This proposal is to support a semester-long faculty workshop to develop new courses at Clemson University to meet a new Science, Technology, and Society general education requirement. The outcome of the project will be 20 new course proposals, to serve Clemson students starting in 2005, all of whom will be required to take a course addressing interactions among the natural sciences, technology, and society. Twenty core faculty and interested additional faculty members will participate in a seminar that will meet every other week during fall semester 2004. Five scholars from outside Clemson University will be invited to meet with the seminar and also give public lectures. In other seminar meetings participants will discuss readings providing an overview of the field of Science, Technology, and Society. The intellectual merit of the proposed project comes from scholarly interaction of the faculty who will be teaching STS courses with a rigorous orientation to the field. Faculty from departments all across campus will participate, so the seminar itself will be an exciting interdisciplinary dialog. This interaction will improve the intellectual quality of the STS courses these faculty offer to Clemson students starting in the fall of 2005. As a result of developing new courses on the Clemson University campus, the most important broader impact of this project will come through the students who take the courses developed by the faculty who participate. The students in these new courses will learn to ask informed questions and think critically about how science and technology interact with society. They will be better citizens and better able to make thoughtful choices about the use of science and technology in their professions and their lives.
