"Freedom" has long been a defining ideal of U.S. life, passionately desired and intensely contested. This course investigates freedom in its cultural and social aspects. How did the ideals of freedom become so intimately associated with "America," and specifically with the United States of America? How have various dispossessed peoples--slaves, immigrants, women, racial and ethnic minorities, colonized populations--looked to the ideals and practices of U.S. freedom to sustain their hopes and inform their actions?

This interdisciplinary project-based course emphasizes human-centered design process as well as critical social theory on the relationships between humans and designed things. Through hands-on, individual and collaborative making, students learn design-thinking skills such as user-experience research, rapid idea generation techniques, prototyping and iterative implementation. This learning happens alongside rich class discussions of both seminal and contemporary scholarly work on design’s role in shaping the lived experience.

Offered as SPN 291 and IDP 291. A course designed for students who have spent a semester, summer, Interterm or year abroad. After introducing the methodology of digital storytelling, in which images and recorded narrative are combined to create short video stories, students write and create their own stories based on their time abroad. Participants script, storyboard and produce a 3-4 minute film about the challenges and triumphs of their experience and share it with others. Prerequisite: Significant experience abroad (study abroad, praxis, internship, Global Engagement Seminar or other).

This course is for students who have completed IDP 132 or another Smith experience that allowed for reflection on curricular and experiential work, values and goals. Students begin to look outward. After reviewing and assessing important learning experiences, students conduct qualitative interviews to gain a multidimensional understanding of their discipline in the world. Students simultaneously create a "personal syllabus," a reflection on maintaining and pursuing curiosity.

Offered as IDP 200 and ARS 200.This course explores speculative design practices as a way to collaboratively envision radical social transformation. The course focuses on imagining worlds without capitalism, building on local Solidarity Economy efforts. Students work in small groups to make these visions tangible through stories, installations, performances and models of everyday objects from the future. Students learn to make iteratively as a process of critical thinking and to evaluate project work based on its ability to provoke questions and connect with viewers.

Entrepreneurship takes on a diversity of meanings, forms and structures depending on its source and context. In this course, the topic of entrepreneurship is studied from a variety of critical and under-explored vantage points such as ethics, access, inclusion, culture, power, expression, agency, economic empowerment, and cultural and social transformation. Entrepreneurship is counter-mapped from an inter-, intra- and multi-disciplinary lens from the liberal arts tradition, and the course examines the commonalities that connect both.

This six-week course teaches students to extend and refine their academic capacities to become autonomous learners. Course content includes research on motivation, learning styles, memory and retrieval, as well as application of goal setting, time management and study skills. Students who take this course are better prepared to handle coursework, commit to a major and take responsibility for their own learning. S/U only. Priority is given to students referred by their dean or adviser. Enrollment limited to 15.

This course provides a theoretical foundation in critical dialogue around issues of power and systemic oppression in relation to socially just leadership and designing for social change. Students explore early messages, personal narratives, identity formation, the intersection of identity and leadership and how these categories relate to creating an equitable and inclusive community.

This course challenges students to interrogate the perceived dichotomy between leading as a solitary versus collaborative endeavor. Students examine theories and histories of leadership and collaboration through a critical lens and explore alternative ways of imagining change-making as a collaborative leadership act. Through reading, writing, reflection and practice, the class offers students new perspectives on how they might lead collaboratively. Recommended as a foundation for students whose future academic work is likely to include significant group work. Enrollment limited to 40.

This class is for students who are starting their Smith journey, embarking on or returning from an immersive experience abroad, weaving their interests through a concentration or self-designed major, or wrestling with expressing what a Smith education has prepared them to do. Students test different integrative paths of their own design, tell their own story and create a digital portfolio to showcase their work. Students learn to articulate connections between their work in and outside of the classroom and explain how Smith is preparing them to engage with the world beyond. S/U only.