Welcome to Course Happenings!

Professor Bailey welcomes you to his university blog.
Professor Bailey welcomes you to his university blog.

Greetings Everyone,

I want to welcome you to my Course Happenings Blog! This is the place where all of my students, colleagues, staff, and administrators can check out some of the latest activities and events associated with my major courses at ECU. In particular, I will highlight my undergraduate courses in Anthropology and my graduate courses in Public Health.

Since I have a joint appointment in two departments (Anthropology & Public Health), I felt the need to start this blog to showcase some of the special activities associated with my courses.

My undergraduate courses are:

  • Cultural Anthropology – ANTH 2200
  • Medical Anthropology – ANTH 3252
  • Professional Development Anthropology – ANTH 4501
  • Race and Ethnic Relations: Discovering New Solutions – ANTH 2250

My graduate courses are:

    • Ethnic Health & Health Disparities – MPH 6008
    • Global Public Health – MPH 6007
    • African American Health – MPH 6005
    • Capstone Experience in Ethnic Health & Health Disparities – MPH 6009

So these are the major courses that I will be highlighting on my new blog — COURSE HAPPENINGS!!

Finally feel free to share your ideals on my blog because I want to hear from everyone who has similar interests.

FALL 2023 SEMESTER – I am BACK with UPDATES OF COURSES!

Wow….I cannot believe that it has been over a year since my last Course Happenings entry! Where has the time gone? Since I have another university Blog – my ERHD (Ethnic and Rural Health Disparities), I tend to forget this blog which focuses primarily on my Undergraduate courses in Anthropology. Nonetheless, I am BACK on a regular basis to provide you an update of my courses!

Now that registration is starting for the Spring 2024 courses, I can share with you the courses that I am scheduled to teach. They are:

  • ANTH 3252 Medical Anthropology
  • MPH 6008 Ethnic Health & Health Disparities

My undergraduate – ANTH 3252 Medical Anthropology course explores your interests in the field of Medical Anthropology. In this ASYNCHRONOUS ONLINE course, you will accomplish the following:

  • You will learn the fundamental principles and key concepts of the field of medical anthropology.
  • You will have the opportunity to develop an applied medical anthropological project or proposal of your choice.
  • You will participate in online discussion board sessions with your classmates.
  • You will view online videos that illustrate how medical anthropology can help solve public health and medical issues.
  • You will learn how medical anthropologists work with other health related and medical experts.

My graduate – MPH 6008 Ethnic Health and Health Disparities course explores your interests in ethnic health and health disparity issues in eastern North Carolina, the state of North Carolina, and the United States. This is an intense graduate level course which dives deep into the biopsychosociocultural and public health factors related to ethnic and rural health disparities in our country.

So that’s a brief UPDATE of my courses for the SPRING 2024. Currently, for the Fall 2023 semester, I am having fun teaching: (1) ANTH 2250 Race and Ethnic Relations: Discovering New Solutions, (2) ANTH 3352 A Medical Anthropology Approach to Global Health Today, and (3) MPH 6007 Global Public Health.

I hope you join me in one of my future classes and by the way, all of my classes are ONLINE!!

UPDATE – COVID-19 IMPACT ON MY ECU CLASSES & BEGINNING AGAIN IN 2022

Yes, I am BACK!!! It is the first week of classes in January 2022 and I have returned to my COURSE HAPPENINGS Blog! It has been almost 2 YEARS since my last entry in my Course Happenings Blog. Talk about a devastating impact that COVID-19 pandemic has not only affected our daily lives completely but it has also tremendously changed how our classes are taught!

My last entry was in 2020 and I was talking about my Race and Ethnic Relations class. I was so excited to get my students together in class and talking within their groups on a wide array of issues associated with race and ethnic relations. Then, in the early portion of the semester, COVID-19 hit the university and we could no longer meet in our lecture room. I therefore had to place all of our lectures and assignments completely online. For me, it was not a major adjustment simply because I have been teaching online classes here at ECU since 2008 yet for my students, it was a bigger adjustment. Fortunately, that semester (Spring 2020), my students made the necessary adjustments and they actually did an outstanding job by the end of the semester! I was very delighted that they worked through the challenges of staying connected with our issues and ended up completing excellent end-of-the-semester projects.

