Education is ultimately about student learning. Sometimes we lose sight of this basic fact.
If there’s any benefit to the current COVID/Zoom world of higher ed, it’s that faculty have been forced to re-think instruction and student learning. And one of the key adjustments has been to reconsider the classroom space itself for a more engaged, personal, and meaningful experience for all.
Senior Seminar is inherently a community environment. This class is designed for students to learn and work alongside other history majors. At a maximum of twelve participants per course section, this is not a class where you can hide. In HIS 4100 you will rely on others for help and support when you need it, step up and contribute regularly, and grow as a historian with your peers.
We have two choices, then: either feel overwhelmed by the research and paper writing process, or work together to reach our goals and showcase the culmination of your history training. The latter choice will help make HIS 4100 a memorable experience for all!
THE FIFA WORLD CUP
The topic for this semester’s Senior Seminar is the FIFA World Cup. Soccer is a rich subject for research. As the field of sports history continues to grow, functioning as a subset of cultural history and studies, scholarship has begun to show how soccer and other sports hold significant value in the lives of diverse peoples and across disparate societies. “The beautiful game” is the most popular sport in the world, and the FIFA World Cup the signature event—watched by more people than the Summer Olympics or any sporting event in the U.S. (Super Bowl, NBA Finals, NCAA March Madness, etc.)
In this course, we will examine how soccer shapes constructions of identity—namely national, racial, ethnic, gender—and challenges popular perceptions of them, sometimes reshaping them with the passage of time.
Our focus will be primarily on the men’s World Cup with the tournament in Qatar scheduled for November and December of 2022, but we will also examine the history of the women’s tournament as we look forward to Australia/New Zealand 2023.
