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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.

Learning Objectives

CAT-124 students work towards these goals:
  • Applied Knowledge: Students connect academic learning to real-world contexts through critical and creative applications.
    • Apply concepts, theories, and frameworks from coursework to real-world contexts, with attention to the intersections of culture, art, and technology.
    • Analyze experiences through a cultural studies lens, with attention to critical concepts such as power, identity, and culture.
    • Critically evaluate existing ideas while developing their own analytical perspectives and theoretical frameworks.
  • Professional Development: Students build transferable skills and competencies that support academic and career pathways.
    • Develop and apply practical skills and professional competencies through hands-on work such as communication, collaboration, organizational and leadership skills, and problem-solving abilities.
    • Develop transferable skills gained through creative, artistic, and hands-on projects to their own career fields and aspirations.
    • Formulate a professional identity that is based in self-awareness, reflection, and personal experience.
  • Civic and Cultural Engagement: Students engage with communities and social systems in ways that foster responsibility and agency.
    • Reflect on and engage with communities, organizations, or social systems in order to understand and appreciate the nuanced and complex nature of their identities and challenges.
    • Cultivate cultural sensitivity and appreciation through engaging and learning with diverse individuals, groups, and communities.
    • Reflect on the broader social and cultural impact of their work in order to develop a sense of responsibility and capacity to contribute positively to society.
  • Lifelong Learning: Students cultivate habits of adaptability, reflection, and sustained intellectual growth.
    • Practice and develop adaptability and flexibility.
    • Develop habits of critical reflection and self-assessment.
    • Deepen their understanding of their own positionality and how it informs their experiences inside and outside the classroom.

Summer Session II 2026

CAT-124: Borders, Boundaries, and Identity

Caleb Mertz-Vega

Associate Instructor, CAT
Tuesday/Thursday 9:30 a.m.-12:20 p.m.

This civic engagement course will take us from the classroom to the border to understand how borders, boundaries, and identity politics work together to construct our identities. We center our focus on San Diego as a border(ed) land and take Borderlands/La Frontera by Gloria Anzaldúa as a point of departure. Combining literature, visual media, and murals in Chicano Park, we dissect identity and how both physical and sociopolitical boundaries both inform and limit possible identities within this space and beyond. Through a combination of classroom instruction, a trip to the San Ysidro border, and a park cleanup at Chicano Park, students will develop a personal and connected appreciation of the history of the border in San Diego and the effects this has on the human inhabitants.

As a final project students will be asked to identify the borders, boundaries, and limitations within their own life and find a local nonprofit they can volunteer with. Each student will give an eight-minute presentation that connects their story to one of the readings, art installations, or stories they gained from this experience and one local volunteering opportunity with the expectation the student will have volunteered with the group.

Fall 2026

CAT-124: Making Sixth Literary Arts Magazine (SLAM): Subversive Publishing, Then and Now

Becca Rose

Lecturer, CAT
Tuesday/Thursday 10:00-11:20 a.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—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.

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: Feral Foraging: Creating a Site-Inspired Art Exhibition

Maya VanderSchuit

Lecturer, CAT

Max Roemer

Visiting Artist
Wednesday 12:00-2:50 p.m.
Craft Center

Feral Foraging is an upper-division experiential learning course in which students will create artworks that relate and respond to their immediate environment. As such, this course invites students to quite literally touch grass, put their toes in the sand, and feel the wind on their faces. This iteration of CAT-124 will partly take place at UCSD's Craft Center, but more so it will encourage students to work outdoors in their local landscapes in collaboration with San Diego-based artist Max Roemer. At the beginning of the course, we will explore the history and evolving language of site-based art, including site-specific, site-responsive, and what we will call "site-inspired" work. Throughout the course, we will analyze concepts explored in site-based practices such as place, sustainability, time, and narrative while also acquiring confidence in working with sustainable materials through artist-led workshops. We will forage for ideas and materials through readings and discussion, research, artist-led workshops on play and experimentation, and field trips. At the end of the quarter, students will apply knowledge and skills gained during the gathering phase towards the production of an art exhibition on campus.

Writing Support

There are a variety of writing resources around campus for students to take advantage of. In addition to CAT TAs' office hours, students may visit the Writing Hub in the Teaching and Learning Commons for help with their writing assignments. The Office of Academic Support and Instructional Services (OASIS) also offers a variety of tutoring programs, including the Language Arts Tutorial Services (LATS).