Summer Courses Offer a Chance to Learn Something New

Summer is a great time to try something new. Students at the College often go off and pursue jobs, internships, volunteer opportunities or trips to new and exciting locations during their three months away from campus. And all of those exploits open the door for students to learn and grow outside of the collegiate environment.

But the months from May to August are also a great time for students to try something new at the College. With more than 500 sections of undergraduate and graduate summer courses, there are plenty of opportunities for students to take advantage of on campus. Summer classes, of course, include your standard math, science and history courses. However, many professors also use the freedom of the summer schedule to offer something a little more unique.

Students can take fun, quick-hit courses during the two-and-a-half-week sprint that is Maymester. Students can immerse themselves in such courses as the “Wedding Planning” class offered by the Department of Hospitality and Tourism Management, or the Department of History’s “Southern History in Film” and “Horror Films in American History.”

More than 100 online courses offer students the chance to take fun and provocative classes from the convenience of their home, such as “Like a Rolling Stone: The History and Development of Rock Music” and “Reading the Lowcountry Landscape,” a geography course examining the various forces that have shaped the region.

Longer summer session courses provide students four to six weeks of concentrated learning in an array of different subjects and settings, from classrooms to city streets to the coastal waterways of the Lowcountry.

Here’s a closer look at a few summer courses at the College that stretch students beyond the confines of the average classroom lecture:

Photo Essays and Literary Expressions

What is an image if not a visual manifestation of a story? That’s what professor Valerie Frazier challenges her young students to contemplate in her English course “Photo Essays and Literary Expressions.”

Students in the summer SPECTRA course “Photo Essays and Literary Expressions” took images of Emanuel AME Church following the tragic shooting there in 2015.

Designed for rising freshmen, the course is part of the College’s SPECTRA program, which offers an academic and transition experience to recent African American, Latino, Asian and Native American high school graduates who have been accepted to the College for the fall.

Frazier says she challenges students to merge the concepts of literature and photography into one avenue of storytelling as a way to grow their critical thinking and writing skills. Students read poems, short stories and essays, which include photography as a central theme. Students also have to tell the story of their own photos through essays, focusing on family photos and those they’re assigned to take in class.

Last summer, Frazier said many students chose to take photos and examine the history of Emanuel A.M.E. Church following the tragic shooting there.

“It was a teaching moment,” the professor says.

Coastal Kayaking

If you’ve ever watched folks paddle across the Ashley River, the Cooper River or Shem Creek in their red, yellow, orange or blue kayaks and thought, “I could do that,” here’s your chance. Ashley Brown, an adjunct professor certified as a coastal kayaking instructor through the American Canoe Association, makes sure students are more than ready to tackle the region’s swelling seas, rivers and tidal creeks.

Coastal Kayaking students learned to navigate the Cooper River during a class last summer.

In addition to students getting plenty of hands-on experience dipping paddles into the waters of the Cooper River, Brown makes sure they also know how to maximize their time on the water by learning about navigation, currents and tides, weather and reading the wind.

“I teach it hoping that they’re going to dig into the sport and they’re going to do it for the rest of their lives, but so much of it is transferrable to simply living on the coast,” Brown says.

Other People’s Money

Visiting professor Peter Schadler is using the summer as a chance to experiment with a new graduate history course titled “Other People’s Money: Personal Debt, Wealth, and their Redistribution from the Ancient to the Modern World.”

By looking at the topics of wealth, wealth transference, lending and debt over a long period of time, Schadler hopes to shed light on the factors that have shaped the experiences of the lower and middle classes (the so-called “99 percent,” he says).

What the course is not, the history professor says, is a standard overview of the financial system. Instead, it’s meant to offer students a different perspective about the value of debt and the value of wealth, and how those concepts have evolved.

“I’m hoping they’ll take away new attitudes toward their own personal debt and wealth,” he says.