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 2027 Classes
Gold: Questions for Human Flourishing
IU174B.005: CRN 26537; M/W 1-1:50
Andrew Meyer
What Stays Human
To understand, examine, and learn how to be in the world is a constant unraveling of adventure and contemplation. Putting yourself in accordance with that journey, whatever form it takes, is among the most vital and human things a person can do.
This course takes up a single old question that has become newly urgent: what does it mean to be human, and what does it mean to flourish, at a moment when so much of what we once made for ourselves can now be made for us? Being human when everything can be engineered is not a problem to be solved but a territory to be explored, and the work of the course is to look honestly at what nurtures, stifles, and moves us forward.
Our approach is interdisciplinary and hands-on. We will read and we will write, we will make things with our hands, we will think hard, and we will talk about all of it together, including with visiting faculty from across the university, each speaking to what it means to be human from the vantage of their own discipline. A personal Creative Working Journal runs through the whole semester as the place where reading, making, and reflection meet, open to whatever medium fits how you think and work, whether that is writing, sketching, digital notes, or something else entirely. You will not leave with my answers. You will leave having learned to ask the questions better, and to live more honestly inside them.
Green: Thinking Toward a Thriving Planet
IU 173B.001 – CRN: 22339; T/TH 12:30-1:15, Education 1
John Kneisley
Gardening the Quiet Mind: Questions on Silence and Slow Time
In a world that often feels ever-quickening and ever-loudening, 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? What of the act of cloud-gazing – a perhaps radical way to shed any pressure to be productive, and replace it with wonder? How might our writing shift when slowed to hand-speed, 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 A Cloud a Day (Gavin Pretor-Pinney), 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.
Courses Taught
Gold
Green