AboutEvery year, the American Cultures Center partners with Summer Sessions and key campus partners to facilitate a workshop for all summer sessions instructors on best practices for teaching in the summer. We invite you to join us for the 2025 Teaching in Summer Workshop at UC Berkeley, co-hosted by the American Cultures Center, the Center for Teaching and Learning, and Summer...
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.
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...
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 has 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...
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...
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.
On February 26, 2018, in response to the increased and specifically targeted immigration enforcement in California, across the U.C. system broadly and at U.C. Berkeley specifically, procedures and recommendations were shared on best preparing to support all members of our...
The 2025-26 application cycle for the American Cultures Course Development Grants is now open.
The American Cultures Course Development Grants awards up to $1,500 to enhance an existing American Cultures course or the design of a new course that has not been offered previously. Funding can be requested in three categories:
Supplies and expenses, which might include photocopying and printing, books and supplies Student hourly help to assist with, for example, digitizing materials (e.g., slides, maps, manuscripts, photographs),...
Launched in January 2010 as a partnership between the American Cultures Center and the Public Service Center, the American Cultures Engaged Scholarship (ACES) Program aims to transform how faculty’s community-engaged scholarship is valued, to enhance learning for students through a combination of teaching and practice, and to create new knowledge that has an impact both in the community and the academy.
ACES courses represent corners of campus that highlights the intent of the AC requirement, while also deepening the meaning of that intent through a combination of multi-disciplinary research and praxis, the development of students and community partners as co-educators, mentoring opportunities, and increased and sustained accessibility of information.