So here are the classes that I taught since Spring 2020:

  1. MPH 6005 African American Health – Summer 2020
  2. MPH 6009 Capstone Experience in Ethnic Health & Health Disparities – Summer 2020
  3. MPH 6007 Global Public Health – Fall 2020
  4. ANTH 2200 Cultural Anthropology – Fall 2020
  5. MPH 6008 Ethnic Health & Health Disparities – Spring 2021
  6. ANTH 2250 Race and Ethnic Relations – Spring 2021
  7. ANTH 3252 Medical Anthropology – Spring 2021
  8. MPH 6005 African American Health – Summer 2021
  9. MPH 6009 Capstone Experience in Ethnic Health & Health Disparities – Summer 2021
  10. MPH 6007 Global Public Health – Fall 2021
  11. ANTH 2250 Race and Ethnic Relations – Fall 2021

Now for this SPRING 2022 semester, I am teaching the following courses (all online)

  1. ANTH 2250 Race and Ethnic Relations – Spring 2022
  2. ANTH 3252 Medical Anthropology – Spring 2022
  3. MPH 6008 Ethnic Health & Health Disparities – Spring 2022

Interestingly, now that all of my classes are online I am having actually more fun teaching in a different way. Of course, I miss actually interacting with my students and hearing their responses in the lecture hall. You cannot duplicate that experience! Yet the adjustments and adaptation to completely online has allowed many of my students to share MORE information on a variety of issues than if we were in the lecture hall. In fact, I have incorporated a number of new online tools and strategies to make each class MORE INTERACTIVE! I can tell that my students really like these new tools and strategies because it is unexpected and it catches them by surprise. Therefore, I welcome another semester of classes with my students (undergraduate and graduate) and look forward to their discussion board comments, interactions with their colleagues through discussion boards, and their final projects and solutions!!

SPRING 2020 – Race and Ethnic Relations: Discovering New Solutions

It’s February already! We are fully into the new SPRING 2020 semester and I am very delighted to be teaching my regular spring course – Race and Ethnic Relations: Discovering New Solutions! This is still a relatively new class that I started to teach in 2017 for the Department of Anthropology and it continues to be one of the most engaging, challenging, interactive, and culturally-sensitive undergraduate class throughout the year.

Not surprisingly, my students in this class are taking on many of these controversial issues directly and willing to discuss, debate and solve these race and ethnic relations now – not later. That’s what I am finding as truly a delight and joy to see today’s students wanting to confront these sensitive issues directly and have a professional discussion with their peers about these issues.

Here is a photo of my class:

 

 

Here is the 2020 Race and Ethnic Relations class.

 

On average, I normally have about 20 – 25 students in this class. It’s not easy to fill a class like this up to high enrollments simply because of the topic so many students shy aware from this course. Yet those students who do take this class, they are usually ready to discuss and debate these culturally and politically-sensitive topics with me and their peers.

The major course objectives of this class are:

  1.  Review the major concepts and theories associated with race and ethnic relations
  2. Highlight the major race and ethnic relations issues locally in eastern North Carolina, each region of the United States, and the United States in general.
  3. Review anthropological techniques to collect cultural data on specific issues on race and ethnic relations.
  4. Provide a framework for students to develop individual and/or group race and ethnic relations solutions.

 

It’s only February and my class has already covered a number of culturally and politically-sensitive topics as they relate to race and ethnic relations. I can’t wait to see what type of SOLUTIONS that they will present at the end of the class. STAY TUNED!

Fall 2019 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY CLASS

Wow..time flies by fast. The academic year of 2019-2020 is underway and my Cultural Anthropology class has already taken their first fieldwork trip outside with me.

I am VERY EXCITED to start another academic year and it looks like my new Cultural Anthropology class has a wide variety of majors and students from the various years (Freshman, Sophomores, Juniors, and Seniors) . As always, I try to make this Cultural Anthropology class a bit different than the typical undergraduate Cultural Anthropology class by finding new ways to have the topics within our class to relate directly to the issues that today’s students are interested.

For example, here are the major course objectives for this class:

  1. To provide a comprehensive introduction to the discipline of Cultural Anthropology — its fundamental principles and key concepts.
  2. To encourage awareness of cultural and human diversity.
  3. To help all students make sense of our increasingly interconnected world and to find their particular place in it.
  4. To help students to find out how they can make a difference in our local and global communities.

Check out a few photos of my brand new class!

 Cultural Anthro 1

 Cultural Anthro 2

 Cultural Anthro Selfie 1

 Cultural Anthro Selfie 2

Honors Seminar Class – Spring 2019 – Improving Race Relations at ECU

Well, this is my Final seminar course that I am teaching for Honors College. The actual title of this Honors Seminar course was – “ECU Global Explosion: Developing and Organizing a Campus-wide Event.” HRNS 2011.  Initially, students in this Honors seminar were supposed to organize and develop a campus wide event for ECU students yet as the semester progressed, my class felt a bit overwhelmed with this major task for the end of the semester.  We therefore changed the end goal of this class and they focused on IMPROVING RACE RELATIONS AT ECU.

Overall, this change of direction of the course worked out very well primarily because the students recognized that this was the bigger issue — race relations at ECU.  Since they had some difficulty relating to other students who were different than them on campus, it was in their best interest to develop new strategies for all ECU students find new ways to improve race relations on campus.

All the students had to complete an individual report and present it to the class at the end of the semester. We also had the director of Honors College present as well as the Dean of Harriott College of Arts & Sciences present during the class presentations.

Not surprisingly, all the Honor students did an excellent job in their presentations and completed their reports as requested. In addition, each one of their reports were collated into one large class report so that we could document their suggestions into one large document. This large class document will be later presented to the top level administrators at ECU.

