​​Grassroots Community Organizing (Spring course)

This is UACT's foundational course! Facilitated by highly skilled and supported student teams, connected in deep and meaningful ways with community organizers off campus and student organizers on campus, and anchored by an evolving curriculum of challenging texts, this class has been changing lives for twenty years. Offered in spring semester - applications due November 15th! Read more about it here.

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Relational Organizing (Spring course)

Organizing is critical to building sustained movements and community change. Yet the culture of organizing is often plagued by fragmentation, isolation, extreme stress, and competition. This course was designed to increase the capacity of organizers in Western Massachusetts to work in relational, collaborative ways that build ongoing power. Co-facilitated by student organizers and alumni, the course brings diverse emerging student leaders together with leaders in community organizations so that they are better able to build leadership within their organizations, build strong bases, work compassionately and effectively across differences, and show up for one another. Relational organizing is a two credit course which meets once a week in the evenings. 

 

Critical Pedagogy for Academic Facilitation (Fall course, GCO Facilitation Training)

This is an intensive training course that prepares students to facilitate collective, experiential knowledge of community organizing with diverse college students. Facilitation is different than teaching, and also different than running a discussion group. Facilitators are responsible for developing collective student learning by designing lessons that combine textual analysis, attentiveness to the diverse lived experiences and story-telling of classmates, and engagement in beginning community organizing work toward racial, economic, and environmental justice led by our community partners. Required for GCO facilitators.

 

Leadership and Activism (Spring course, GCO Facilitation Support)

Supports the ongoing training and development of GCO facilitators while they are engaged in facilitation. This course involves critical reflection, collective problem solving, and professional support and development for the ongoing classroom and community-based work of facilitating an intense 5-credit class. Facilitators spend 20-30 hours per week in their work, and develop truly professional skills by the end of their year-long commitment. 

 

Critical Knowledge Practices: Teaching, Research, Action (Fall course)

Projects of marginalized people to produce collective knowledge and to make their knowledge matter have bubbled up in many places and spaces across the globe. This course provides a structure for weekly learning and dialogue about the contexts and implications of such diverse attempts to develop power/knowledge "from below." Open to anyone who is practicing some organized form of critical teaching, research, or action. Offered each fall semester.​