Effective communication is not always easy or natural, but it can be learned. This course provides a platform to learn and practice principles of professional communication (through presentations, writing, and audio/visual media) in the field of construction and sustainable building. Through various class exercises and assignments, students attain the skills that are required to succinctly get a message across and connect with an audience.

Extractive colonial and neocolonial capitalism structures and articulates life-giving ecological relations - webs of life - into hierarchies and separations, including commodification of the fundamental biophysical elements of land and water, and separations of people from other species and biophysical systems, the more-than-human. This class explores developments, movements, stories and efforts related to land, water, and the more-than-human, in dialogue with interrelated theoretical/empirical approaches, that aim to find and support life-affirming change.

Taught by the Grace Hazard Conkling Poet in Residence, this advanced poetry workshop is for students who have developed a passionate relationship with poetry and who have substantial experience in writing poems. Texts are based on the poets who are reading at Smith during the semester, and students gain expertise in reading, writing and critiquing poems. Prerequisite: ENG 205 or ENG 216, or equivalent. Enrollment limited to 12.

Outdoor rock climbing is designed to give students experience outdoors on natural rock faces with an emphasis on risk management, outdoor climbing technique, and outdoor-specific rope systems. Students will walk away from this course with the skills to be a confident "second" in outdoor climbing spaces. We will climb at local, outdoor locations. will spend time at the Hampshire rock wall and local rock climbing gyms with the goal of becoming more efficient climbers.