Here is a photo of my last Honors Seminar class at ECU!

Honors Seminar students

Spring 2019 – Race & Ethnic Relations: Discovering New Solutions

Wow, this Spring semester is flying by and this is the first time that I am able to highlight one of my Spring courses — Race and Ethnic Relations: Discovering New Solutions. This is the second time in which I am teaching this new course that I feel needs to be taught in our Anthropology department and our College of Arts & Sciences due to the fact that there is no other course selection that lectures, investigates and discusses issues of race and ethnic relations to the extent that I cover in this class.

Basically, the course objectives are:

1.  Review the major concepts and theories associated with race and ethnic relations.

2.  Highlight the major race and ethnic relations issues locally in eastern North Carolina, each region of the United States, and the United States in general.

3.  Review anthropological techniques to collect cultural data on specific issues on race and ethnic relations.

4.  Provide a framework for students to develop individual and/or group race and ethnic relations solutions.

From the start, this class has been a bit more hesitant to engage deeply with the topics of race and ethnic relations yet once I started providing other avenues of discussion, the students interacted and engaged more on several culturally-sensitive topics. Oftentimes, I would divide the classroom up into small groups to examine a most relevant topic and then present their issues to the class.

Check out a few photos.

 

Here is my race and ethnic relations class.

Fall 2018 Cultural Anthropology and Ethnic Studies Class

Well, here we are again. Another Fall Semester and new academic year (2018 – 2019) has started! I can’t believe how the summer went by so fast and now we are starting a brand new year!!

Normally, I would have posted about my fall classes earlier yet we were interrupted by Hurricane Florence during the week of September 10 thru 19th!! Classes were cancelled and students had to leave the university entirely!

Now, we are back in the flow of the semester and my COMBINED class – Intro to Cultural Anthropology and Intro to Ethnic Studies — is coming along very well. The major course objectives are:

  1. To provide a comprehensive introduction to the discipline of Cultural Anthropology — its fundamental principles and key concepts.
  2. To encourage awareness of cultural and human diversity.
  3. To help all students make sense of our increasingly interconnected world and to find their particular place in it.
  4. To help students to find out how they can make a difference in our local and global communities.

Check out a few photos of my great class!

 Cultural Anth & Ethnic Studies – Photo 1

 Cultural Anth & Ethnic Studies – Photo 2

 Class Selfie

Summer 2018 New Course – Global Public Health Study Abroad Experience – MPH 6017

Well, it finally happened! My new study abroad course was approved and I took my first set of graduate public health students to Vienna, Austria and London, England. This course was a new course that I have been working on for the past 3 years. It finally was placed into the ECU system and enough students enrolled in which I could make plans to travel abroad during the summer session.

The first part of this Summer I course was online in which my colleague in Public Health and I presented our lectures to the students. I lectured about the history of Austrian and England health care systems and my colleague lectured about the basic components of epidemiology. After the students completed their weekly assignments and took their Midterm exam, they were ready to travel abroad with me.

Here were the major course objectives:

  1. Examine and experience the countries of Austria and England.
  2. Evaluate and critique the major public health systems and policies of Austria and England.
  3. Develop a global public health initiative for a specific public health issue in either Austria or England.

For 2 weeks, my graduate students (Rebecca, LaKeisha, and Kami) and I visited and conducted public health fieldwork in the neighborhoods of Vienna, Austria and London, England. Wow!! What a great cultural experience and opportunity to observe, interact, engage and learn from local residents about their public health and medical systems!

Kami, Rebecca, LaKeisha and I in Vienna

Rebecca, LaKeisha, Kami and I in London

 

I highly RECOMMEND all students (graduate and undergraduate) to take the opportunity to travel abroad while they are still here at ECU! It will be well worth all the time and energy. The most important take away from my global public health study abroad experience is that my GRADUATE STUDENTS now see public health and medicine in a completely different way now!

 

2018 New Course – Race and Ethnic Relations: Discovering New Solutions

Visiting a Seminar Class

It’s a brand new semester and I am teaching a brand new course entitled, “Race and Ethnic Relations: Discovering New Solutions.” Although it took a while for this course to be approved, I felt that it was necessary to establish an undergraduate course like this one simply because there was nothing in our Anthropology department as well as in Harriott College of Arts & Sciences which would address the issues of race and ethnic relations in the manner of which that I wanted to do.

In general, the major course objectives are:

  1. To examine, discuss, and debate the major concepts and theories asssociated with race and ethnic relations.
  2. To apply anthropological techniques to collect cultural data on specific issues on race and ethnic relations.
  3. Develop individual and/or group race and ethnic relations solutions.

Thus, the primary focus of this course is for students to find new ways to resolve all types of race and ethnic relation and to DISCOVER new solutions!!

Check out a couple of photos of my first class on Race and Ethnic Relations here at ECU!

 

Here is a portion of my new Race and Ethnic Relations Class