as the possibilities for resistance, agency, and change on both the micro- and macro-levels. Particular attention is given to both large-scale initiatives as well as grassroots community based efforts in educational change.

We will spend the first part of the course exploring how urban schools (and students and their families) are framed in the public discourse and in the media at large, and then examine more closely the actually political economies of urban schools and neighborhoods. The second part of the course explores and considers the now ubiquitous mantra of school reform: accountability, choice, and standards. We discuss the complex implications of these discourses on the creation of policy and on the lives of children in US urban schools. Some of the topics discussed are the rise of charter schools, the role of high-stakes testing, evaluation (for students and teachers), vouchers, the increase of public school closings, etc.. While we draw from examples across the country, some of the case studies in the texts focus on New York City and Chicago, where many of these models have taken root. The final phase of the course looks theoretically and empirically at the possibilities for a more just school reform, drawing from localized case studies and ethnographies. This will enable us to understand more closely how school actors resist, succumb to, and negotiate the many tensions and policies currently framing urban public schools, and certainly affecting the lives of young people in the US.

The most unique part of this class is our partnership with youth and teachers from Poughkeepsie High School. The last hour of class will be dedicated to planning work you will do with young people at their school that includes not only thinking through with them what changes they would like to see in their own schools and district, but also helping them to prepare for their post-secondary lives. We will be partnering with an ELA classroom at PHS to make this happen.

Some of the essential questions of the course are:
● How are urban schools and students framed and how does that influence educational policy, particularly in public schools?
● How have urban public school reform efforts created more equitable and socially just spaces for youth? In what ways have they served to perpetuate educational and economic inequalities, particularly along lines of economic, social and cultural locations (race, class, geography, ability, language, etc…)?
● Who benefits from particular reform initiatives and how does that influence what gets made into legislation? How does this help drive the engine for reform?
● How might policy be crafted to authentically engender high quality urban public schools, so that all students have the opportunity to achieve and excel both in school and beyond?
● How can centering youth voice and perspective contribute to more just educational spaces?