Fall 2025

This course offers an engaging exploration into the field of museum studies with a particular emphasis on social justice principles and practices. Museums serve as vital institutions in society, shaping narratives, preserving cultural heritage, and reflecting the values of communities. However, traditional museum practices have often perpetuated exclusionary narratives and overlooked marginalized voices. This course examines these issues critically and explores strategies for creating more inclusive and equitable museum spaces.

ACE Component: Students will work with the Flaten Art Museum on an acquisition project to further the development of the Flaten collection in conjunction with their collecting priorities.

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.

Students study topics related to the environment. Topics vary from year to year at the discretion of the instructor. Recent topics offered include Ecosystem Research, Landscape Art, Imaging Environmentalism, and Landscape and Regional Change in the Arctic.

ACE Component: Students will write and share a public narrative of an environmental theme of their choosing.

A capstone seminar for seniors in the major, this course involves intensive study of special topics through reflective writing, student generated research projects, presentations, and a grant proposal. Topics relate to local or regional environmental issues of interest to the students, and it provides participants with opportunities to interact with alumni, government and regulatory agencies, and community groups. The work culminates in a grant proposal where students rely on the expertise gained from their environmental studies courses and work in other majors as applicable.

ACE Component: Students will work with organizations and businesses on developing narratives for future sustainability grant proposals.

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 serve as Election Ambassadors to encourage peers to make a plan to vote. Students will also interview local candidates and collect information from public sources to share with the rest of the campus community.

This course emphasizes critical thinking, conversation, collaboration, and academic habits for the liberal arts. Students learn key skills like locating and evaluating academic sources, as well as reading, reflecting, and responding to texts. Students cultivate their own curiosity while also learning how to engage in community, better understanding their responsibilities to each other.

ACE Component: Students will serve as Election Ambassadors to encourage peers to make a plan to vote. Students will also make displays to share on campus that compare democracies around the world.

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ACE Component: Students will participate as a class in the Service Saturday event.

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ACE Component: TBD

Students analyze mechanical principles in depth as they affect human motion. Topics include study of muscular and skeletal systems, skill analysis, and motion measurement techniques. Students attend lectures plus one three-hour laboratory per week.

ACE Component: Students will offer free gait analysis or functional fitness measurements to the greater St. Olaf community (faculty, staff, and students).

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ACE Component: Students will work with the community on fear of falling research.

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 greater 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.

Students explore how Somali diaspora communities have made important visible and audible contributions to the cultural landscape of Minnesota, while studying and learning to perform the interconnected arts of Somali poetry, music, dance, and theater. Interactions with local Somali musicians and community leaders, a visit to the Somali mosque, and collaboratively working to discern and support the needs of a community partner organization that serves Somali families provides students with hands-on experience in community engagement.

ACE component: TBD

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: TBD

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 conduct STEM demo days with high school students visiting St. Olaf through the TRIO program.

This course investigates entry control policy, integration and citizenship policy, and the political activities of migrants in the wealthy democracies. Alternative arguments emphasizing the role of economic interests, sovereignty, national identity, and gender are introduced. Opportunities for academic civic engagement projects are included in the course.

ACE Component: Students will be doing interviews and survey with alumni who are immigrants and exploring the college as “by and for” immigrants.

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 development 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 do diverse cultural contexts influence early development? Course format is primarily discussion-based and includes community-based experiential learning projects. Offered annually. Also counts toward applied linguistics concentration.

ACE Component: Students will work on projects to support Growing Up Healthy, a local youth and family serving organization that works on early childhood education with Latine and Somali families.

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.

Students gain the skills necessary to conduct and critically evaluate quantitative research. Students learn the underlying theoretical assumptions and orientations of quantitative research, including research design, sampling techniques, strategies for data collection, and approaches to analysis. Students gain practice in data analysis by conducting are search project and using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS), a standard in sociology.

ACE Component: Students will work on projects with an on campus office or department.

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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.

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ACE Component: Students will participate as a class in the Service Saturday event.