Every year we host workshops that focus on some of the best approaches to teaching an intensive six- or ten-week summer course at UC Berkeley. Among the topics discussed include strategies for managing extended summer class time, what to expect from summer student enrollment, the specifics of the American Cultures curriculum requirement, and teaching to issues of racial and economic justice in diverse classrooms.
Find on our Student Projects page a collection of the powerful projects growing from the collaborative understanding and effort developed in UC Berkeley's ACES courses to inspire you to create thought-provoking...
The ongoing national conversation about immigration status lies across a bipartisan political landscape, but statements made by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Acting Director Thomas Homan indicate that enforcement will be significantly increased and specifically target California.
In response, across the U.C. system broadly and at U.C. Berkeley specifically, procedures and recommendations have been shared on best preparing to support all members of our undocumented community. However, understandable questions remain in what support we can...
According to a July 2017 nation-wide report, 60 percent or more of the total cost of attending a college or university comes from expenses other than tuition, and the cost of living for college students has increased by more than 80 percent over the past 40 years. In a high-cost area such as Berkeley, affordability is especially acute and impacts many aspects of students' lives beyond the financial: housing and food insecurity, commute time, mental and emotional health, the ability to pay for course materials, working for money vs. doing research or taking...
Every year we host workshops that focus on some of the best approaches to teaching an intensive six- or ten-week summer course at UC Berkeley.
In 2019, the American Cultures Center partnered with Summer Sessions, the Center for Teaching and Learning, Among the topics discussed included strategies for managing extended summer class time, what to expect from summer student enrollment, the specifics of the American Cultures curriculum requirement, and teaching to issues of racial and economic justice in diverse classrooms
Commitments to the work that connects diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging/justice, anti-racism, anti-Blackness, anti-white supremacy and abolition work, are deep and rich. Each of these terms also have motivations and genealogies. During this event there was a discussion focused on unpacking the relationships between these frameworks and how they help us better understand and situate the work and the questions that they generate. When we think about the relationships that we hope to foster with and between students, how do we use these frameworks to inform our practice?...
Violence and trauma are all around us—fatal shootings by police, sexual violence, family separations, addiction, abuse, displacement of refugees. Often, these situations give rise to individual healing journeys and collective efforts to create change. But the pain and loss embedded in them also have a damaging effect long after the events have passed.
We invite many difficult experiences into our classrooms, historically intimate and distant, often through written and visual text depicting traumatic events and experiences. At the same time, we have many students...
Since 2018, the CDF program has supported instructors in developing creative design assignments, assignments that are intentionally built to support faculty and students in ways that are adaptive, equity-oriented, and foster antiracism. In the CDF Winter Institute participants developed actionable strategies that build antiracist and equity-based education.
In conversation with CDF faculty, staff, and students, the Winter Institute discussed how within the current condition of remote instruction and the devastating effects of the...
Building on the groundwork of the Antiracism Winter Institute, the CDF Program co-sponsored and co-facilitated a follow-up seminar in late April centered on contract grading. The two-day workshop, The Problem(s) with Grading: Making a Case for Contract Grading, invited participants to explore two models of contract grading, Specifications Grading and Labor-based Contract Grading. On the first day, participants engaged in current research that explores how traditional grading methods structure...
