Discovery Experiences represent the most transformative forms of scholarly and experiential learning and powerfully express what it means to receive an education at a major public research university in the 21st century. As our campus develops the Discovery platform, the Office of Berkeley Arts + Design has received funds that allow us to support undergraduate courses within the “creative” dimension of engaged, cross-disciplinary learning.
In the second round of the competition, 14 grants of up to $5,000 were awarded on a competitive basis to faculty to develop new courses or enhance existing undergraduate courses with innovative creative pedagogy and opportunities for reflective making and producing.
Spring 2019 Creative Discovery Grant Recipients
Rhetoric 184: Language and Movement
Marianne Constable
Department: Rhetoric
How does one become more aware of oneself as a mover, doer, learner, knower? Does one learn to do things with language - to read, to write, even to think - in the same ways as one learns to move? This studio-seminar course engages with these sorts of questions through experiences with and responses to basic movement lessons, through academic readings about embodiment, through observation of and reflection on performances, and through writing and discussion.
The seminar meets twice a week. The basic aim is to become more aware of the way you move and the way you use language and, through this awareness, to become more skilled at what you want to say and do. The aspiration is not only to become aware of how you do the things you do, but also to reflect on how this awareness can serve you well in coming to know - or to learn about - the world we inhabit. On Tuesdays, we meet in a studio and students do a movement lesson (roughly an hour, generally drawn from Feldenkrais Method ® Awareness-through-Movement (ATM) lessons). After a 5-minute break, we discuss the lesson and related short readings or videos tailored to student interests and experiences. On Thursdays, we meet in a seminar room where we focus on more substantial academic readings relating language, bodies, and action. Themes include awareness, observation (of self, others, and environment), expressiveness, and learning. Attention in studio is on oneself in place/space; breath; ease, timing, and range of movement; use of the self and self-image; voice; repetition and rest. Academic themes include: habit, intention, and strain; perception, observation, imagination; the “mind-body problem”; discipline (and its discontents). Discussions integrate attention to bodily movement and language with analysis and interpretation of assigned readings, videos, and students' short writings.
This course received a grant of $2,000 to support visits to Cal Performances for the class.
Public Policy 190: Introduction to Labor Studies
Anibel Ferus-Comelo
Department: Goldman School of Public Policy & Labor Center
This course provides a broad, interdisciplinary overview of the U.S. labor movement as a catalyst for progressive change. It will introduce students to the changing nature of employment, the power dynamics at work with diversity and inclusion as the analytical lens, while considering why and how workers form unions in response. It serves as a foundation course of a Labor Studies program that is envisioned at Cal. One of the primary objectives of this course is to develop a theoretical and practical understanding of contemporary workers’ experiences in the U.S. shaped by race, class, gender, sexuality, immigration status, language, religion, and other social constructs. There will be a special comparative focus on the role of structures and the space for agency and mobilization in the Latinx, Black and Asian American communities. The course will cover current challenges facing the US workforce, such as wage theft, temporary and contingent employment, corporate restructuring, the impact of technology, and globalization. Despite tremendous political and legal obstacles, millennials are organizing to build power that is transforming their communities. In 2017, 76 percent of the increase in union membership was workers under 35. Disruptive innovations in workers’ rights campaigns such as the Fight for $15 and teachers’ walk-outs have led a resurgence of bargaining for the common good. The course will integrate guest speakers, films, current news, blogs, and community engagement to deepen students’ appreciation of the role of unions and workers’ centers in promoting intersectional equity and justice.
This course received a grant of $3,997 to support cultural, artistic, and technological forms of the final course project to accommodate the diversity of learning styles and skills sets in the classroom. Students will have three options: (a) creating an original screen-printed poster for the annual May Day rally; (b) developing a video on an issue, eg. low-wage work, and the value of unions in the contemporary economy; and (c) writing a research paper on a workers’ organization or a labor leader.
