(SitNews) Ketchikan, Alaska - In response to popular demand, the University of Alaska Southeast’s Ketchikan campus announced a major revitalization of its community education program.

“I arrived here last July,” says Campus Director Anthony Mansueto. “As I began doing individual meetings with key leaders around Ketchikan, one of the desires people expressed most consistently was that the campus offer a wider range of personal enrichment courses – courses which would allow people to explore questions of meaning and value that they lacked the time to engage earlier in life, to learn a new language, or to act on long standing interests such as painting or cooking, meditation or metalwork."

Mansueto said, "We are starting small, with courses that play to our strengths and which don’t duplicate offerings elsewhere in the community, but I think that for a small campus it is actually an impressive portfolio.”

Community Education offerings this Spring include:

• What Does It All Mean, Anyway?  Exploring the Big Questions From Different Cultural Perspectives
• Oil Painting
• The Art of Cooking
• Conversational Chinese
• Sitting Meditation
• Knife Making

While most of these classes are noncredit, What Does it All Mean? can also be taken for variable (1-3) credit as HUM 193. Sitting Meditation is a one credit class (PE 103).

Campus Director Anthony Mansueto also pointed out that many of the University of Alaska Southeast Ketchikan's credit courses offered as part of the liberal education core curriculum or as upper division courses in the university’s Bachelor of Liberal Arts program can double as personal enrichment courses.  “For a small campus like ours to be able to offer students the opportunity to study Fundamentals of Archeology (ANTH 211) with a teacher like Priscilla Schulte, who has thirty years experience doing field work throughout Southeast Alaska, is really quite extraordinary. Priscilla is a dedicated teacher with a profound understanding of this region and its cultures and ecosystems.”

Registration is easy. First look up the courses that interest you on our schedule page: http://www.uas.alaska.edu/schedule/spring/index.html.   Then follow the instructions on the university’s online registration page:  http://www.uas.alaska.edu/schedule/spring/reg-info.html . If you have any questions or can’t find the course you want, call the campus information desk at 228-4511.

The campus is closed through January 3, but will be open to answer your questions after that.

Source of News: 

University of Alaska Southeast Ketchikan
www.ketch.alaska.edu

The University of Alaska Southeast is a public liberal arts university dedicated to student learning enhanced by faculty scholarship, undergraduate research and creative activities, community engagement, and the cultures and environment of Southeast Alaska. The university integrates fully the community college mission, offering a liberal education transfer curriculum, training for high skill, high wage, high demand jobs to meet the workforce needs of Alaska’s growing economy, and a variety of upper division and graduate concentrations, including a signature Bachelor of Liberal Arts program.

SitNews ©2012
Stories In The News
Ketchikan, Alaska

Articles & photographs that appear in SitNews may be protected by copyright and may not be reprinted without written permission from and payment of any required fees to the proper sources.