Continuing Education program is learning with a twist

This fall semester, UHCL will host 18 non-credit educational classes offered through the College of Human Science and Humanities’ new Continuing Education (CE) program Friday mornings from 9 a.m.- noon. The fall semester’s schedule runs from the last week in August to the last week in October and will start again in the spring.

During the program, faculty, staff and local community members will prepare presentations on a wide range of academic topics designed to stimulate discussions amongst attendees and create a teaching atmosphere without the stress of final exams.

The Continuing Education program seeks to address the needs of the community as well as UHCL students on campus. After a survey was taken among community members and UHCL graduates, a schedule was created as a direct response to the requests for high-quality programming on a variety of topics.

Many of the subjects will focus on professional development, educational learning and personal interests. The most popular topics, however, may expand further into a discussion and could run several weeks in a row.

CE Program Coordinator Christine Paul, who is also the director of the Foreign Language and English Enhancement program, said she continually receives positive responses from students about how the program successfully promotes dialogue and a proactive atmosphere in the classes.

“There is no experience more fulfilling or more meaningful than to work with CE students because of this extreme desire to learn,” Paul said. “ I was incredibly honored and moved to see them with all their papers spread out on the table, and all the hard work they had done on their own initiative after all. This is a great honor for me to be able to work with them and to see how our classes have added knowledge, skills and meaning to their lives.”

In the latest CE lecture “Victorians and Vampires!” presenters Samuel Gladden, associate dean of college of human science and humanities, and Sarah Costello, assistant professor of art history, collaborated their expertise in literature and art history to discuss the significance of vampires in culture, their metaphorical symbols, Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” and the visual arts of Victorian paintings.

“I think it’s important to recognize how historical context plays a role in how we understand the world,” Costello said. “That you do need to know history, and you need to know literature, and you need to understand art to get the full picture of a topic like vampires and that we’re missing something if we don’t know that history.”

Costello said that’s what the Humanities program tries to do by bringing together literature, history, philosophy and art history to create those full contexts.

“The literature and the art depicting vampires are fascinating; they’re vocative, they’re spooky, they’re mysterious, they’re scary, they do everything that we sort of like about vampire movies and vampire Tv Shows” Costello said. “So, it’s fun for that reason.”

Costello and Gladden presented vampires as metaphors based on how they have emerged in the media.

“I hope students learn why the vampire is a really important cultural figure, including why the vampire appears in certain cultural moments, what that says about a culture’s anxieties, desires, and fears,” Gladden said. “Vampires remind us of the one thing we fear: losing control and it turning into something else.”

Upcoming presentations include speakers Wanalee Romero, director of the First-Year Seminar Program and faculty in humanities and Latina/o and Latin American studies, discussing “The Other Wes Moore,” Rekha Subramanian, associate professor of humanities, speaks on “Incarcerated Humanities: teaching in the prison,” and Michael Brims, assistant professor in communication and digital media studies, presents “Creating High-Quality videos with your phone!”.

The CE program is available for UHCL students and community members of all ages. The one-time membership fee of $26 is waived for currently enrolled (for credit) UHCL students. The cost per course is $18. This price does not include books or class materials. However, the membership does include discounts on specified items such as school supplies, clothing and more at the UHCL bookstore.

To see a complete Friday Morning CE program schedule, visit http://prtl.uhcl.edu/continuing-education/friday-morning-ce. For additional information about attending and/or hosting a session, contact Christine Paul at 281-283-3033 or email paul@uhcl.edu.