English for Academic Purposes: Food for Thought: Eating Our Way to a Sustainable Future

Catalog description

The freshman English for Academic Purposes (EAP) course is designed to help you develop the high-level language, communication, and critical thinking skills you need to be successful in an English-speaking university. While the primary emphasis is on speaking and listening, you will also practice reading and writing. You will engage with content individually and in groups, complete a variety of communicative tasks, reflective writing assignments, and an experiential learning project outside the walls of the university. This course is designed to help you acquire skills that can be also be transferred to your future professional and personal lives, and to help you cultivate an interest in issues that cross disciplines, an important part of a well-rounded, liberal arts education. Specifically, this course will investigate food; its production and consumption and the challenges of feeding a growing global population. The course will be divided into 5 modules addressing food security, sustainability and waste as well as the politics of food and what the future might hold in terms of diet. Students will also conduct research into the factors that influence both our current food choices and those of the future. Prerequisite: None.