Lower Dauphin High School

Course Descriptions:

World History

            The purpose of the my World History course is to use relevant factual knowledge taken from primary and secondary sources in combination with higher-order thinking skills to acquire a greater understanding of the development of global processes, from ancient times to the present day.  The course emphasizes the character of change and continuity in world structures and their impacts.  Furthermore this study will evaluate the interchange of major societies in the global community and the results of that interplay.  Throughout the duration of the course the instruction lends itself to chronological periodization as well as thematic perspective.

Popular Culture

Popular culture has been variously dismissed as mere trivia: ―just entertainment. It has been condemned as propaganda, a tool of mass deception. Its consumers have been dubbed cultural dupes, fashion victims, and couch potatoes. In this course we will take a step back from simply consuming popular culture, or judging it, to investigate how different cultural forms communicate ideas about the world. We approach popular culture as a body of widely shared and contested beliefs, practices, and material objects that presents ordinary social life’s extraordinary possibilities: the popular accents the potentially remarkable dimensions of ordinary practices, such as style, literature, and music. In this sense, popular culture mirrors real life, but it is a distorted and selective reflection that presents familiar realities in their most spectacular forms. Popular culture is the place where fantasies are given form; it is also where social norms gain much of their power. As such different cultures and subcultures produce different sorts of popular.  In this course we will take these cultural differences seriously while also considering global, mass cultural phenomena. We will explore a range of media and genres including television, film, advertising, music, books, magazines, video games, and the internet to struggle with the significance of popular culture. We will learn to assess the value of different critiques of popular culture. Further, we will explore various methods that investigate both what popular culture does to people and what people do with popular culture.

All content and course assignments can be found on my Canvas Page.