AC Teaching Award

2021 AC Excellence in Teaching Award


"This class opened up my mind and asked me to challenge everything I had ever considered at face value. I am humbled by the course and I also feel like I am a better communicator, listener, and thinker because of it."

- UC Berkeley Student in AC course, Spring 2021

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...

American Cultures Excellence in Teaching Award

About

The American Cultures Excellence in Teaching Award is intended to recognize individual faculty members ’ exemplary teaching in the American Cultures curriculum. Instructors are recognized for their inspiring and sustained commitment to creating a learning space that holds the challenges and opportunities that teaching AC content requires. Such challenges and opportunities include the multivocality of America’s diverse social fabric; the scales of geographic assemblage that support political and economic ways of being; the often contested nature of the political nation; the...

FAQs: AC Excellence in Teaching Award

Stage One FAQ Q: Can I nominate someone for the 'AC Excellence Teaching Award' who's already received the 'AC Innovation in Teaching Award?'

The AC Excellence Teaching Award and the 'AC Innovation in Teaching Award' are essentially the same award (the Award's name was changed in 2018). You may nominate any American Cultures instructor who's taught within the last three years whose name does not appear on this list.

2020 AC Excellence in Teaching Award

About

The AC Excellence in Teaching Award is intended to recognize individual faculty’s exemplary teaching in the American Cultures curriculum. Instructors are recognized for their inspiring and sustained commitment to creating a learning space able to hold the multiple challenges and opportunities that teaching AC content requires.

2022 AC Excellence in Teaching Award

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,...

2018 Teaching Award Recipients

Photo of AC and Music Instructor T. Carlis Roberts smiling in formal suit attireT. CARLIS ROBERTS
Music 137AC
“Music of the Civil Rights Era”

The decades of the mid-20th century were an explosion of political unrest, social change, and cultural innovation. While numerous anti-colonial struggles rocked the world, disenfranchised populations in the...

Ronald T. Takaki Teaching Award

About

Professor Ronald T. Takaki, ‘didn’t just teach about race and ethnicity. He helped redefine it.’ Instrumental to the field of Ethnic Studies, and central in the creation of the AC curriculum. In working with the family of the late Professor Takaki, the American Cultures Teaching Award committee assigns the 'Ronald T. Takaki Teaching Award' to an applicant of the American Cultures Teaching Award that merits special recognition....

2020 AC Prizes Virtual Ceremony

The AC curriculum has been the fulcrum of critical diversity work on this campus for a long time. Inspired by the struggles and dreams of the Third World Liberation Front fifty years ago this year, and created in the late 1980s, the energy for the AC requirement was formed not on campus but in our surrounding communities. In 1984 in San Francisco and Oakland, longshore workers were leading the Bay Area fight against South African apartheid. For decades the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) had stood against apartheid, refusing to touch South African cargo. Although the...