History of Art C62 - Introduction to Italian Renaissance Art
Henrike Lange
Department: History of Art
Berkeley’s interdisciplinary Italian Renaissance survey presents moments from Italian art and literature from circa 1300 to circa 1600 and considers artworks and texts as mirrors and motors of cultural change in visual and textual media. Its active components include the search for traces of Italian culture on campus, in the Bay Area, and San Francisco, and the consideration of the presented historical challenges and conflicts in their enduring relevance, and the production of research-based creative final projects.
Learning objectives include: starting the life-long process of carefully looking at art and gaining knowledge and inspiration from it, acquiring a memory of visual knowledge through the practice of memorizing artworks, gaining insights into the history of religions, understanding better the connections between the Italian Renaissance and American cultural practices and aesthetics, becoming aware of differences in media, style, and material, approaching texts and images more sensitively, describing well, citing primary and secondary sources in a professional and academically sound format, and making informed choices about one’s own research and creative-artistic approach for any given topic.
This course received a grant of $5,000 to support materials for the class and to help students realize their innovative ideas without having to worry about the financial limits. They will also hire a student curator to help with the exhibition and hold a mini-conference at the end of the term.
SPH 196 Fung Fellowship for Wellness and Technology Innovations
Jennifer Mangold
Department: Fung Institute for Engineering Leadership
Fung Fellowship for Wellness and Technology Innovations is a transdisciplinary entrepreneurship and innovations program that brings together diverse undergraduates from over 20 different majors - from engineering to public health to arts and humanities - to develop innovative solutions to health and wellness challenges facing kids and older adults. The Fellowship seeks and nurtures emerging leaders from groups often overlooked by other entrepreneurship programs: women, transfer students, first generation college students, veterans.
The Spring course incorporates creative discovery through human centered design principles and processes, with students working on teams that: conduct customer research, employ lo-fidelity prototyping methods (including acting, bodystorming), engage in technology solution product ideation and design. If this grant is awarded we will be able to expand to include students more deeply in the makerspace ecosystem on campus and develop multimedia presentations of their semester-long journeys and prototypes that address the needs of their target populations.
This course received a grant of $5,000 to expand and enhance the creative opportunities in the program, with students creating story-books, videos, pitch decks and other similar presentations to align with their customer research engagement and product ideation.
Art 160 Designing and Activating Public Space
Jill Miller
Department: Art Practice
This course will focus on the research, design, and planning of the Wurster South Courtyard. Starting from a completely gutted and stripped down site, students will work collaboratively to create a plan for building a multi-use space for video screenings, performance work, and collaborative projects. In this course, students will: explore the history of public gardens and piazzas through research and field trips, experiment with a range of materials for the built and natural environment, and design the layout for the courtyard installation. We will speak to local experts in the areas of placemaking, landscaping and programming public art spaces. We will design and construct different components of the space. Students will curate a pop up exhibition on site as a final project.
This course received a grant of $5,000 to support design and construction of physical site improvements, and leading a curatorial project in the space. Students will design using the Adobe Creative Suite, and they will build physical objects and structures with their hands. Students will engage campus and local communities by studying public spaces and gardens at UC Botanical Gardens, Blake House, Yerba Buena Gardens, BAMPFA, and Oakland Museum of California. We will invite guest speakers to teach us about their practices through lectures and workshops.
Design Innovation 198
Vivek Rao
Department: Design Innovation (Engineering)
Design Innovation 198, Design Innovation Bootcamp, teaches students the mindsets, toolsets, and skillsets of design and innovation in an intensive, hands-on format. Student teams explore a systems-scale design opportunity - this year, it will be the future of mobility - using a design thinking approach. Students develop four core skills: qualitative design research methods, problem framing and re-framing, concept development and prototyping, and storytelling. Design theory and practice skills are developed through lecture, case studies, focused use of the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation Makerspace, and experiential assignments.
