Elon University welcomed five new interdisciplinary minors this fall for undergraduate students, including Islamic studies, food studies, engineering design, sustainable enterprises and museum studies and public history.
All minors are available this fall and are aimed to foster interdisciplinary studies, ranging from foreign languages to nutrition. Each minor can be applied to many interests and majors offered.
Islamic Studies
When Waseem Kasim, interim coordinator of the Islamic studies minor and professor of history at Elon, first moved to St. Louis, Missouri, from Ghana, one of the first things he did was find the local mosque. Kasim said he was immediately embraced and welcomed to the community. The friend who drove him, unfamiliar with Islam, was shocked at how quickly he was accepted.
“He was surprised that somebody I had never met anywhere, how this person welcomed me into their mosque. … It was like I had known him for a very long time,” Kasim said. “These are the many examples that I will be teaching in this course to show how Muslims are often connected and express themselves as people who are global and integrated.”
The minor is connected to many majors, including political science, religion and world language.
Professor of religious studies Ariela Marcus-Sells, the minor’s coordinator, is on sabbatical until August 2023 for research. Karim is filling in her position until she returns.
According to Karim, Marcus-Sells originally came up with the idea for the Islamic studies minor, which focuses on global interconnection.
“We thought that Islam would be a wonderful way to teach Elon students the idea of what it means to be global,” Karim said.
Karim wants students engaging in the minor to understand how, even though all Muslims read the same Quran, they live such different experiences around the world.
“The ways that they express that Islam is different. Everybody expresses it in a different way,” Karim said. “So what it means to be Muslim is different according to people's experiences, but the basics are the same. So that is just the conversation that brought it into being.”
Food Studies
Svetlana Nepocatych, food studies coordinator and professor of exercise science, has been working on the creation of this minor since 2017. She worked with other professors that make up the Food Studies Minor Advisory Board to create a pathway for students interested in working with food.
“Why not to put that in a little bit more structured way where students can be guided through that process and have a minor in food studies, especially for students who are interested in food studies or related fields nutrition as for their curricula, so that might be beneficial for them to have that minor to have that exposure and think, whether they go on in management or marketing or nutrition,” Nepocatych said.
The minor has three components: nutrition, food and behavior, which span across many majors, including exercise science, public health, foreign languages, sociology and anthropology.
“The mission was to provide the students with the means to deeply analyze food across the arts and humanities, natural sciences and social sciences, as well as education, communication and business,” Nepocatych said.
According to Nepocatych, students that are interested in the minor are spread across multiple departments, stressing its interdisciplinary nature.
“I think it's important to understand some of these issues, underlying issues and also leading them to the change in food systems and food justice,” Nepocatych said.
Engineering Design
When thinking about what students would most benefit from learning about engineering if they were not majoring in it, engineering professor Richard Blackmon landed on engineering design.
“Where we teach students the design process, how to work in teams, how to communicate technical concepts so that they can build solutions to problems,” Blackmon said.
The minor concentrates on design course sequence, where students take on challenges in engineering and design; computing, where students take programming classes to gain technical skills; and mathematics and engineering principles, where students take calculus and an engineering course.
Four years ago, Blackmon said he saw the opportunity to “bridge disciplines” and started campaigning for this minor.
Blackmon thinks students from all majors could benefit from an engineering design minor.
“I think it's for anybody who is interested in finding solutions to problems or designing something for their specific disciplines,” Blackmon said.
Sustainable Enterprises
The sustainable enterprises minor is a joint initiative with the College of Arts and Sciences and the Love School of Business, but it also includes policy and sociology classes, according to Scott Hayward, management professor and co-coordinator of the minor.
Almost 10 years ago, according to Hayward, former management professor Susan Manring introduced the idea of this minor, and passed it to Hayward and Ryan Kirk, co-coordinator of the minor, almost two years ago when she retired.
“There's whole careers that are being developed out there for students with this kind of knowledge,” Hayward said. “And so I think she was the one who recognized that and responded to that.”
Hayward said there is a lot of student interest in the minor, but the development of the program goes beyond current engagement.
“It's really a response to student interests, but also there's the number of jobs out there is growing and budgets are growing, and so there are companies that clearly recognize that this is an issue for them, and CEOs are starting to make it a priority,” Hayward said. “So we want to be able to help our students to not only get those jobs, but just to help make that positive change in the world.”
Kirk said students are interested in sustainability not only now but have been previously, and now they have a good foundation for a network.
“We have a number of students from a whole variety of majors that are now working in corporate sustainability or as sustainability officers,” Kirk said. “So a lot of our alumni have crafted careers in this before we could effectively support them, so we're excited to tap that alumni network and really connect them a little more.”
Museum Studies and Public History
Just three years after art history joined the Department of History and Geography, the museum studies and public history minor is making its debut.
According to Evan Gatti, the minor’s coordinator and professor of art history, one of the first joint meetings of this new department was about the creation of this minor.
The department brought on Amanda Kleintop, professor of history, specifically for the creation of this minor. Kleintop comes to Elon from Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, where she coordinated a public history minor.
“Because the minor is so interdisciplinary, it’ll offer a wide range of topics and opportunities for students to engage with,” Kleintop wrote in a statement to Elon News Network. “As MSP minors, students will explore how history continues to affect us today and learn more about careers in museums, archives, and more.”
According to Kleintop, public history encompasses the diverse array of ways history is applied to issues in the modern world.
“We interact with ideas about the past all the time, and those ideas shape and are shaped by our modern identities and politics,” Kleintop wrote.
Typically, public historians work with historians, professionals in museums and archives and other community members to fully understand and interpret history, according to Kleintop.
“I’m really excited about the experiential learning opportunities at Elon so students in the minor can participate in this collaborative work first-hand,” Kleintop wrote.