A survey of French cinema that will introduce the origins and history of French cinema through the lens of race, ethnicity and multiculturalism. It will familiarize students with the most prominent films, directors, actors, genres, and aesthetic movements from the 1890s, exploring representations of citizenship, race, ethnicity, and identity, as well as the ways discrimination and humanism are approached, and sometimes conflict. The course will thus introduce various ways of representing diversity and inclusion in film and more broadly will enable students to engage in informed and nuanced discussions on race and social diversity, beyond the French or class context.

This seminar will introduce first year students to the field of anthropology through foregrounding Indigenous Ecologies of Knowledges in the combat against biodiversity loss and climate change. Based on the premise that there will be no future for Amazonia and our threatened planet if Indigenous knowledge practices are not fully appreciated and foregrounded, the course will include hands on service projects and a class trip to the Amazon region (when feasible), encouraging students to start their exploration of environmental and anthropological studies at Princeton by attending to the dynamic ecologies in which the rainforest is shaped and cared for.

The department will add a new course to the Junior Seminar Program in Panama, splitting the current course on parasitism into two sequential courses, parasitism and mutualism (mutualism focuses on relationships where both species benefit from their interaction: pollination, seed dispersal, protection). The additional course will expand access to the Junior Seminar Program and allow students to delve more deeply into this pressing and relevant set of questions in the field, while also drawing on the expertise of researchers at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, where the program is based, with the goal of ultimately encouraging more students to become tropical biologists.

PHI 352: The Psychology, Ethics and Epistemology of Stereotypes will be reimagined in both form and content. In a new unit on Intersectionality Theory, students will be encouraged to think through key issues of discrimination across different kinds of identities. In addition, some or all of the lectures will be “flipped,” so that students will watch pre-recorded lectures and come to class ready to lead discussion; in this intervention, Professor Helton will adapt aspects of her pandemic pedagogy to in-person teaching to promote students’ deeper engagement with the material and active learning. 

As part of a broad curricular shift, the Physics Department will build on the significant adjustments to the first year curriculum it has made to further develop the curriculum for second-year prospective physics majors. The department will add two new classes to the second year program that will further smooth the barriers to entry to the major, especially for students who may not have strong pre-college math and physics backgrounds. At the same time, careful decisions regarding reallocating some content to upper level courses will ensure that rigor is not sacrificed and that there is both continuity and flexibility for students from all backgrounds.

A new precept track for COS 126 will engage and challenge students with previous programming experience, thus addressing the problem of how to fully support the more advanced students in this introductory course. While students with little or no prior experience programming will continue to use the current precept content, the more advanced students will enroll in precepts where they are expected to apply their prior programming knowledge in novel and compelling ways, especially through active learning approaches–such as programming a mini computer called the Raspberry Pi platform. 

A new gateway lecture course, part of a broader departmental curriculum redesign, will welcome prospective majors to English by modeling interdisciplinary practices that involve merging archives and methods of different disciplines. The course will survey the varieties of animation across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as well as their critical reception, situating early cinematic experiments with animation in robust period debates about vitalism, mechanism, and the vicissitudes of the human and animal body in modernity. Both a survey of animation and a rigorous introduction to critical reading and critical practice, it will emphasize issues of race and class, racism and labor.

A new program across three Molecular Biology courses (MOL214, MOL320, and MOL350) will coach and guide students in effective teamwork through introducing a structured program to teach leadership, cooperation, and collaboration skills. Based on a critical need to provide training for effective teamwork skills in STEM courses, the program aims to empower all students to identify themselves as leaders and ultimately to increase the diversity and inclusivity of leadership in the STEM field. Instructors will design highly structured team-based assignments through allocating different student roles, and guide and coach students in effective team-building and organization. 

This course will be revised from a small lecture to a large lecture-plus-precept format, with redesigned assessments that better capture the course's aims for students to learn to think back and forth between science, the humanities, and the arts. With precepts in addition to the lectures, students will be able to more effectively practice new skills, to have more hands-on engagement with the material, and to have sustained discussions around the course’s complex topics. The redevelopment will also allow for diversified materials and to incorporate student performance into the course, and will expand its size so that more students can take this popular course.

New class sections will be embedded within this existing course to allow all students to thrive: supporting students entering Princeton with less background knowledge in Physics and Math, the sections will place extra attention on building up foundational skills. This added support will significantly improve students’ ability to handle the rest of the PHY103 material, and thus be prepared for subsequent courses in science and engineering. The additional sections will involve creating a new set of Learning Guides, to give students practice with fundamental skills. 

This new course (first taught in SP22) will be further developed through the addition of field trips and writing workshops which will introduce sophomores and juniors both to research in the field and to key scientific writing skills, specifically through studying the long-term evolution of the earth in contrast to our rapid human perturbations of these environments. Students will collect soil and water samples on a trip to Hawaii during semester break and to communicate their discoveries by developing a scholarly article.

Through a robust program of guest speakers and hands-on experience in this redeveloped course, students will explore the historical role of Indigenous people as a trope in Western and especially American culture, the material effects of such representations, and the longstanding resistance to them among Indigenous people. Students will work with the Indigenous holdings in both Firestone Library and the Princeton Art Museum, visit collections such as the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian in Washington D.C. and Indigenous communities and activist spaces, and also possibly curate an online exhibition from the university’s holdings with the aid of artists and historians from Indigenous communities. We will hear from Indigenous curators, artists, and writers about the legacies of colonialism and explore ways to support Indigenous sovereignty and futurity. 

This new course will offer both a textual study of perception and a practicum, reimagining the forms that learning takes in the classroom. In addition to reading about phenomenological philosophy, students will directly experience perception in embodied forms through carefully observing their own habits of hearing, listening, touch, and movement, documenting those investigations through rigorous description, and sharing those descriptions with the class in sessions of collective inquiry. In a final project, students will use perceptual attention and descriptive practice to produce an original phenomenology of an object, a place, or an event that they have observed over the course of the semester. The course will begin in a smaller seminar version, and then be expanded into a larger lecture course. 

This advanced language course will be redeveloped and reinvigorated to better fit student needs, implement relevant and engaging critical pedagogies, and introduce class activities that provide more opportunities for sustained language practice than the current version of the course. The redevelopment responds to critical student feedback regarding the course as it stands and the prevailing realization that it no longer fully meets student goals and needs. Specifically, the redesigned course will focus on teaching linguistic, pragmatic, and sociocultural meanings in context to help students develop the finely-tuned, highly advanced proficiency in the language required of upper-level departmental courses in literary and cultural studies.