The AC classroom is unique and uniquely UC Berkeley - in an Anthropology course, you may have majors from Engineering, Data Science, Geography, and Public Health, a first-semester freshman, and a final semester transfer student. The myriad of personal backgrounds and disciplinary optics on the world collide and bump into each other in the AC classroom. A huge challenge and an opportunity for conversation on shared and different struggles and visions for the future. Faculty who teach AC courses seem to relish the particularities of the AC classroom, exciting intellectual curiosity, centering inclusivity and justice-making, and building the collective critical thinking muscle to face and make our futures.
0:00 Welcome - Oliver O'Reilly, Interim Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education
6:39 Jo Alvarado, 2022 AC Student Prize Recipient, UC Berkeley Undergraduate
8:26 Professor Brandi Summers, 2022 AC Excellence in Teaching Award Recipient,
AC Faculty, Department of Geography
11:22 Lauren Adams, 2022 AC Student Prize Recipient, UC Berkeley Undergraduate
Brandi Summers
Geography 70AC, "The Urban Experience: Race, Class, Gender and the American City"
Professor Brandi Summers' AC course Geography 70AC, "The Urban Experience: Race, Class, Gender and the American City" shares the philosophy that “the diverse teaching tools and strategies created in the class are part of my commitment to engaged pedagogy, which has developed based on the presumption that classrooms are spaces that hold promise for radical change and growth within and outside the classroom. As an engaged teacher, what I’m really asking is that both me and my students take risks, to see ourselves and our lives as part of the critical process of inquiry; to be vulnerable enough to ask hard questions, and to see the world from different, and sometimes contradictory, points of view.” In the words of one of Professor Summers' nominee, “Brandi’s teaching has been a critical resource for the university, especially as it has sought to understand and respond to the challenges of racial disparities over the past two years.”