COPLACDigital is a Mellon Foundation-funded initiative to develop distance mentoring digital liberal arts courses across the Council of Public Liberal Arts Colleges consortium. Based on the highly successful Century America seminar, COPLACDigital brings together faculty, students, archivists, and instructional technologists to collaborate in the public creation of knowledge. »

COPLAC courses focuses on conducting digital liberal arts classes on multiple campuses at once by a team of teachers through distance mentoring.

About This COPLAC Course: Cultural Crossroads

Our project comes as a result of coursework from the 2017 Fall semester COPLAC course titles Cultural Crossroads led by Alvis Dunn from the University of North Carolina Asheville and Leland Turner from Midwestern State University. The course is described as such:

 Migration is a constant in human history and laden with cultural implications. In virtually any locale the movement in of people has occurred.  Those migrations are not always at the forefront of the historical memory of a place.  In this course students will investigate migration into the community or communities surrounding their campus.  Once an in-migration group is identified the students will work to discover the cultural contributions brought to bear on their communities. This movement may have happened at any time in the community’s history.  By thinking creatively and broadly students will find groups in their regions and identify the contributions of those one-time newcomers to the life and culture in those places. Students are asked to consider how migrant culture broadly defined may have influenced music, culinary traditions, labor relations, craft and art, agriculture, architecture, or religion. By bringing to life these stories the students’ crossroads projects will rescue forgotten local history from obscurity.

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