Room Enough for Everyone: Advocacy for the underrepresented: Sometimes one person's actions can change the world, or at least one little corner of it. Join Professor Smelcer to learn how your voice matters from someone who became the voice of millions of disenfranchised American minorities in their struggle to change the unjust policies one of the world's most powerful mega-franchises.
So you want to be a writer!: Learn how to write and get published from one of America's most widely published authors and influential literary editors who has edited and published many of the world's greatest writers and icons, including Stephen King, Norman Mailer, Alice Walker, Amiri Baraka, Allen Ginsburg, John Updike, Ray Bradbury, Paul McCartney, Jewel, Jim Morrison, Leonard Nimoy, Marge Piercy, Gary Snyder, Seamus Heaney, Chinua Achebe, James Welch, John Denver, Studs Terkel, Ursula K. Le Guin, Robert Bly, Philip K. Dick, Frank McCourt, and an impressive list of others.
Closing the Deal: The psychology of sales: Join Professor Smelcer, who has taught interpersonal and multicultural communications at colleges and universities for over fifteen years, for a discussion on how to build better interpersonal communications with prospective buyers, how to understand body language, and how to increase sales by avoiding socioeconomic, cultural, and gender stereotypes.
Razing the Standard in Education: Are standardized tests really predictors of learning and achievement? Does our current cookie-cutter model work? How does technology in the classroom affect learning? Is more homework and a longer school year the answer? Should teacher certification require a graduate degree? Join Professor Smelcer, a certified teacher and teacher educator for over twenty years, for a thought-provoking and controversial discussion on how to make better schools.
Pale Blue Planet: Our fragile earth: Join Professor Smelcer, a friend and literary collaborator with the late Pulitzer Prize and Emmy-award winning scientist, Carl Sagan, for a provocative discussion on what ten billion people means to the future environment of our planet, and beyond.
Breaking The Bell Jar: Depression, Suicide, and the Dark Looking Glass: Pharmaceutical advertisements tell us that more than half of all American adults and teens are depressed. Teen suicides are increasing. Join Professor Smelcer for a candid discussion on the topic by someone who has sunk as low as any individual in history has ever gone and returned alive to prove that there is light at the end of the tunnel. Using his own story, John Smelcer proves that life really can begin on the other side of despair.
A better you tomorrow: Making healthy lifestyle changes today: Join John Smelcer, a former top-ranked national athlete, as he shares twenty years of personal experience in competitive sports and physical training education and offers his no-nonsense advice for a healthier life. Start making healthy lifestyle changes.
The United States of Obsession: America's fixation with beauty: Every year, Americans are bombarded with tens of thousands of images of beauty generated by the commercial and advertisement industry in television, cinema, and magazines. How are our self-images defined and distorted by these images? Join cultural anthropologist John Smelcer for an intriguing discussion of the subject.
Mythology 101: Myths and fairy tales for every age: Join world-renown mythologist, John Smelcer, a consulting editor at Parabola magazine and the author of numerous world-wide published and translated books on mythology, including one with Joseph Campbell, on the function of myths and fairy tales in socialization, nationalization, human development, and understanding.A great lecture for children or educators and professionals who work with children.
And now for something entirely different: Poems in one of the world's
rarest language: Hear award-winning poet John Smelcer read and discuss his bilingual poems from The Complete Ahtna Poems, which includes a foreword by Noam Chomsky, the world's most influential linguist and one of the world's foremost cultural intellects. Be part of the human archive of people around the world who have heard the only existing literature of one tiny, disappearing, indigenous American culture.
Return to Babel: Toward a one-world language: The loss of languages around the world is accelerating, driven by an ever-expanding global economy. Why do languages matter? Join world-renown cultural anthropologist and linguist Professor John Smelcer, the editor of two indigenous dictionaries and world-wide translated essays on language diffusion and extinction, for a fascinating discussion on the interconnection between language and culture and how the loss of cultural pluralism affects us all.
Stirring the Melting Pot: Increasing diversity in higher education and the workplace: America has always been proud to point out that it is a “Melting Pot” of race and religion, recently even electing its first African American president. And while demographics support an ever-increasingly diverse population, many groups are still significantly underrepresented in higher education and the workplace. Join cultural intellectual John Smelcer as he shares nearly twenty years experience in diversity and multicultural issues in business and higher education.