Team Profile: Luther College

Ellen Drewes-Stoen, Brian Caton, and Scott Hurley

Team Background

Luther's team consists of members from three very diverse academic backgrounds. This diversity is an advantage, as our ultimate goal is to construct a single Paideia II course on Animal Studies that has enough flexibility to allow any two interested faculty from Luther to insert themselves into a fixed course description.

Curriculum Development Plans

Our team will work to develop a proposal for a Paideia II course, titled "Animal Studies," which will introduce junior- and senior-level students to relevant issues and disciplinary approaches in the field, through a set of ethical questions. Two-person teams of instructors will be able to choose their set of ethical questions from a longer list that we generate at the SAIL seminar, or instructor teams may develop their own. We will also develop a series of classroom lecture and discussion topics, as well as out-of-class projects (e.g. assigned readings, service-learning activities, micro-research projects), all with flexibility in mind, so that instructors can insert and remove items, thereby customizing their semester's syllabus. These set pieces could be focused on particular animals (e.g. dogs, elephants, horses, monkeys, etc.); on issues (e.g. domestication vs. wildness, the expendability of certain animals, anti-vivisectionism, etc.); or on specific texts.