Spring Semester of 2021
- Course number: Japanese 309
- Course Title: Masterpieces in Japanese Literature
- Course description:This course explores early Japanese prose and poetry to detect native motifs that continue into modern literature. Dramatic scripts, I-Novels, surrealistic fiction, and contemporary authors including Yoshimoto Banana and Murakami Haruki will be read and written about in a student-created literary online diary.
- MLO 4
- Course reflective narrative: Through these courses I was not only able to look at aspects of Japanese culture but also immerse myself in the literary culture of Japan. To demonstrate these ideas I examined upon studying a different culture.
- Course number: Japanese 410
- Course Title: Japanese Quakes and Nukes (Un)Natural Japanese Environments
- Course description:Japan is richly diverse, from the tundra-like north to the subtropical south. Its islands are shaped by earthquakes, volcanoes, and man-made ecologies. We study the Japanese archipelago from multiple scientific and humanistic perspectives, including material from scientific journals, films, history, anthropology, and Japanese comics. We cover the basics of Japanese geology, Pacific seismology (the Ring of Fire), the causes and effects of nuclear radiation, and the changes to the land.
- MLO 4
- Course reflective narrative: Focused on an environmental impact on the people of Japan. This class showed me how to analyze cultural aspects of Japan and how the people of Japan take environmental issues as a serious topic.
- Course evidence/work samples:
- Course number: Spanish 306
- Course Title: Culture / Civilization of Span Latin America
- Course description: The course presents a historical and cultural overview of Hispanic Latin America from its pre-Columbian origins to the present through works of literature, art, music, and video clips.
- MLO:3
- Course reflective narrative:This course fulfills my MLO 3 requirement by examining Latin America from a cultural point of view, taking into consideration, as mentioned in the course description, “...works of literature, art, music, and video clips.” This course focused on developing our understanding of cultures and civilizations through reading specific chapters that focused on certain areas of Latin America and how they influenced one another. We also watched films in which the primary focus was to show us particular times of history or significant people or events that took place in Latin America. One thing I gained in this class was a true understanding of specific customs and traditions found in all of Latin America. A major contribution that shows in my MLO is being able to distinguish where different traditions come from. Most importantly, I learned about different civilizations and how they became crucial to the development of Latin American countries. This course relates to other courses taken at CSUMB as it covers issues that go hand in hand with the social sciences. There were many moments in the class in which interdisciplinary subjects were discussed in class, going beyond what is being studied and examining course topics from a sociological point of view or a psychological standpoint.