Courses designated Mercy Experience (ME) in the catalog are a key component of Mount Mercy's Core Curriculum. They engage students in an active learning environment, with course themes derived from critical social justice and global concerns of the Sisters of Mercy.
The 2010-11 Portal Courses are:
Sharing the Earth with Animals
What are our responsibilities to animals? Do animals have rights? What do our religious traditions tell us about our responsibility to animals? What does it mean to ask and try to answer these questions from the perspective of an educated person? This class addresses these questions as it prepares students to begin their studies in the liberal arts tradition. Experiences in the course promote understanding of the status of animals within religious and philosophical traditions, with an emphasis on Christianity, while fostering understanding of the impact of human actions on animals.
Rogues, Rebels, and Accidental Discoveries
The Crooked Path to Creativity Creativity is a powerful force in human beings that has shaped our civilization. In all disciplines from food preparation and actuary science to chemistry and the arts, humans have made intentional and accidental discoveries. Even games like chess require a flexible mind in which a creative and strategic thought process leads to problem solving. International capitals have been the center of creativity, like Berlin in the 1920s. Creativity erupts in unlikely places as well, like in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. Dreams, nature, and colleagues also inspire creativity. This course examines individuals who have made significant discoveries and the context for those discoveries. As the course focuses on how creativity is revealed in many areas, students make their own discoveries about contributions to our development as a civilized and progressive world.
Ethnic Iowans: Diversity Issues in the New Millennium
This portal course is a unique sociological journey that enables students to canvass Iowa’s colorful and diverse ethnic fabric from its earliest period in the 19th century to the present time. By analyzing various ethnic groups and immigrant populations’ manner of entry, socio-economic and political status, and contributions to Iowa’s globalized economy and culture, students are challenged to search for answers for Iowa’s spatial/ethnic stratification, state of race relations and periodic outbursts of prejudicial attitudes and discriminatory practices. Students engage in critical analysis, complete a historical map, and share their skills in service-learning projects that aim to help certain immigrant and refugee populations getting settled in Iowa. Field trips are anticipated in the Greater Cedar Rapids area, with one extending to another Eastern Iowa community.
Cities, Sewers, and Shots: Health Protection
Awareness of public health issues is important to all students in their roles as educated citizens, regardless of their intended undergraduate majors. This course uses an interdisciplinary approach to explore historical context and current issues related to health protection in the United States. The focus is on the health of an entire community rather than on an individual or family. Students are introduced to national, state and local health concerns identified in major studies and reports. Field trips to public health sites may be scheduled.
Immigrants and Literacy: In Pursuit of the American Dream
This course provides students with an interdisciplinary approach to learning about immigrants and their pursuit of literacy. Students encounter the historical, sociological, and political perspectives on U .S . immigration laws and policies, immigrants’ countries of origin, and factors promoting immigration to the U.S. Literary works and films and/or documentaries featuring the lives and stories of immigrants help students understand the immigrant experience. Linguistic principles related to second language learning as well as research-based reading and writing strategies from the field of Education prepare students to complete a 15-hour service learning experience tutoring immigrant children and/or adults who are learning English. Students have opportunities to work together, become oriented to Mount Mercy services, take part in student-led presentations to the Mount Mercy community, and participate in educational field trips.
Avatars of Good and Evil: Media Stereotypes vs. Reality
A lot of research has been done about media representations of stereotypical characters and ideas. This course looks at media “avatars,” or personifications, of good and evil, compared to what research and real-world service activities reveal to be complex realities. The course will be roughly divided into three parts: Part I examines the role of personalities in politics and the news, Part II examines media stereotypes in popular narrative entertainment, and Part III concerns symbolic representations of people in advertising. Immigration and racism are featured in the first part of this course, followed by participation in a service project as the course proceeds.
Why a Mercy Education?
