Mankind has been making art for at least 100,000 years. From painted rock to carved bone, tiny sculptures to monumental stele, prehistoric art gives clues to human creativity.

The Smith College Chinese Character Literacy Project site is part of the Chinese Character Literacy Project which has been funded by the Five College Blended Learning for Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences and supported by the Five College Deans and a multi-year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This site serves as an online character learning platform which showcases the character videos made by students and instructors in the beginning Chinese courses (CHI110 and CHI111) at Smith College (and with the hope to collaborate with other institutions in the future).

Social Problems: Continuity and Change is a realistic but motivating look at the many issues that are facing our society today. As this book’s subtitle, Continuity and Change, implies, social problems are persistent, but they have also improved in the past and can be improved in the present and future, provided that our nation has the wisdom and will to address them.

Table of Contents:
Chapter 1: Understanding Social Problems
Chapter 2: Poverty
Chapter 3: Racial and Ethnic Inequality
Chapter 4: Gender Inequality
Chapter 5: Sexual Orientation and Inequality
Chapter 6: Aging and Ageism
Chapter 7: Alcohol and Other Drugs
Chapter 8: Crime and Criminal Justice
Chapter 9: Sexual Behavior
Chapter 10: The Changing Family
Chapter 11: Schools and Education
Chapter 12: Work and the Economy
Chapter 13: Health and Health Care
Chapter 14: Urban and Rural Problems
Chapter 15: Population and the Environment
Chapter 16: War and Terrorism

The founders of sociology in the United States wanted to make a difference. A central aim of the sociologists of the Chicago school was to use sociological knowledge to achieve social reform. A related aim of sociologists like Jane Addams, W.E.B. DuBois, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett and others since was to use sociological knowledge to understand and alleviate gender, racial, and class inequality.

Steve Barkan’s Sociology: Understanding and Changing the Social World makes sociology relevant for today’s students by balancing traditional coverage with a fresh approach that takes them back to sociology’s American roots in the use of sociological knowledge for social reform.

Print on demand edition available here: https://www.uncpress.org/book/9781469659282/sociology/

Sons et lettres provides a set of classroom materials to train students to hear and produce the sounds of French and to recognize the regular spellings used to represent those sounds in print. The materials are inspired by a desire to help students feel more confident about their French pronunciation and more at home saying the many French words, familiar and unfamiliar, which they encounter in their studies, in French media and in their travels. In our experience, students are not given sufficient preparation to successfully decipher and pronounce French words. These materials are intended to fill that gap and to clear away the confusion that English speakers often feel when they see French words with seemingly mysterious combinations of letters.

For both, the teacher and student alike, this Spanish I book is intended for a first-year, college Elementary Spanish I level. It also attempts to make the study of a language in this case, Spanish, more than another required subject. Eliminating the artificial limitation of the traditional textbook, offers the teacher and the student the ability to tailor the content to their own needs. Also, this book tries to show the value of learning a second language from a high quality pedagogical criteria at a low cost solution.

Features include:

Clearly defined objectives in communication, culture, and grammar are given at the start of each chapter, and summary exercises.
Many activities are provided in a practical context in which to practice.
Concise grammar explanations address the level of language acquisition for non-major language students. Carefully chosen communicative goals focus on low to intermediate ACTFL oral proficiency skills.
The book recycles material on a regular basis to encourage the student to see the value of continual learning progression rather than testability.

This book has five chapters with three stories per chapter for a total of 15 units to work with. Each chapter has a small cultural research assignment with extra credit opportunities. It also contains hyperlinks to websites about vacations, food, and more. It is meant to be a supplement to in-class instruction. If you are new to TPRS, check out the methodology before jumping in. Feel free to contact me with any questions that you may have at jared.reynolds@yc.edu. I have taken care to make this my own work. All images are sited and contain a license that allows them to be used freely in this book. All written material is original.

A compilation of brief video clips in which native speakers of Spanish from various locations throughout Latin America and Spain demonstrate various language tasks.

The purpose of Speaking of Culture is to define culture and many other concepts associated with it. My hope is that the readings in this book will help you to better understand the breadth of the concept of culture and provide you with a vocabulary for discussing it more articulately.

Culture is one of those broad concepts that is used widely, although somewhat imprecisely, in everyday English. It also cuts across many academic disciplines, and this book draws on many of them. It touches, for instance, on anthropology, biology, history, mythology, political science, psychology, and sociology.