The course was piloted in Spring 2018 to positive student reviews, and will be expanded in Spring 2019 to deepen student mastery of problem framing and discovery, storytelling, and critical feedback and reflection. The course structure includes four six-hour class sessions for a one-week intensive format in January before classes be
This course received a grant of $4,110 to help instructional staff successfully develop, evaluate, and assess new materials associated with this proposal. Funds will be partially allocated to GSI and head instructor hours.
Portfolio Workshops
Emily Rice
Department: Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation
We propose to create a Portfolio Workshop series that will be primarily geared towards students enrolled in the Berkeley Certificate in Design Innovation (BCDI), and other design innovation courses.
BCDI introduces design as the creative and critical means to innovate — to define, to imagine, and to advance a globally just future. The program assumes that innovation will not come from any one discipline, but rather from the meaningful integration of methods, technologies, and knowledge from a wide range of different disciplines. As such, the certificate connects the design approaches from four schools (CoE, CED, L&S, and Haas) to ensure that students know how to innovate.
To earn this certificate, undergraduate students must complete a four-course sequence, at least three of which must be outside a student’s home department. This structure ensures that the certificate serves as a broadening experience, exposing students to new approaches and mindsets and offering them the opportunity to work on cross-disciplinary teams. Taken as a whole, the certificate provides students with the critical mindset, collaborative problem defining skills, and technical skills to innovate in a wide variety of areas, and hands-on tools in each of the phases of the innovation cycle.
Since the certificate launched in spring 2017, 34 students have earned the certificate, and 96 more are currently on track to complete it. Certificates have been awarded to students from 18 majors, ranging from Mechanical Engineering to Anthropology to Economics. Of those students currently pursuing the certificate, 18.9% are from CoE, 63.3% from L&S, 11.1% from CED, 4.4% from Haas, and 2.2% from CNR.
This course received a grant of $4,800 to to fund a series of portfolio workshops.
ES21AC - A Comparative Survey of Race and Ethnicity in the United States: An Introduction to Abolition Pedagogy and Practice
Victoria Robinson
Department: Ethnic Studies
When asked to reflect on her own experiences as a political prisoner in relationship to her work as a “prison abolitionist” with Critical Resistance, Angela Davis comments, “The most important lessons emanating from those campaigns, we thought, demonstrate the need to examine the overall role of the prison system, especially its class and racial character. There was a relationship, as George Jackson had insisted, between the rising numbers of political prisoners, and the imprisonment of increasing numbers of poor people of color. If prison was the state-sanctioned destination for activists such as myself, it was also used as a surrogate solution to social problems associated with poverty and racism.” While speaking very directly to the prison system, her critical connections on an institution we commonly accept as a logical destination for those deemed as “criminal” offers a guiding framework for our survey course on “racial and ethnic groups in the United States.” As we think comparatively about the experiences of racial and ethnic groups, through themes relevant to the historical development of America (settler colonialism, slavery, immigration, labor, politics, community formation…) we seek to ask the type of questions demonstrated by Davis in her reflections on the prison in U.S. society. Instead of simply accepting institutions and ideologies as given, or the only ways to do things, the driving question of a course like ours is how can we learn from the movements that created Ethnic Studies (liberation movements of the 1960s) and envision a different reality. This course provides students with the tools and historical background needed to engage in meaningful and informed debates about race, gender, legal status, crime and punishment. Central to this learning and analysis is the question, ‘how might we forge an abolition pedagogy’, and how has/can such pedagogy be formed in antiracist and feminist scholarship,
grounded in domestic and transnational grassroots social movements? In addressing these, the course intimately links the community and the academy as sites of organizing and analysis in critical prison studies and abolition movements.
This course received a grant of $2,900 to enable the development of two projects in ES21AC: zine creation with Prison Renaissance; and Wikipedia Data Visualization with the Adobe Creative Suite.
