Creating theatre is what this course is all about. Using exhibits at the Buffalo Museum of Science both as inspiration and backdrop, students will function as an artistic production team -- inventing, writing, designing and producing a theatrical event that will be presented at the Science Museum. Science museums around the world are in the forefront of the museum theatre movement. Whether it's a vaudeville routine on the concept of Pi, a musical on the tropical rain forest or a comedy about the Universe, theatre is a powerful way to educate and entertain.

Museum Theatre is an interdisciplinary method of creating effective and entertaining educational experiences in a wide variety of institutions, from historic villages to art museums to science and natural history museums. Though this course will introduce students to the field of arts in education and the role of education in a museum, our main focus will be on Museum Theatre - what it is, how it is being used in museums around the world and how we can put it into practice. Students from all departments and disciplines are welcome. This extraordinary opportunity is made possible by the participation of the Buffalo Museum of Science and funding from the College of Arts and Sciences' Community Linked Interdisciplinary Research.

This course is designed to teach graduate and undergraduate students how to conduct social research on contemporary neighborhood and community social problems. Students will learn how to develop original research questions that are based on limitations identified in current scholarly knowledge on neighborhood dynamics and how to develop a sound "research design" that serves as a vehicle through which the necessary data can be carefully gathered. This course will also train students on how to use cutting-edge techniques to gather neighborhood data. Special emphasis is being placed on multi-methods research. The overall research ambition of this course is to understand and explain the following: what, if anything, do neighborhoods actually do -- why, and how? What drew persons in various neighborhoods to live there? What has caused persons to remain in certain neighborhoods? In order to answer these key questions in ways that respond to some of the major limitations in the current literature, comparisons will be made across various neighborhoods in Amherst and Buffalo, two neighboring, but economically and racially diverse cities.