The SpinTX video archive provides a convenient web interface to search hundreds of short video clips from the Spanish in Texas Corpus. The collection includes hundreds of video clips culled from interviews of native and heritage speakers of Spanish living in Texas. Each video is accompanied by synchronized closed captions and a transcript that has been annotated with thematic, grammatical, functional and metalinguistic information. All materials available on the site can be freely used, copied, and distributed under a Creative Commons license.

This is a text that covers the standard topics in a sophomore-level course in discrete mathematics: logic, sets, proof techniques, basic number theory, functions, relations, and elementary combinatorics, with an emphasis on motivation. It explains and clarifies the unwritten conventions in mathematics, and guides the students through a detailed discussion on how a proof is revised from its draft to a final polished form. Hands-on exercises help students understand a concept soon after learning it. The text adopts a spiral approach: many topics are revisited multiple times, sometimes from a different perspective or at a higher level of complexity. The goal is to slowly develop students’ problem-solving and writing skills.

Spunti: Italiano elementare 1 is a unique program for Italian language learning, authored by the Italian faculty of Muhlenberg College (Pennsylvania, USA). Spunti 1 provides fully elaborated course materials for first-semester Italian that college instructors can use and adapt, or students can use on their own. Spunti 1 consists of: 1) an online Pressbook with grammar explanations, cultural material, vocabulary, videos, and self-correcting interactive exercises; 2) printable packets of in-class activities; and 3) complete lesson plans for one semester. Users are free to use Spunti 1 in whole or in part, and are free to adapt it to their needs. Spunti: Italiano elementare 2 and Spunti: Italiano intermedio are the companion texts for second-, third- and fourth-semester Italian, and are still under development.

From audience analysis to giving a presentation, Stand up, Speak out: The Practice and Ethics of Public Speaking will guide students through the speech making process. The authors focus on the process of speech making because they have created this book to be a user-friendly guide to creating, researching, and presenting public speeches. While both classic and current academic research in public speaking guide this book, the authors believe that a new textbook in public speaking should first, and foremost, be a practical book that helps students prepare and deliver a variety of different types of speeches — and that is the primary goal of this book.With practicality in mind, the authors developed, Stand up, Speak out: The Practice and Ethics of Public Speaking, as a streamlined public speaking textbook. Many public speaking textbooks today contain over twenty different chapters, which is often impossible to cover in a ten-week quarter or a sixteen-week semester; this textbook is eighteen unique chapters. The fifteen chapters are divided into four clear units of information: introduction to public speaking, speech preparation, speech creation, and speech presentation.

Our book represents a unique opportunity for three generations of scholars to reflect upon and collectively consider their decades’ long research, and the meaning of that research to both the broader society and to students of contemporary politics. Nicholas Lovrich served as a graduate school mentor to Brent Steel, and Brent in turn mentored Christopher A. Simon as an undergraduate and guided him to study with Lovrich. Steel and Lovrich have collaborated on research for over 30 years, while Simon has frequently collaborated with Steel and Lovrich for nearly 20 years.

Statistical thinking is a way of understanding a complex world by describing it in relatively simple terms that nonetheless capture essential aspects of its structure, and that also provide us some idea of how uncertain we are about our knowledge. The foundations of statistical thinking come primarily from mathematics and statistics, but also from computer science, psychology, and other fields of study.

This is an open-access lab manual for a historical geology lab focused on student observations. We have uploaded this book to Lulu Press so that you may have them print a copy for you. The cost is $19.67 plus shipping. We believe in free access to educational materials, therefore we collect no revenue from Lulu. The price you pay is simply the cost Lulu charges to print the materials for you. You can also download a printable PDF version to print on your own.

After completing my Arabic minor, I wanted to continue my studies but encountered few resources to do so independently. Given my six years of Arabic experience, I decided to write a free, online, Intermediate Arabic textbook through my Open Educational Resources internship. I chose to write a textbook because I saw the value in Arabic materials from the perspective of a student, as I can relate to the struggles of learning Arabic. As so, I structured my project to act as a digital pocket guide for students to use when studying or traveling abroad. The textbook currently contains five units broken down into sections of vocabulary, grammar, cultural dialogues written by Arab students on campus, study abroad advice, and practice activities.