FRS 001L — Sec. 001 — (1 unit) — CRN 55878 — T 11:00 – 11:50am — 227 Olson
Why Can’t We All Just Be Friends?: A Systematic Way of Looking at People From Other Cultures

Instructor: Norma López-Burton, Department of Spanish and Classics, College of Letters and Science

Description: Immigration at new levels…Indecipherable languages in the street…Free trade…Technology making the world smaller…The Iraqi invasion. Like it or not, we live in a world where people of different colors, different languages and different ways of doing things are crossing out paths more and more. How will we react? What’s inside us that will allow us to either be open to all this change or reject it—or maybe a bit of both?

In this course, students will learn to examine their own cultural myths, stereotypes and realities and, in turn, compare the way others live in their world and how they perceive ours. Students will learn to question and compare cultures in a systematic way by examining the Four Perspectives: “How we see ourselves”, “How we see them”, “How they see themselves”, “How they see us.”

Format: One hour per week for lecture and discussion. Discussions are based on short readings posted on the My.ucdavis.edu website. Before each class, students will be expected to have read that class’s selection, taken an online quiz and be ready to speak out in class. Grading: 8 quizzes based on the readings - 40%; class participation - 30%; final paper - 30%. The final paper will be no more than three double space pages in length.

About the Instructor: Norma López-Burton has been a Spanish instructor at UC Davis going on 25 years and has supervised the First Year Spanish Program for ten years. She has introduced ways to measure the cultural awareness of students and has made cultural understanding proficiency as part of the grade. Students in this freshman seminar will be exposed to some of the material she presents in her Spanish 390 graduate seminar.