INTRODUCTION & OVERVIEW
This three-credit, in-person course is an introduction to the study of human populations, otherwise known as social demography. Demography is the scientific study of the size, composition, and distribution of human populations, focusing on how fertility, mortality, and migration drive changes in the shape, size, and composition of populations. 
A 'population' might be all of the people in America, the residents of a single city like Minneapolis, MN or Ames, IA, all males in a state prison system, or all of the children in a school district.
Demography is an established field of study, a well-paying and in-demand career track, and home to a vibrant professional association. You can find demographers working in the public sector, including, city, county, state, and the federal government, in all kinds of firms and industries in the private sector, and in domestic and international non-profit organizations. They work locally, nationally, and internationally in areas such as family, including marriage, divorce, childbearing, in illness and death, and the movement of people across borders. They track things like how internal and cross-border migration has changed in the US and abroad and how these changes have impacted the ethnic, cultural, and socioeconomic composition of various populations.
In this course, you'll learn about historical patterns of fertility and how
they vary across countries, how the World Health Organization monitors causes of death, STI prevalence rates and risk factors, changes in marriage, divorce, cohabitation, non-marital births, infant mortality in the US and around the world, immigration during periods of anti-Japanese, Chinese, Italian, Irish, and Mexican sentiment, undocumented immigrant crime rates in the US, the evolution in how the Census Bureau measures race and ethnicity, and the relationship between population growth and the end of the world as previous generations have known it. WHEW! That's a lot!
Along the way, we'll talk about how our rapidly growing world population is producing the largest and most unequal cities in human history, what that means for our future, and why the concept of population density is important.
TEAM-BASED LEARNING (TBL)
In this course, you work in a small team of 5-7 students. You'll take a brief reading assessment at the beginning of class each week, and then work with your team to complete a team quiz, and collaborate on demographic problems (e.g., Why are so many Americans dying of drugs, alcohol, firearms, and cars?), and discuss population concepts and course readings. It makes for a really fun and social way to learn demography and it also means that you're doing a lot less work outside of class. In fact, with the exception of a weekly reading assignment and a bit of review for the midterm and final exams, you'll do all of your 
learning in the three hours we spend together in class each week. I do some lecturing on key concepts and topics and we have weekly class-wide facilitated discussions about things like changes in US immigration policy, traditional and modern fertility control methods such as rhythm, withdrawal, IUD, and sterilization, the history of infectious disease and its impacts on life expectancy, and why the US Census Bureau has such a hard time classifying people into racial and ethnic categories. This means you'll get lots of opportunities to learn what other students think and feel about these complex and challenging issues. When I ask students to tell me about their favorite part of the class, the most common answer is some variant of team/group work. Previous students also like the class discussions, the in-class activities, and the range of topics we cover.
INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES
We spend a lot of time studying human populations from a cross-national and global perspective. We consider how demographic events and processes have varied over time and across countries, and how and why demography is destiny for the eight billion people on earth. You'll learn about the origins of global fertility decline, the reasons why there are so many fewer women in South and East Asia than there should be, and why the countries of sub-Saharan Africa are projected to command so much demographic influence in the future.
This section meets the international perspectives requirements.
COURSE TEXTBOOK
The textbook for this course is Population and Society by Dudley Poston. As far as demography texts go, this one is really accessible and easy to follow. There are lots of examples and it provides a great overview of the foundational population science terms, concepts, and methods. Students rate this book highly and have relatively few complaints. You can pick up a used copy for under $30, so it won't break the bank.
SHOOT ME AN EMAIL IF YOU HAVE QUESTIONS OR WOULD LIKE TO DISCUSS THE COURSE (sdorius@iastate.edu)