COURSES

Academic Program Offerings

A 2-course sequence, counting for AUCC credits, that introduces students to the complexity of Humanities-based thinking, and investigating the way such thinking can enter into STEM concerns.

IU174A-D: Questions for Human Flourishing
IU173A-D: Thinking Toward a Thriving Planet

A certificate in interdisciplinary learning that includes IU173 and IU174 along with 9 additional upper-division courses in the CLA that further the vision of the Arts & Humanities and the STEM fields as necessary partners

IU174A-D

Questions for Human Flourishing

We call Questions for Human Flourishing our “Gold” course—color of ripe wheat and the nourishing grain, precious metal that keeps its luster across millennia. These classes approach concerns that have been our deepest cares since humans have been human. Devoted to discussion and inquiry, recent Gold classes have examined “Truth & Beauty,” “Happiness,” and the roots of “Inspiration”

IU173A-D

Thinking Toward a Thriving Planet

We call Thinking Toward a Thriving Planet our “Green” class—color of the lush meadow, color of the summer leaf. Our Green classes merge the Arts & Humanities with concerns that prevail in STEM fields, furthering our belief that interdisciplinary learning leads to mutual thriving. Recent courses explore the ethical and aesthetic relation of humans to the more-than-human-world, and a class investigating the various ways in which knowledge can be built.

AUCC Credits

All our courses count for the AUCC in four different categories:

A = 1C Diversity, Equity, Inclusion
B = 3B Arts & Humanities
C = 3C Social Sciences
D = 3D Historical Perspectives

Spring 2026 Classes

Gold: Questions for Human Flourishing

Gardening the Quiet Mind: Questions on Silence & Slow Time The Liberation Arts: Abundance, Stewardship & Play Crisis, Craft & Imagination A Creatively Examined Life

Gardening the Quiet Mind: Questions on Silence & Slow Time

IU 174B.002 – CRN 22366; T/TH 2-3:15

John Kneisley

In a world that often feels ever-loudening and ever-quickening, what might it look like to attune ourselves to an opposite ethic – to slow and still our minds to the speed of a seed? Inspired by John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” a poem where “silence and slow time” comprise a fundamental mode, our class will cultivate a quiet space to ask what silence and slow time might be.

Taking root in this question will require quiet, contemplative practices over the course of the semester – steps toward embodying silence and slowness, as best we can – and reflecting on our experiences. What might we learn from bird-watching, and from the patience it requires? What do the plants in CSU’s campus gardens and greenhouses have to say to us, in all their relative stillness? How might we feel our thoughts change when wandering a museum exhibit, or devoting a length of time to a single artwork, as Keats did? How might our writing shift when slowed to the speed of the hand, using pen and paper to write letters and journal entries? And what of the simple act of walking, both alone and together, disregarding destination?

Supporting these shared practices will be discussions of texts ranging from the ancient to the contemporary, spanning poetry, philosophy, visual art, and physics. Some texts, like Slow Birding (Joan E. Strassmann) or Wanderlust: A History of Walking (Rebecca Solnit), are chosen with the above practices in mind, while others, like Garden Time (W.S. Merwin) or The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson & Issa (trans. Robert Hass), show silence and slow time on the level of language. The Thinking Root: The Poetry of Earliest Greek Philosophy (trans. Dan Beachy-Quick) and Seven Brief Lessons on Physics (Carlo Rovelli) will serve as historical bookends for how humans have thought about silence and time, drawing us nearer to (or making us beautifully confused about) their primary natures.

Ultimately, by embracing silence and slow time as a bodily habit, while reading and writing about them in whatever ways and genres we can, our aim is to discover what happens when we listen to the world on a deeper register – witnessing silence and slowness as we become silent and slow ourselves – and to hear if something as quiet as silence, as it does for Keats’s urn, might be another way of speaking.

The Liberation Arts: Abundance, Stewardship & Play

IU174B.001; CRN 22365; T/R 11-12:15

Shane Omar Slattery-Quintanilla

“...if I were asked to name the most needed of all reforms in the spirit of education, I should say: 'Cease conceiving of education as mere preparation for later life, and make it the full meaning of the present life.’”

— John Dewey

“I’m a believer in the power of knowledge and the ferocity of beauty, so from my point of view, your life is already artful—waiting, just waiting, for you to make it art.” — Toni Morrison

“The most important part of your equipment is yourself: your mobile body, your imaginative mind, and your freedom to use both. Make sure you do use them.”

— Maya Deren

“Be a good steward of your gifts. Protect your time. Feed your inner life.”

— Jane Kenyon

“There’s a crack / a crack in everything / that’s where the light gets in.” — Leonard Cohen

THE LIBERATION ARTS: Abundance, Stewardship, Play

There’s a crack at the origin of the liberal arts; in the Middle Ages, these “liberal” arts—all the subjects deemed “worthy of a free man”—were named to distinguish them from the “servile” arts: the crafts and skills considered suitable only for the laboring or enslaved classes.

What do we make of such a distinction now? Why inherit any form of education without deeper reflection or interrogation? In this course, we’ll let this crack at the origin become a site of illumination: a way to ask what’s possible, necessary, and nourishing for our own educational journeys.

