The University of Alabama’s Honors College has introduced a new course that allows students to examine controversial topics of a popular book in an effort to integrate new students into the college.

Victoria Sheesley, a junior in the honors college, played a role in the development of the course along with members of Honors Year One, a student-directed program in the honors college aimed to help new students get involved.

“In the spring, Honors Year One set out with the idea that we would like to engage all of the freshmen in a common book experience via a book that they would read with their residential communities,” Sheesley said.

This idea created a University Honors College course called the Common Book Experience.

“The Honors College is offering many sections of UH 120 this semester, and several of these focus on ‘The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,’” Heather Humann, an English instructor at the University, said.

The book by Rebecca Skloot, tells the true story of a poor tobacco farmer whose cells were taken without her knowledge and used as a vital tool for developing medicine in the 1950s.

“Speaking for myself, I can say that I’m very excited about the opportunity to teach the well-known book,” Humann said.

The Common Book Experience courses encourage student discussion and focus on the collision between ethics, race and medicine, while also discussing controversial topics of human rights along with bioethics.

“It gives students a different learning experience where they are teaching one another, opposed to a teacher doing most of the talking,” Winston Brooks, a junior majoring in civil engineering, said.

Sheesley said the class was originally designed for freshmen but has recently been restructured to incorporate students of all years because of a lack of publicity.

“The idea never really developed they way we would have liked,” Sheesley said. “So this past fall [Honors Year One] decided to create classes for the spring that were faculty-led that would engage the honors college in the book so we would have higher participation in the book club events already arranged for the spring.”

The idea to use the “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” was presented last spring as a primary option for the honors college book club.

“We liked this option because the book lends itself to discussion from a variety of different perspectives,” Sheesley said. “We decided to look for professors around the campus to lead classes on the book and not just instructors from the English department.”

Because of this, the instructors for Common Book Experience come from many departments that range from history to biology.

“In addition to the classes we developed for this book, there are still a few other classes that do not utilize this book and instead are based on the interest of the professor,” Sheesley said. “These classes are all under the UH 120 umbrella ,which are designed to be exploratory topics for students.”

The class is worth one credit hour and is available to all Honors College students.

Although the class sounds helpful, Brooks said he probably wouldn’t take the course due to the reading material.

“It seems like a good idea, but I’m not much of a reader,” Brooks said.