Fall Semester
Fall 2020 Schedule
The Muhlenberg College School of Continuing Studies provides quality education for adults, offering a supportive learning environment like no other in the area. We take the time to get to know our students, discuss their goals and help them find the best path to success. There is no one-size-fits-all at Muhlenberg. We offer over 25 majors in flexible formats including 15-week courses, 8-week Saturday-only courses and 5-week Accelerated Degree course modules.
Special Topic Courses
ARB 183-90: Special Topic: Arabic for the Community
Language, culture, and the lived reality of the Lehigh Valley’s large and diverse Arabic-speaking community are at the core of this high-beginner Arabic course. With culture at the core, weekly visits with native speakers, regular excursions into the Middle Eastern neighborhoods here, and a community-based service project, students will learn about the gifts that Arabic-speaking immigrants brings as well as their interests and needs within the broader community. Working with a local calligrapher, students will learn to read and create the calligraphy that is one of Arabic’s great gifts to global language and art.
BUS 386-90: Special Topic: Negotiation
This is a comprehensive course in Business Negotiation Theory and Practice. A key element of the pedagogy is self-assessment and examination of the students’ negotiating style and default behaviors. Their current negotiating competencies are also assessed. The Global 5 and Myers Briggs Type Indicator are used to enrich self-awareness and the self-assessment process. The students will negotiate a legal contract, a labor agreement, an agreement with another culture, and nine other business simulations requiring them to understand and use negotiating leverage, use and counter negotiating tactics, and deal with different negotiating styles and strategies.
ENG 388-90: Special Topic: Advanced Speculative Literature
This course is an advanced creative writing workshop in speculative fiction, fiction in which some element goes beyond the real, is supernatural, futuristic, fairytale-esque, and/or weird. Speculative fiction utilizes the tactics of both literary fiction and genres such as horror, fantasy, and science fiction. We will practice seeing deeply and differently, and constructing strange/magical/haunting-yet-convincing worlds with language. Speculative fiction poses fundamental questions about morality and the purpose of human existence. As such, we will explore—through writing speculative stories and workshopping—why and how speculative fiction frequently mirrors—albeit oddly—our deepest insights, desires, hopes, and fears.
Cluster Courses
Cluster Title: The Humanist Turn: The Development of the Renaissance Liberal Intellect
This cluster takes in the cultural and historical world of Renaissance humanism, a world once dynamic in its reappraisal of the human place in the cosmos, and conservative in its love for the humanitas of the ancient and Greeks and Romans, the people they looked to as their mentors in being human. Renaissance humanism often found itself at odds with entrenched institutions and mentalities, asserting its own right to search and disseminate truth, and as well to be an arbiter both of the tools of the free intellect, and of the parameters of the good life. This cluster will look at the rise of Humanism by calling on humanism to speak for itself through its most distinguished representatives in all its ribald glory, in literature, polemics, poetry, music, theater, religion, and philosophy.
ENG 255-80: The Renaissance Imagination
A study of the writing and other popular art forms of Renaissance England, with attention to the newly articulated stress on self and the emergence of Tudor England as a world power. Alternate years. Meets departmental Genealogies approach. This course, in conjunction with HST-219, Renaissance Humanism, satisfies the IL requirement. Meets general academic requirement HU, W, CL and is a linked (IL) course with HST-219, Renaissance Humanism.
HST 219-80: Renaissance Humanism
The course will, through readings, discussions, videos, images, music, etc., introduce the student to the main themes, writers, and intellectual currents in religion, politics, philosophy, culture, aesthetics, economics, and manners, during the period of the Renaissance, c. 1300-1527. The students will be introduced to a wide variety of subject matter, concerned with an arrang of topics and various methods of historical inquiry. When the students have finished the course, they will have an introductory knowledge suitable for pursuing more fully discrete subjects for further study. This course, in conjunction with ENG-225, The Renaissance Imagination, satisfies the IL requirement.