CAT-124

CAT-124 is Sixth College's own high-impact experiential learning course that gives students the opportunity to learn through community engagement, critical analysis, and small group discussion. The courses bring together an interdisciplinary faculty to expound on themes of culture, art, and technology, examining different topics each quarter and over the summer, through distinct experiential learning opportunities. These classes fulfill the experiential learning requirement and are open to students in all departments and fields.

Winter 2027

CAT-124: Byte-Sized Stories: Exploring the World of Podcasting

Romain Delaville

Assistant Teaching Professor, CAT

Tuesday/Thursday 11:00 a.m.-12:20 p.m.

With over 600 million listeners worldwide, including more than half of U.S. adults, podcasts have become a major site for the circulation of ideas and public conversation. This raises a number of questions about visibility, truth, and authority: How is podcasting changing the way audiences access information and engage with contemporary issues, particularly when standards for accuracy and accountability often differ from those in traditional media? How does podcasting create space for voices that have historically been excluded from public discourse? How do feeds, algorithms, attention metrics, and monetization shape what gets said and who gets heard? And more broadly, how does sound itself (tone, pacing, layering, silence, etc.) shape emotion, trust, and intimacy? In this experiential learning course, we will examine podcasting as both a cultural and rhetorical form. The questions above will serve as a conceptual backdrop as you create Sixth College's first podcast season. You will develop a multi-episode series from concept to release, working through the full production process. This includes scripting, editing, interviewing, recording, post-production mixing, and developing a marketing strategy for your work. Please note that this course has a significant group work component that will require both in class and out of class collaboration. No prior technical experience is required.

CAT-124: Beetles, Bats, and Bottlebrush: Eco-writing Workshop and Showcase

Becca Rose

Lecturer, CAT

Tuesday/Thursday 11:00 a.m.-12:20 p.m.

Writing is a form of attention; attention is a form of care. Can writing about the non-human lives we share space with in San Diego—such as the green fruit beetle, the Mexican free-tailed bat, the bright red bottlebrush trees—bring us to know and care for that species, and perhaps ourselves, more deeply? In this creative writing workshop, we will both write about our relations and we will write to make relations to our surrounding environments: people, plants, animals, insects, landscapes, and all. To do this, we will read eco-writing—writing about human and non-human relations, such as Kathryn Harlan's story about a woman that grows mushrooms from her skin and Ross Gay's essay on the garden as a site of mutual aid—across poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and experimental forms. These works will help us study the craft of creative writing as well as the role of writing in understanding our place in our ecosystem.

We will then put eco-writing into practice, turning our attention to our own environment through bi-weekly field trips and generative, place-based writing prompts. Through the workshop component of the course, students will use writing to build their relations with each other, sharing in the revision process by critiquing (and encouraging) the development of each other's work in small group settings . Students will end the course with their own creative writing portfolio of revised eco-writing pieces. As the culmination of our course, students will collectively plan a public-facing reading during Finals Week to share their eco-writing. Whether writing about beetles, bats, bottlebrush, or any species found in our coastal desert ecosystem, we will use writing to turn our attention towards fostering an ethic of care for both ourselves and our greater human and non-human communities.