Instructors: Katie Hall (section 001) and Myron Minn-Thu-Aye (section 002)

Prerequisite: A year of calculus, which may include calculus taken in high school. Instructor consent required; email the faculty member for the section in question.

This is the first course in a four-course sequence (2141Q, 2142Q, 2143Q, 2144Q) that approaches calculus in a fundamentally different way: focusing on proofs and theoretical understanding more than on drilling skills. While other math courses you’ve taken might emphasize tricks and recipes, this sequence will focus on seeing patterns and helps to provide a solid conceptual understanding of how math works instead of just gaining computation skills.

Completing the two-year sequence fulfills the requirements of a mathematics minor and satisfies the prerequisites for upper-level mathematics courses (those that require linear algebra, differential equations, and/or transitions to advanced mathematics).

More information.

Beginning in Fall 2020, ENGL 1007 will be the course number for all first-year writing courses at UConn Storrs.

Honors ENGL 1007 recognizes that Honors students are often expected to write more and differently than other UConn students. There are additional opportunities for connection to your own major(s) and greater emphasis on the roles of inquiry and discovery in the humanities. Finally, the Honors sections will culminate with a public celebration of student work.

For Fall 2020, there will be two themed sections of Honors ENGL 1007. They share a single studio section (instructor: Beth Reinwald).

ENGL 1007-015: Music and Identity

Instructor: Darby Lacey

Music is all around us and shapes our connections to places, films, experiences, and even ourselves. For example, music might help us connect to our cultures or explore our emotions or make friends by bonding over shared musical favorites. In this course, we will carefully consider our own various interactions with music and the impact those encounters have on how we perceive ourselves: how certain music makes us feel, how we interact with or use music, even how music might help us to construct our own personal identities.

As we consider our own reactions to music, we will also think about the convergences and divergences in rhetorical choices that are made both when artists compose music, and when we compose our own writing across different mediums. Just as composers, musicians, and djs make countless choices to make a song perfect for the moment, so too do writers when they create their own compositions. As we write together this semester, we will explore the key inquiry, “How does music specifically and writing in general compose our individual and collective identities?”

Our course will also embrace multimodality in music and our own writing. Music brings together sound, lyrics, and even images and video for maximum impact. We will similarly investigate the possibilities of different mediums and modes for our own composing as we explore our course inquiry. The contributions you make in this course will take the form of a personal reflective essay, an annotated playlist, an annotated bibliography, a critical introduction, and a visual album cover. We will explore a variety of composing technologies together, and no previous experience of writing across technology is required.

ENGL 1007-016: Documentary Film and the Composition of “Truth”

Instructor: Mollie Kervick

In a media landscape in which the line between fact and fiction is increasingly blurry, how does documentary media construct our perception of truth? This course asks you to consider the rhetorical moves that a variety of documentary texts make in order to craft an idea of “truth.” As we consume different kinds of documentary daily, it is vital to consider whether documentary media has more to do with “truth” or the ways we construct and consume stories about the “truth.” Furthermore, to what degree has the indecipherability of differences between fiction and non-fiction stories in our current media landscape exacerbated ideological divisions that cause us to interpret the same realities in dramatically different ways? In this class, we will use the art form of documentary film and other documentary media (podcasts/social media/news articles) to explore questions about the representation of truth and reality in art, media, and narrative form more generally. Studying a mix of classic and recent documentary texts, often in comparison with theoretical meditations on truth, we’ll celebrate the complexities of documentary media and delve deeply into the philosophical and aesthetic questions it inspires.

The course assignments include:
1) A Documentary Review (YouTube video)
2) Mini Discovery Documentary
3) Documentary Treatment
4) Collaborative Documentary Composition

Instructor: Leigh Fine

“Leadership” can be described as inherent traits, a set of behaviors, the leveraging of relationships, collaboration, or a socially-navigated performance – leaders may be someone with social influence, unique knowledge, a convincing enactment of “leadership”, or all of the above. UConn Honors believes leadership is a process that improves conditions in communities of practice. We believe leadership can be practiced by multiple subjects in many contexts, and that the need for leadership in all fields of study is as important now as it has ever been. Keeping such emerging social and leadership realities in mind, this course endeavors toward an integration of experiential, theoretical, and applied learning on the subject of leadership to the end of addressing a leadership challenge that exceeds the boundaries of traditional disciplines in the hopes of effecting change for the collective social good.

As a learning community, we will:

• Analyze leadership as a phenomenon that we can experience, practice, and study
• Evaluate current community and global problems through a leadership lens
• Create proposed solutions to current problems while applying leadership theories
• Embark on a shared leadership experience within our local communities

[UConn Stamford]

Instructor: Annamaria Csizmadia, Ph.D. 

Honors students are able to enroll without a permission number. Non-Honors students who are interested should email Dr. Csizmadia for more information. 

Mondays, 3:35-6:05pm, UConn Stamford, in-person

This course invites mid-career Honors students to explore their personal intellectual interests, to expand their knowledge of research approaches within various fields of study, and to examine topics with a diversity, equity, and inclusion lens. As an interdisciplinary seminar serving Honors students of many majors and led by scholars from a variety of disciplines, an important goal of the course is to cultivate comparative conversations across fields of specialization.  The successful student will present sophisticated and developed ideas in a manner sufficiently generalist to promote learning and innovation across subject areas. Students will also create a plan of action to expand their learning and build their skills and knowledge beyond this course. This plan will include individualized goals for completing the Honors thesis and learning goals for beyond graduation. This course will help support students within a community of scholars as they pursue Honors undergraduate research at UConn Stamford.  

Sample course schedule and Assignments (tentative for fall 2024): 

Week 1 – Welcome & Getting to Know You
Week 2 – Guest Speaker  – Identifying reliable sources, Mind-mapping areas of interest
Week 3 – Faculty Speaker Panel #1 (A panel of faculty members/experts will describe research in their field, including how DEI informs current research)
Week 4 – Faculty Speaker Panel #2
Week 5 – Guest Speaker from the Writing Center, Writing within your discipline
Week 6 – Guest Speaker from Enrichment Programs/Advising, Developing a Learning Plan
Week 7 – Honors Alums Guest Speakers Discussion of their Honors theses and careers
Week 8 – Discussion on Research with potential field trip
Week 9 – Guest Speaker on the Important of Life-Long Learning
Week 10 – Who Has a Seat at the Table? The importance of representation in all fields
Week 11 – Minority Voices in Literature
Week 12 – Student TED Talks
Week 13 – Student TED Talks

Grading will be based on Participation/Engagement and Assignments. Assignments are likely to include: Attending a Getting Started in Undergraduate Research workshop, Identifying reliable sources assignment, creating a Quick Guide for writing within your own discipline, writing Reflections, presenting a “Ted-Talk” style presentation, and crafting a future Learning Plan.