FSEM Courses

History is the study of what happened—the paths, both chosen and unchosen, taken by people in the past.  But what about what didn’t happen—the paths not taken, the choices not made, the outcomes that never came to be?  Historians refer to this topic of debate as alternate history or counterfactual history.

This class delves into a different kind of war—not one of guns and bombs but a centuries-old battle over what history should be taught and commemorated. While I’ve always been passionate about studying history, it wasn’t until my years teaching high school history in Southeast Dallas that I began questioning the content mandated for our students. Why, for instance, did my students need to know about WWI Medal of Honor recipient Alvin York but not about Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street”?

Do video games make us violent or do violent people gravitate to video games? Can video games make us smarter or are they making our minds weaker? Those questions make up only a small piece of what psychologists have to say about how video games impact our behavior.

Climate change isn’t just happening “out there,” but right here in the Commonwealth as well. This class will focus on communities in Virginia that are being impacted by sea-level rise and other changes associated with a warming world. How are they experiencing climate change and how are they responding?

All kids play, right? It seems spontaneous, often unstructured, and even though we say “kids need time to play,” we don’t pay a lot of attention to what kids DO when they play.