We’ll reimagine the liberal arts as the arts of liberation, emphasizing the practice-based dimensions of art and inquiry. The conceptual pillars of this experimental course are abundance, stewardship, and play:

Abundance: We will explore how beginning from what we already have and who we already are can transform our ways of dreaming, learning, and creating. What new forms of art and knowledge arise when we embrace this abundance model and depart from the more familiar models of scarcity?
Stewardship: We’ll consider creativity as a form of care, curation, and curiosity—an etymologically linked trio that gently rebalances the cultural fixation on so-called productivity and innovation above all else.
Play: Finally, we will allow a spirit of play to guide us, keeping us buoyant through the streams and storms of our creative experiments.

Across the semester, we will explore a range of artistic practices, including but not limited to: poetry and spoken word, essay and live storytelling, drawing and zine-making, musical performance and song, as well as movement and other embodied forms of expression. No prior experience is required or expected, and no one will be compelled to work in every mode; rather, the course invites each participant to stretch (gently and curiously) into unfamiliar creative territory.

Each week will include an open mic/share-space as a recurring ritual of creative exchange. The goal in this course is not a single final project but an evolving practice of presence, generosity, and reflection. Participation and shared, sometimes collaborative, experimentation are therefore essential to the spirit and success of the course.

Crisis, Craft & Imagination

IU 174B.004 - CRN 23071; T/TH 9:30-10:45

Robin Walter

In moments of crisis, language often fails us. As writers, what do we make of the limits of our craft and to what other forms might we turn when confronted with crises—societal; personal; collective—that exceed linguistic representation?

Throughout this course, we will enter into a sustained consideration of the confluence between language and image, growing curious about that which emerges when the two forms conspire.

In describing the process behind his book-length collage Poem Bitten By a Man, poet Brian Teare suggests his task is “to pursue meaning through its displacement. To understand change, remarkable or hidden. To go on—”

It is in this latter directive where our class will begin. When we reach the edges of language, how go on? We will cultivate an imaginative mindset that eschews the rigid dogma of genre and adopt an expansive approach that values multiplicity over singularity. Reimagining how language and image behave on and off the page, we will study and practice forms that invite us into the margin—that liminal space where boundaries and genres dissolve to reveal an art that asks us into a primary space of imagining and making.

We will consider how forms of collage might enhance, complicate, and deepen our poetics. Our studies will include expansive forms of making, including ekphrasis, graffiti, public art, letterpress, collage, and printmaking. In addition to language, we will turn to ink, to color, to the cathartic practice of cutting and pasting—reminded anew that the underneath is as valuable as the seen and the margin as vital as the center.

We will seek out language and image beyond the classroom, visiting local galleries, public art spaces, and diverse sites of linguistic and imagistic potential.

Some of the primary questions Teare asks across his book-length collage include 1) how to make language more—a dimension that holds & meets multiple demands: love, work, death, & art, and 2) How to say what can’t be seen. Our class will further this line of questioning and pursue a related query: how do we portray what can’t be said?

We will examine crisis through the collage of our singular and shared experiences, considering the most personal intimacies of mind alongside the most public horrors of empire and state.

Put simply, we will entangle ourselves in two of the primary questions every writer must ask:

How does language fail us? How does it save us?

A Creatively Examined Life

IU 174B.003 – CRN 22367; MW 11-12:15

Andrew Meyer

The author and scholar Joseph Campbell wrote, “The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are,” and understanding, examining, knowing, and learning how to be-in-the-world is a constant unraveling of adventure and contemplation. Putting oneself in accordance with the journey of self-discovery through the lens of creativity is a vital step in understanding what it means to be and to live. Venturing through forms of creativity both old and new, we will watch, read, listen, write, and investigate substantial creative endeavors and create our own to help us understand how various subject matters within creativity can foster self-examination and personal discovery. Each day of our existence all the gods, all the characters, all the heavens, and all the hells, are within each of us and we must figure out how this can nurture, stifle, or encourage our paths forward. This course will investigate how lived experience in conjunction with the personal creative investigation could unlock newfound understandings of personal meaning, creative purpose, and having a vision for life. We will investigate questions of truth, beauty, love, malice, conflict, tribulation, meaning, atonement, revelation, and many more to help foster a better understanding of what it means to be-in-the-world.

Green: Thinking Toward a Thriving Planet

Encountering the More-than-Human World Injustice Unveiled: Human Rights, Environmentalism & the Humanities The Perfect Intersection: Art-Making as a Way to Learn (& Do!) Anything

Encountering the More-than-Human World

IU 173B.001 – CRN 22339; TR 12:30-1:45

Robin Walter

Within its definition, the word “Encounter” holds multiplicities:

to come upon face-to-face
a coming into the vicinity of a celestial body
a meeting between hostile factions or persons : a sudden often violent clash

In this class, we will explore how each of these modes of encounter shapes the ways in which we open ourselves to the world around us, and in turn, how it opens to us. How is it that we extend ourselves to the more-than-human world, and what traditions and bodies of knowledge inform our approach?

