Courses

Students can take two of the courses listed below

SABR 2930 Communications and Culture
Dr. Debra van Tuyll
dvantuyl@aug.edu

Students will learn about how Ireland’s history and culture have shaped its mass communications systems, and the same for the United States. Through comparative study, they will gain deeper insight into how culture and history affect communications systems. Students will read about and discuss the common history of western communications that gives American and Irish communications media similar qualities, yet has also created significant differences in news judgment, entertainment qualities, and production. Students will become daily media consumers and will participate in a writers conference to learn more about how culture affects the creation and construction of content. Students will engage daily with communications media from the U.S. and Ireland and will use their interactions with these mediums as the basis of class discussions and daily journal entries that examine the relationship of culture and history to communications media. Further, each student will be assigned a media type and will make a presentation during the final leg of the trip on how that medium functions in the United States (reading on this should be completed prior to leaving) and what they have observed about the similarities and differences of the same media type in Ireland. Thispresentation will become the basis of a researched essay of 1,500 to 2,000 words that offers a formal and well-researched comparison of the medium type as it functions in the U.S. and in Ireland. Essays must address the historical and cultural bases for those differences and similarities.

SABR 4930 Directed Research in Comparative
Communications and Culture
Dr. Debra van Tuyll
dvantuyl@aug.edu

This course is intended for students who have completed COMC 2010 and are interested in further study of media systems in a comparative manner. Students will participate in the class meetings and discussions of SABR 2010, and will be expected to enrich these discussions with the results of their researches. This research project will be at the direction of the instructor and will be tailored to the studens particular interest students will take advantage of the opportunity provided by the study abroad trip to develop an individualized research project that will compare some aspect of Irish mass communications systems to American mass communications systems. They will work with the instructor to devise an appropriate topic and to determine the best way of constructing the final product that presents the results of the research. Students may create a research paper as their final product, but other options, such as a documentary film or poster presentation (supplemented with a briefer paper) suitable for presentation at an academic conference are among the other possibilities.

SABR 4930 Travel Blogging
Dr. Debra van Tuyll
dvantuyl@aug.edu

Students in the Travel Blogging class will learn the basics of travel photography and writing and will produce both copy and photography for a public blog about their trip to Ireland. Students may register for the freelance writing workshop at the Listowel Writers conference to supplement course content. They will write stories, take photographs, and create a blog that contains both visual and written content.

SABR 2930/4930 War and Revolution: The Struggle for
Ireland, 796-1923
Dr. Hubert van Tuyll
hvantuyl@aug.edu

Students will learn about the role of conflict in Irish history through travel, reading, study, and research. The course opens with the arrival of the Vikings and ends with the fratricidal Fenian bloodshed. Students will conclude the course by submission of written work depending on whether they are electing lower or upper level credit.

SABR 2930 Fundamentals of Human Communications
Professor Rick Davis
rdavis@aug.edu

Students will learn the principles of communications as taught at this university. In addition, however, with the cooperation of the Public Speaking Institute of Ireland, they will attend available public talks, public lectures, seminars, conferences, and speeches. These opportunities will deepen and enrich course content and offer students practical experience in intercultural communication, an important component of the introductory course.

SABR 4930 Contemporary Irish Theatre
Professor Rick Davis
rdavis@aug.edu

Students will come to understand Irish theatre by studying the plays of contemporary Irish playwrights Beckett, McDonough, McPherson for example and by sampling the rich array of plays in performance whenever possible. Goals include studying theme, plot, characterization as well as understanding how language, movement, voice create dynamic theatre. To these ends, we will visit the Abbey Theatre and other performance venues as available. We will also attend the Listowel Writers Week Festival.

SABR 2930 Writing Popular Song Lyrics
Professor Tony Kellman
akellman@aug.edu

This course will introduce students to the craft elements involved in writing popular song lyrics, through a systematic study of contemporary Irish and American song. They will also, as a result, see how culture shapes the style, subject matter, and voice in songwriting.

SABR 4930 Poetry and Short Story Writing
Professor Tony Kellman
akellman@aug.edu

An advanced exploration in the craft of composing poems and short stories. Students will investigate relationships between form and content in the selected works of modern and contemporary Irish poets and fiction writers such as W.B. Yeats, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, Eavan Boland, and James Joyce. Students will also write their own poems and stories.