Course Development

Collaborating for Transformative Change: Anti Racism and Community Engagement

About

Monday, April 5th and Tuesday, April 6th from 11:30a - 2:00p
Keynote speaker: Dr. Tania Mitchell - Tuesday, April 6th, 12noon - 1p

Creative Discovery Fellows (CDF) Support

Resources

To help support creative/digital projects in your courses, the following set of resources are available for immediate implementation.

Teaching in Summer 2025

Summary On May 12, 2025, the American Cultures Center partnered with Berkeley Summer Sessions and the Center for Teaching and Learning to host our annual teaching in summer workshop. Covered topics included:

Inclusive, supportive and effective summer teaching strategies from the Center for Teaching and Learning staff

An overview of student demographics, key academic policies, and the range of resources available to support all students, including visiting and...

Difficult Knowledge, Trauma Informed Pedagogy and Safe-ish Spaces

Event Description

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...

More Than Words: In Conversation with the Language of Racial and Social Justice-Making

About

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...

Course Development Grants

About

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),...

ACES Program Grants

About the ACES Program

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 Course Grants are...

Assignment Design for Social Justice Education

ACES Student Projects

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-...

Faculty Grants

About

The American Cultures Center offers various grants and fellowships throughout the year to current AC instructors as well as faculty interested in creating, revising, or further developing an American Cultures course or an American Cultures Engaged Scholarship course. We also offer grants to faculty interested in learning how to develop, use and incorporate film clips as into their teaching. To learn more about these opportunities, please visit the links below.

How to Have Political Conversations in the Classroom?

Event Description:

Tuesday, September 25th, 2018 marked the largest National Voter Registration Day on record. Over 800,000 people updated their registration or registered to vote for the first time. At the same time that so many Americans are involved in ballot box politics, the country is polarized, partisan and politicized. With sharp political differences seemingly not going away any time soon, how do we support robust discussions in our classrooms? How do we support our students to consider issues from immigration to gun control through deliberation and not shouting...