Fall 2024

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.

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. Offered annually. Also counts toward media studies concentration.

ACE Component: TBD

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. The course includes readings, case study analysis, in-class exercises and group projects. Offered each semester.

ACE Component: Students will work in small groups to develop marketing plans for clients. Potential clients: MN Somali Museum, MOR Golf & Utility, Hot Spot Music, LifeStyle Extracts

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.

This course introduces students to film and media production. The course rotates topics to accommodate various modes of production such as documentary, experimental, and narrative filmmaking. Students view and study film, learn the creative and technical skills associated with the course’s focus, as well as participate in their own film and media productions.

ACE Component: Students will connect with the Archives–students will share one project with them for archiving purposes. They will also be producing a podcast series for Clean River Partners about the watershed.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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

Students examine feminist critiques of aspects of contemporary culture that shape women’s lives, such as conventional morality, science, education, art, medicine, law, religion, and marriage. Students critically examine philosophical views that underlie these institutions, including views of human nature, gender, rationality, knowledge, morality, justice, and the value of autonomy. Alternative feminist views that promote feminist aims are explored and evaluated.

ACE component: Students work on social action projects that address topics discussed in the course.

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 assisted with peer-to-peer voter mobilization efforts and conducting exit polling on Election Day.

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 working with the college’s current Lilly Endowment Nourishing Vocation grant project to generate research and tools for congregational communities participating in the project to learn more about “Who is My Neighbor?”.

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 whirlwind introduction comprehensively examines foundational principles, theoretical approaches, and major areas of study within psychology. Acting as skeptical scientists, students gain another lens on the human experience by which they can better understand themselves and others. Students see psychology as a science and challenge “common sense” explanations about how people function. This gateway course captures the essence of the liberal arts, applying to almost any career choice.

ACE Component: Students will make a presentation about a topic in psychology to local youth in Northfield Public Schools.

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.

Students examine the diverse elements that have shaped the cultures of U.S. Hispanics and Latinx through an exploration of political, social, economic, religious, and artistic topics. They develop critical analysis through reading, discussion, and written and/or oral projects. Students examine processes of identity and inclusion, and its connections to historical narratives. Students analyze materials through an intersectional lens of race, colorism, language, generational differences, class, gender, and sexuality.

ACE Component: TBD

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.

TBD

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.