CAT 124

CAT 124 courses bring together an interdisciplinary faculty to expound on culture, art, and technology themes, examining different topics each quarter, through distinct experiential learning opportunities. These classes fulfill the experiential learning requirement and are open to students in all departments and fields. Preauthorization requests for CAT 124 can be submitted through the Enrollment Authorization System and do not require a justification or any supporting documentation.

Summer Session II 2025 Courses

CAT 124: Community in Action: Civic Engagement and Practice

Bill Robertson Geibel

Assistant Teaching Professor, CAT

Tuesday/Thursday 11:00 a.m.-1:50 p.m.

This experiential learning course empowers students to engage with their local communities—no matter where they are in the world. Through a scaffolded series of assignments, students will explore the foundations of ethical community engagement, map local assets and needs, and design a personalized project that contributes to community building or social impact. Combining critical reflection with hands-on practice, this course equips students with the tools to become active, thoughtful civic participants while fostering a deeper understanding of the importance of community and an appreciation for their own role in creating positive change.

Course seminars will be held remotely so that you can participate in this class from wherever you will be located this summer!

Special Summer Session 2025 Courses

CAT 124RS: Internships in Dublin: Critical Inquiry and Professional Success

Joe Bigham

Lecturer, CAT

Seminar time TBA

This CAT 124RS course is only open to students participating in the Sixth College Internships in Dublin Global Seminar.

This course is designed to accompany students' participation in internships in Dublin, Ireland. The course provides students with an academic framework through which to analyze and leverage their international internship experience. Through small group meetings and online discussion, students will share their reflections and observations about their internships while exploring what these experiences mean in the context of their own civic and professional development. Foregrounding the themes of critical inquiry, civic professionalism, global citizenship, and professional development students will produce a portfolio that documents their professional identity, values, and experiences. Students are expected to commit between fifteen and twenty hours a week to their internships.

Fall 2025 Courses

CAT 124: Sixth Literary Arts Magazine

Becca Rose

Lecturer, CAT

Seminar time TBA

What experiences have you longed to see represented in books, magazines, journals, comics? In what ways do you think art and literature can influence identity, can forge community, can create dissent? In this experiential learning course, we will explore these questions both by learning about literature and creating our own. In the classroom, we will engage with readings, lecture, and discussion that will focus on learning about the systemic and structural inequalities of the publishing industry that has and continues to favor white, male, cis, heteronormative, neurotypical, and able-bodied people, but more particularly we will devote ourselves to learning about the community-centered movements, presses, and projects (such as Kitchen Table Press, the Riot Grrrl 'zine movement, present-day Rowhouse Publishing, and more) that have and continue to challenge those industry norms and create space for more voices in literature (while also critiquing any further failings of representation within some movements). For the experiential component of the course, we will put this space-making into practice ourselves: we will make literature and form community within and outside of the classroom through the creation and sharing of the collective final project—a new issue of Sixth College's very own literary arts magazine, for which you will be the editorial team. As such, this course isn't just about histories of literature—this course is about what kind of art and literature you want in the world. Please note that community-making is integral to this course, which has a significant group work component that will require both in class and out of class collaboration.

View the Summer 2023 highlights of this CAT 124 course!

CAT 124: CATalyzing Community: Connection and Place-Making at Sixth College

Bill Robertson Geibel

Assistant Teaching Professor, CAT

Seminar time TBA

In this four-unit experiential learning course, students will be tasked with finding ways to enhance the Sixth College community and student experience. Using models of leadership, community building, and social change as guides, students will begin by engaging in social research to identify issues, challenges, or shortcomings that may exist at the college. Students will then learn about various theories of change and ways of addressing social problems. The goal is for students to develop their own solutions to the problems they have identified. At the end of the course, students will present their research and proposed solutions in a Shark Tank-like event, the Purr-suasion Den, to an audience of university staff and administrators.