CWR4B Images of History
Patricia Steenland
Department: College Writing Programs
This class performs a in-depth exploration of the Japanese American internment, and asks, How do we come to understand the past? Once an event recedes, we are left with an unfiltered mix of sources and perspectives, each reflecting a partial truth. We begin with the following texts as our starting points: Mine Okubo's pictorial memoir of the Japanese American internment, Citizen 13660 and a novel, Julie Otsuka’s When The Emperor Was Divine (part of which is set in Berkeley). Students also look at other representations of this event in different genres, such as films, essays, oral histories, diaries, and standard history textbooks, to explore differences in genre and perspective. For the final research project, students choose their own topic to explore from the internment and work with primary materials found both online and at the Bancroft Library, including the Densho Digital Archive, an immensely rich collection of materials on this subject.
The Internment is the largest violation of constitutional rights in our nation's history. It has been increasingly invoked as a historical parallel to issues our country faces now. This current relevance makes it all the more important to understand the event itself and its historical context.
This class is one of seven participating in the UC Berkeley-Library of Congress pilot project. The project's goal is to introduce primary source assignments into beginning courses as a means to introduce students to critical inquiry and discovery.
This course received a grant of $5,000 to support a new class-based project that would become part of the students' primary source research. This proposed project intends to "make the internment visible." The class will be divided up into small groups to research five figures on campus whose lives intersected with the internment. Student research would produce a short biography, an image, and a relevant quote in that person's own words. Then with the help of our existing Adobe team, a life size image of each person would be projected on a wall somewhere on campus.
Theater 146B Choreography: Compositional Study
Lisa Wymore
Department: Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies
This course will focus on the creation of small group dances in the style of modern/contemporary concert dance performance. The beginning of the semester includes in-class exercises on topics such as form, structure, space, phrasing, partnering techniques and rhythm. The second part of the class involves auditioning dancers/performers for choreographic studies, project management, and completing given assignments. The class concludes with two public showings of the dance pieces created within the course. One showing at Rossmoor Senior Living Community on April 13 and performance in the Bancroft Dance Studio at the end of the term. Students are also required to give a presentation about their creative process used to make the dance piece. Prerequisites: Sources of Movement (Theater 144) or Movement Improvisation (Theater 148). It is highly recommended that students be enrolled in a dance technique class while taking this course. This class satisfies a TDPS Dance and Performance Studies Major requirement. All Berkeley students are welcome to take the course.
This course received a grant of $5,000 that will allow the dancers to engage with visiting artists, see relevant shows in the Bay Area, and create a meaningful and useful video dossier of their creative work.
Art8A: Intersections of Art Design and Technology
Shari Paladino
Department: Art Practice
ART 8A: Intro to Visual Culture at the Intersection of Art, Design and Technology is an innovative class that critically considers the visual world, which is increasingly mediated by screens, devices, images, and displays. Visuality is not a natural or random fact, but provides entry points to interpret visual codes and meanings that shape social conditions and the workings of power in everyday life. The class investigates how meaning is generated, produced and reproduced through historically shaped visual fields, and how these form and inform the production of racialized categories, as well as the intersections of gender, sexuality, class, religion, neuro-diversity and physical ability. To do this Art 8A: ADT develops critical skills around cultural practices of looking, image making and display. Students are tasked to consider Art, Design and Technology as media fields that not only reflect opinions and conventions of taste; rather, encounters with media in these fields are considered among the forms through which human subjects are ‘made’, as citizens, consumers, and as enculturated social beings . Particular attention is paid throughout the course to how a diverse range of contemporary artists, designers and media producers de-stabilize and re-form the habits, organization and operations of visual cultural systems. Art8A extensively considers issues of visibility and visual marking, erasure, and appropriation, the visual technologies of representation, reproduction, spectatorship, the gaze, the manufacturing of global flows of desire and consumption.
This course received a grant of $1,500 to provide Maker Passes, to support attendance to museums, galleries, performance and public spaces both on-campus and off-campus, and help fund pop-up exhibits.