Exploring Parent-Child Conversations during Shared Book Reading. When parents read to their young children, they help them develop language and literacy skills critical for later academic success. Parent-child conversations during this preschool activity teach children important abstract language skills through discussions about characters' motives, explanations of the story's events, or predictions about what could happen next in the story. The goal of this course is to study how parents and their young children, with typically developing language skills, converse during shared book reading. In addition to reading primary articles on the topic, students view and analyze actual video-recordings of parents and their young children reading books.
Evaluation is based on participation in class discussions and a completed case study.
Ms. J. Vander Woude. The Church and the American Cinema. This course examines major films and controversies marking the history of the church's engagement with the American cinema. Protestant and Catholic approaches are compared and efforts to censor and rate motion pictures are explored and evaluated. Students keep a journal and complete a comprehensive final exam.