Throughout this course, we will cultivate what poet C. D. Wright describes as “a sense of wakefulness, of being present for what you’re looking at to reveal itself in more absolute terms.” We will use our words and our minds to reach towards the wild earth, in the hopes that through this reaching we might discover something essential about our own being.

We will follow the streams that braid between the built and natural; human and animal; mind, memory, moss, and song. We will ground our inquiry in an ethic of reciprocity—not that we ‘discover’ the wild world, but that we cross paths with it. To do so, we might adopt a version of R. W. Emerson’s “transparent eyeball,” and endeavor to see our own selves through the world around us. A sounding and surrounding.

Our course of investigation will be far-ranging; it will transcend genre and discipline. We will look towards modern and ancient texts, art, philosophy, film, music, science, and dance. Our efforts will open the possibility of fundamentally reimagining our modes of encounter, the occasions for which will often occur outside the classroom. We might find ourselves on the banks of the Poudre, wandering through a cemetery or museum, or among a herd of horses.

We will grow curious about the nature and quality of our attention; how is it that our minds attend to the complexities of our past, current, and future worlds—those internal and external ecosystems situated in a moment of both great urgency and transformative possibility? Through our pursuit of this inquiry, we will hope to come closer to experiencing the root of the word ‘tend’: to care for, to promise, to give into safekeeping.

Injustice Unveiled: Human Rights, Environmentalism & the Humanities

IU 173B.004 – CRN 22342; TR 11-12:15

Amy Young

This course will focus on literary and historic texts that emphasize the concepts of justice, human rights, and environmentalism. It will contemplate the meaning of justice and human rights and how their interpretations change throughout time. Discussion will continue with how environmental and climate issues disproportionally and systematically impact communities of color and low-income communities in the U.S. and around the world. What can be done about this injustice? Would it be beneficial to further the cause as a human rights issue as some are currently seeking to do? How do the humanities play a role in educating others about these issues as well as provide inspiration for change? This discussion-based, collaborative, and experiential class will attempt to reach into writings, visual art, music, and nature in search of an answer to these, and many similar questions.

The Perfect Intersection: Art-Making as a Way to Learn (& Do!) Anything

IU 173B.003 – CRN 22341; MW 10-11:15

David Pyle

Art is far more than just making or performing. It creates context and meaning that serves as an extraordinary portal into science, culture and history. In this course, we’ll do paper-making as a way to explore the chemistry of hydrogen bonding. We’ll discuss quilting as an avenue into culture and identity. We’ll go as far back in time as we can, looking at the intersection of art-making, storytelling, carbon, and the physics of lightfastness. From there, you’ll have the opportunity to explore your own creative interests and how they can serve as an avenue leading to other disciplines and ideas.

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This course is drawn from nearly 40 years of work by the instructor, David Pyle, in the intersection of the arts, education, commerce, and chemistry. It’s based on the premise that the arts can metaphorically act as a "railroad roundhouse" allowing us to enter on the arts "track" and then, depending on how we rotate the turntable, we can exit on a chemistry track. Or physics. Or culture and history. Or any of a thousand disciplines.

During the first week, we’ll make paper by hand and use that as a track taking us to organic chemistry and hydrogen bonding. Next, we’ll discuss historical pigments and paint-making and crushed cochineal to make genuine carmine. From there, we’ll open a track to explore Aztec codices, history, and culture and then move into materials science.

We’ll explore the ideas around Temple Grandin’s most recent book, Visual Thinking, and her commitment to developing essential engineering skills through learning that comes from drawing and sewing and other arts.

The first ten weeks of the course feature an exploration of different intersections between the arts and science or culture. We’ll look at quilting and the Gee's Bend quilters as an intersection with history and community-building. We’ll explore intersections between painting, optics, and how pigments are being used in Biomedical Engineering. From there, we'll dive into the direct and powerful intersection between the work done by Josef Albers on the Interaction of Color which gives us a track to the Well-Tempered Clavier by J.S. Bach which opens a direct link with the Principle of Uncertainty by physicist Werner Heisenberg.

During the last five weeks of the course, the students will each present a unique intersection that they’ve explored.

The Green and Gold Initiative

About

Courses

Experiences

Workshops

People

COURSES

Academic Program Offerings

IU174A-D

IU173A-D

AUCC Credits

Spring 2026 Classes

Courses Taught

Questions for Human Flourishing

Craving Experience

Craving Experience

Mindful explorations: Art, The World, and Self

Mindful explorations: Art, The World, and Self

Happiness

Narratives of Crossing: Spaces of Transgression and Transformation

On Truth & Beauty

The Artist in the Expanded Field

The Artist in the Expanded Field

The Map & the Journey

To the Underworld & Back

Poetry, Politics & Place

Thinking Towards a Thriving Planet

What IS Nature?

Meeting the Universe Halfway

Encountering the More-than-Human World, Robin Walter, Animal Sciences

Community with the More-than-Human World

Being Ecological

Knowledge and Uncertainty

Injustice Unveiled: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Civil Rights, Environmentalism & the Humanities

Elegy & Ode

Staying with the Trouble: Poetry/Printmaking/Place