What if the titles of a course’s lectures were based on actual headlines? This semester, the Prague site has done just that in our newly-launched course “History in the Headlines” and some examples of the lecture titles include:Modern Life in an Old City: Is Prague Becoming a Disneyland?
Donald Trump and his Czech Mini-me
How will Brexit Change Central Europe?
The course meets once a week and is taught by 14 members of our faculty, each an expert on the topic they present. Lecturers include the former Czech minister of foreign affairs, leaders of the Vevet Revolution and the dissident movement against Communism, an architect at Prague Castle, a film historian and a jazz musician. Seminars are overseen by the NYU Prague Director Jiri Pehe and Assistant Director of Academics Vanda Thorne.
The original, highly-successful precursor of the class was developed in New York by Timothy Naftali in the Department of History (CAS). In New York, the goal of the course was “to enable students to curate knowledgeably the flood of news spewing from their media 24/7.”
Eliot Bernstein from the Russian and Slavic Studies Department at CAS came up with the idea that the New York syllabus could be adapted by Prague. According to Vanda Thorne, Assistant Director of NYU Prague, “We are following the NYU model, but additioanlly we are aware that our students have much less of a context to draw upon when they read articles about Czech or European news. They didn’t grow up here, they might not know the history of the region. We try to give them the historical and cultural context so they will can better understand whether the media is reflecting and interpreting things accurately.”
Students read and discuss academic articles in addition to the articles that the headlines come from. Does the article reflect reality? How do media report on hot topics – and how could they affect the opinions of the reader?
The 2-credit class is open to students of all majors and is designed to increase NYU’s affordibility as well as help students have a deeper understanding of the country and region in which they are studying. Students who haven’t signed up for the class are welcome to audit.
This is a hot topic in the era of fake news. Other NYU global sites are considering their own versions of this project, which would create space for interesting inter-cultural analyses and discussions – not to mention more interesting headlines.