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.

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.

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!

Spring 2025 Courses

CAT 124: Engaging San Diego: Taking Local Action to Address Global Issues

Bill Robertson Geibel

Assistant Teaching Professor, CAT

Wednesday 11:00 a.m.-1:50 p.m.

Supported by funding from Project Pericle, this hands-on, experiential learning course will challenge you to not only learn about important global issues but to take local action to help solve them through a media-based social impact campaign. In the first part of the class, you will work in groups to identify and research a specific global-local issue to address. In the second part of the class, you will learn about various media-based approaches and theories of social change that will inform the development of your group's campaign. You will then create and execute a strategic media campaign, focusing on either correcting misinformation or educating the public on the issue you've chosen. Each campaign will culminate in the production of a mini-documentary designed to inject an evidence-based narrative into our local media ecosystem, supplemented by a targeted social media campaign. Finally, we will end the class by analyzing our campaigns and reflecting on their impact and sustainability. Ultimately, this class will push you to think individually and collectively to form original ideas that build off of established knowledge and practices. As such, you will not only sharpen your research, analytical, and communication skills but also be empowered with a stronger sense of global and civic agency in the digital age.

View the Spring 2023 highlights of this CAT 124 course!

CAT 124: Sixth Literary Arts Magazine

Becca Rose

Lecturer, CAT

Wednesday 1:00-3:50 p.m.

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—the second 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!