Fall 2022 ACE Courses

Americans have long understood their diverse identities through stories. This course analyzes familiar and less familiar narratives that have formed and re-formed identity in the context of American culture. Students examine literary works, histories, cultural artifacts, and media, paying attention to the forms and themes through which the American experience is constructed.

ACE Component: Students will be partaking in the biennial Elections Engagement project, helping to register voters, volunteer for political campaigns, serve as election judges, and participate in other election related activities of their choosing.

The dynamic, multidimensional character of American culture originates in the journeys and encounters of groups defined by race/ethnicity and factors such as gender, religion, sexual orientation, and social class. As they respond to opportunities, challenges, and conflicts, groups construct meaning and produce art and literature. Using the tools of social science and artistic and literary studies, students examine resulting changes and how institutions, ideas, and policies shape (and are shaped by) these processes.

ACE Component: Students will be partaking in the biennial Elections Engagement project, helping to register voters, volunteer for political campaigns, serve as election judges, and participate in other election related activities of their choosing.

The software we design has real effects in people’s lives. This course explores the ethical and social considerations inherent in computer-based systems, develops skills in thinking about those considerations and in collecting data to determine their effects, and expands students’ abilities to integrate these issues and skills into software development procedures, largely through an extensive team analysis of a “live” software project. Coursework uses extended case studies and surveys topics such as professional and ethical responsibilities, risk, liability, intellectual property, privacy, and computer crime.

ACE component:  Students work in small groups to analyze the ethical implications of a socio-technical system for outside clients, both nonprofit and for-profit. The students conduct an initial informational interview. Students then give clients a list of possible issues to analyze. Client and team choose several issues, collect data, and prepare a final presentation of their analysis, complete with suggested solutions and supporting material.

Solving complex environmental problems and generating creative work requires the integration and application of multiple ways of knowing. Team projects connected to community needs bring the department’s three areas of emphasis into conversation within an experiential learning framework. The course attends to the nature of environmental inquiry and creativity, one’s own perspectives and values, and how to use one’s knowledge and skills to contribute in personal, civic and work related roles.

ACE Component: In cooperation with a community partner teams of students will participate in a project fulfilling an identified local need, such as research, planning and execute a community event, inventorying and documenting various features of natural environments, etc.

How can we learn to think more critically and communicate our ideas more effectively by developing our identities as writers? And in so doing, how can we develop our individual and civic identities as activists as well? Course texts and activities will theorize and question the extent to which social factors, such as race, class, gender, age, and ability, impact identity, and the ways in which those identities shape our perspectives, opinions, and actions. This section is writing intensive and focuses intentionally on the writing process. Projects emphasize expressing opinion, analyzing course texts, researching and analyzing how a movement or event presents itself, and responding to opinion. The final activity is to reflect, using words and images, on influences that inform your identity and the person you imagine becoming. We will talk about writing not just as a skill, but as a form of empowerment and agency.

ACE Component: Students will develop and plan an activism project with a community they identify as belonging to.

FYS 120N Nordic Romantic Science

Instructor: Troy W. Smith

What was natural philosophy? How was it that the sciences and the humanities were once viewed as a shared endeavor, but are now treated as separate? In the Romantic period (ca. 1750-1850), natural scientists were still considered philosophers, and poets and novelists like Mary Shelley first asked critical social and ethical questions about the consequences of scientific breakthroughs (such as in the novel Frankenstein, which we will read). The focal point of this course will be the Danish physicist Hans Christian Ørsted, who discovered electromagnetism in 1820, and mentored the other Hans Christian, the fairytale author Andersen.

ACE Component: After improving their academic reading, writing, and research skills, students, for their class project, will work together to create a display about Ørsted at the Bakken Museum in Minneapolis.

Students study in-depth the physiology of exercise, covering cardiovascular and muscular adaptions to exercise and factors affecting performance, including body composition, environmental influences, training implications across gender and age, and the assessment of fitness. The course includes a laboratory component.

ACE Component: Students will offer free baseline measurements to the great St. Olaf community (faculty, staff, and students). During the process, participants will receive not only the measurements, but information about the measurement testing and suggestions for how to improve their health based on their individual measurements.

This course provides a comprehensive research opportunity, including an introduction to relevant background material, technical instruction, identification of a meaningful project, and data collection. The topic is determined by the faculty member in charge of the course and may relate to his/her research interests.

