January Term 2026

This seminar integrates the liberal arts with the experience of work and the search for a vocation or career. Course content will include both an off-campus internship and on-campus class sessions that connect academic theories/analyses of work with their particular internship experience. Students will also consider and articulate the value of the liberal arts for their pursuit of a creative, productive, and satisfying professional life. Offered during Interim.

ACE Component: Students complete internships at various sites in non-profit and for-profit healthcare and wellness settings.

Students study how music can engage and advocate for those on the margins of society, inspiring social justice movements. Analyzing historical and current events, class members design a musical project that can empower a people, group or organization in addressing moral and social problems such as racial inequality, rural or urban violence, or prison reform. A Christian normative framework, along with religious and secular alternatives, help guide the ethics implications pertaining to this subject.

ACE Component: TBD

This introductory course provides students a broad overview of public health focusing on concepts relating to health promotion, disease prevention and epidemiology. Additionally, students learn about the core public health values, functions, population health assessment and intervention and the socio-economic, behavioral, biological and environmental determinants of health. Students engage in oral and written communication to critically think and analyze public health issues.

ACE Component: Students will write advocacy letters to elected officials on a public health related issue.

This course integrates on-campus classroom learning with off-campus internships in community organizations in Northfield. Readings, classroom discussions, and assignments highlight theoretical perspectives, knowledge, and methods that psychologists use to address social problems and community needs through research, practice, and policy. Throughout the month, on-site experiences and observations provide opportunities for the application of previous coursework, while guided reflection supports exploration of personal and vocational development.

ACE Component: TBD

Rapid global aging represents the next great challenge that students in a broad range of majors must be prepared to address. Students will consider contemporary and enduring questions about aging from multidisciplinary perspectives to explore issues, methods, and theories surrounding what life will be like as people grow older. Students will interact with older adults in the community to understand aging in context

ACE Component: TBD

This course helps students explore the connections between society and their own lives. Students answer challenging questions such as “Do we have a ‘human nature’?,” “Why does social inequality exist?,” “What is race?,” and “How do societies change?” In answering these questions students learn to develop a sociological imagination. In doing so they review the various research methods and theories that form the sociological tradition. This course is open to first-year students or students in certain accredited programs.

ACE Component: The students will be identifying, interviewing, and requesting archival materials from social justice-oriented urban agriculture related organizations in the Twin Cities metropolitan area.

Students explore service to human beings as a profession, both vocation and avocation. Who needs help? Who helps? Where? How? What motivates people to help? Using the liberal arts as a foundation for helping people, students study opportunities in areas such as health care, social services, ministry, youth work, and the arts. The class includes lectures, discussions, speakers, and field visits.

ACE Component: During the January Term program, students will participate in a direct service projects in conjunction with local community partners to experience and analyze first-hand larger systemic issues that face the island, its people, and its environment.

Students investigate community-based approaches to environmental sustainability during this January Term course taught at the Asian Rural Institute (ARI) in northern Japan. Students explore how ARI builds on local Japanese resources to support its mission of training rural leaders from developing countries in organic agricultural practices. Activities include field trips, discussions, and symposia with Japanese students, as well as hands-on participation in the daily food life at ARI.

ACE Component: Students participated in daily food life routines to sustain operations at ARI.

In this course, students examine how schools and communities in the Twin Cities interact to provide support and developmental opportunities for school-age children. Through lectures, readings, discussions, field trips, and in-school and co-curricular placements, students gain an understanding and awareness of how race, class, ethnicity, national origin, and gender shape the complex character of urban youth and schools. Students spend one week in orientation activities on campus and two weeks in the Twin Cities. The last week of January Term is spent back on campus discussing the experience.

ACE Component: During the time in the Twin Cities, St. Olaf students participate as tutors and classroom assistants during the school day and then assist in various after-school and community programs.

This course combines experiential learning with ethical reflection. It offers networking and possible job shadowing opportunities in the areas of policy-making, advocacy, campaigning, federal and local government, journalism, advocacy, law, among others. Students will be matched with a number of St. Olaf alumni and professionals in Washington, D.C. and be able to talk with them about their jobs and perhaps shadow them at their workplace. The jobs-shadowing and career-related experiences will be paired with course material that will help you learn about the practice of governance, politics as a vocation, political efficacy and the ethical dimensions of leadership and public service.

ACE Component: Students will participate in a service activity in the DC metro area with a local organization.