This course introduces the students to the distinctiveness of a Mercy education. Insights into the values and experiences inspiring the founder of the Sisters of Mercy, Catherine McAuley, are gained from stories of her life and times. Reading Courage and Change, a history of Mount Mercy College through 1978, and interviewing current Sisters of Mercy enrich students’ understanding of the special characteristics and opportunities associated with higher education in the Mercy tradition. The course addresses issues of immigration, non-violence and poverty as it prepares students to begin their studies in the liberal arts tradition. A service learning project at one of the Mercy sponsored institutions in Cedar Rapids is another highlight of this journey into a Mercy education.
Poor Women, Poor Family, Poor Work
This course introduces the problem of poverty as women in the U.S. experience it and seeks to discover its causes and consequences for women, their families, and their communities. Students learn to apply a range of sociological concepts and theories to critically examine attempts to explain why women have an increased risk of poverty. Social institutions such as family, education, work and polity are critically examined as they correlate to the poverty of women as well as to possible solutions. The unique experiences of women of color are included, as are those of immigrant women.
Screen Icons: A Cultural and Aesthetic Study
This course analyzes how we can understand the phenomena of the cinema icon, through study of such figures as Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, Paul Newman, Jane Fonda, Denzel Washington, Audrey Hepburn, John Wayne, and some contemporary film stars. Students encounter star performances and star images historically, aesthetically, and ideologically by examining how their films, along with magazines, the studio system, their personal lives, and advertising, contributed to making them important cultural figures. The course pursues the idea that they became icons because they tapped into and fulfilled, for better and worse, substantial emotional needs within their cultures. Students also will examine the whole nature of celebrity in our culture, while also critically addressing concerns related to non-violence, racism, and women.
The Religious Roots of Political Involvement
What responsibilities do religious persons or groups have in the political sphere? How are religiously-motivated forms of political involvement different from their secular counterparts? How are they similar? What are the various motivations, historical precedents and theological or other theoretical paradigms or justifications for different forms of religiously-informed behavior in the political sphere across religious traditions? These forms of behavior include nonviolent resistance, various forms of pacifism, participation in aggressive war, participation in just wars and terrorism. This course will explore these questions in two ways. First, it will explore the theoretical and the historical or theological justifications for these forms of political involvement across religions. Second, it will explore these questions through the lives and writings of exemplary religious personalities from different religious affiliations – Martin Luther King, Jr., Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Mahatma Gandhi, Daniel Berrigan, Dorothy Day and others. This class will have a service learning component consistent with the course content.
Talking in “She” and “He”: Gender Communication in College and Beyond
You’ve always ” known” that women and men talk differently, but you may not have realized that academic research agrees. The aim of this course, however, is to show how studies in gender communication do more than confirm your intuition: they detail differences, explain why they occur and their consequences, and suggest some routes for improving your interactions, both now and throughout your life. Moreover, through means of a final public education project, the course will encourage recognition of how informed gender communication is a key means of maintaining and enhancing relationships among all in the community.
Water – A Shared Responsibility
In “Water – A Shared Responsibility” students will be introduced to the fundamental chemical and physical properties of water, which make water essential to all life. Because water is vital to human existence, it inextricably links all humanity: through time and space. The use and abuse of water as a natural resource has shaped human culture and history – indeed it continues to do so. Students will be exposed to the issues that surround water, such as equitable treatment of minority groups and their water needs, water access and poverty, the disproportionate effect of water scarcity on women and children, global climate change and increasing water needs in this country and around the world. Students will be required to go on field trips.
Law Ungendered: History of the Legal Status of U.S. Women
This is a portal course that focuses on the history of the legal status of women in the United States. Particular attention will be paid to the development of laws in the early republic based on the common law concept of coverture, and students will trace the evolution of American women’s legal position through the Married Women’s Property Acts, the struggle for suffrage, the definition of female citizenship, and equal treatment in realms such as inheritance, jury duty, work, etc. Students will balance their study of these issues with service projects in the community directed toward helping immigrant women learn English and prepare for citizenship exams.