ACE Component: Students will work on delivering Matter of Balance curriculum in Northfield community.

In an age of information overload, stories can rise above the noise. Effective organizational storytelling helps to engage an intended community on a meaningful and emotional level. Students will explore the craft of storytelling and study a variety of media (analogue and digital) on which the story can be delivered. The course will include case study analysis, group work and client-based projects.

ACE Component: Students will work in small groups to develop storytelling materials (print and digital) for clients.

This course introduces the key elements of marketing principles. Topics include evaluating market opportunities; buyer behavior; market segmentation, targeting, and positioning; market strategy and planning; development of marketing mix; and marketing organization and control. Students are challenged to apply the principles learned in class to current and real world marketing issues.

ACE Component: Students will work in small groups to develop marketing plans for clients.

Public health nursing is informed by community needs and environmental factors focusing on health promotion and disease prevention. Through project management, students address the health needs of groups and communities utilizing group communication processes, teamwork, and collaboration. Students focus on utilizing community resources, identifying risk factors, and evaluating the impact on population health as related to current epidemiological trends.

ACE Component: Students prepare presentations on puberty and adolescent concerns for 5th and 6th graders at Medford Public Schools. In addition, students help coordinate and facilitate county employee health fairs in Rice and Steele Counties.

Physics 232, the third course in the three-semester calculus-based sequence, explores special relativity, waves and oscillations, and the quantum mechanics of light and matter. Students attend lectures and one 2.5-hour laboratory per week.

ACE component: Students will create take-and-go STEM kits for youth in conjunction with the Northfield Public Library.

Political parties have traditionally served to organize the American electoral process but not to govern. Is their role changing? This course examines party organization, candidate recruitment, campaign strategies, the role of the media, election financing, and citizen participation.

ACE Component: Students will help lead voter mobilization efforts on campus, serve as election judges during the general election, or conduct exit polling.

Individuals, communities, and organizations have found ways to address even the most egregious state abuses of human rights and other injustices. Using comparative analysis, this course considers cases and theories of nonviolent personal and political resistance and the factors that appear to contribute to people taking action and to successful responses. Students research and analyze cases of their choosing in light of the literature.

ACE Component: Students work on social action projects that address an injustice with various community partners or for the general public good.

This seminar examines the amazing, transformational journey from birth to age three. Topics include prenatal development, birth and the newborn, physical and motor development, caregiver relationships, infant mental health, cognition, and language development. Students explore questions such as: how long-lasting are the effects of early experiences? How is early development similar and how is it different across diverse cultural contexts? How do nature and nurture interact to influence development? How can research findings help infants?

ACE Component: Students will create interactive kits and educational videos to be used in the Growing Up Healthy program.

Social work majors study the methods and skills of social work practice, particularly intercultural communication. They describe strengths and problems of diverse individuals and families; frame goals and plans for change utilizing the planned change process and the systems perspective; and use ethical decision-making, informed by the scientific method, grounded in the liberal arts, and concerned with social justice. Students demonstrate learning in recorded role playing and have an academic civic engagement experience.

ACE Component: The story-partners project pairs students with an older community members at FiftyNorth. Students meet with their partner 3+ times throughout the course of the semester for the specific purpose of encouraging their partners to tell stories about their lives. Students practice what they have learned through role-playing in class such as active listening and asking clarifying questions, which helps to build their one-on-one conversation and interviewing skills. The volunteer participants gain an enthusiastic listener, validation for their experiences, and the opportunity to reflect upon their lives.

Increasingly, we ask ourselves, “What can I do about climate change?” Maybe we try to recycle or donate to environmental causes, but we wonder if such actions make a difference. Maybe what we’re really wondering is this: how do we live meaningfully in the time of climate change? How do we confront climate anxiety, find joy, and be good ancestors to future generations? To address these questions, we’ll discuss environmental media from diverse leaders of the emerging climate renaissance. These voices will take us from the heights of the Arctic to worlds below the earth, through forests that communicate with each other, and into the food cultures of the future. In the process, we’ll do civically engaged environmental work with our local Northfield community and dispel the myths that make writing difficult in favor of evidence-based essay strategies. Ultimately, we’ll work together to find words and ideas to live responsibly in community–with each other and the more-than-human world.

ACE Component: Students will assist with the annual Watershed Wide CleanUP day of the Cannon River with Clean Water Partners. Students will also participate in citizen science wildlife counts.