UCSD - University of California - San Diego
01/16/2025 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 01/16/2025 05:22
Digging Deep: Sixth College Launches Innovative Honors Program
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January 16, 2025Article Content
Sixth College's redesigned honors program encourages its students to dig deep-literally-through a revolutionary approach grounded in community engagement.
The first of its kind at UC San Diego, the Community-Engaged Honors Program reflects an evolving world and recognizes the need for a new approach to teaching students how to write about and interact with the world around them.
The program's restructure emphasizes the university's commitment to developing changemakers and people ready to tackle the world's challenges, says Bill Robertson Geibel, Sixth College's Associate Director of Experiential Learning and an assistant teaching professor of Culture, Art and Technology. "UC San Diego is meeting the needs of this next century," he said. "We are pushing the envelope in student engagement, learning and innovative pedagogy."
Re-thinking the Honors Program
At UC San Diego, undergraduate students can participate in honors programs through their college and major's department. While departmental honors programs are specific to that discipline, college honors programs expose students to experiences that align with the college's mission. These can include unique research opportunities and extracurricular experiences.
Of the eight undergraduate colleges at UC San Diego, seven offer honors programs. Three of the seven accept students into their program based on grades earned before enrolling at the university. Four colleges, including Sixth, have earned honors programs; they recognize achievements earned while at UC San Diego.
However, the Community-Engaged Honors Program is the only college honors program at UC San Diego that has a structured multi-course progression and does not admit students based on grade point average. Sixth College's three-course sequence grows a student's knowledge in community engagement and critical media literacy then culminates in real-world experience.
The program starts in the winter quarter with students examining the intersection of storytelling, identity and mental health through the lens of fiction. Through experiential opportunities like interviewing others, volunteering, self-reflection and discussion, students' self-awareness and sense of agency grows.
The spring quarter course then asks students to explore how popular culture views the environment and shapes environmental change-focusing on the climate crisis-while working with local nonprofit Sage Garden Project-funded programs at multiple San Diego Unified elementary schools. The Sixth College students work in small groups of two or three alongside trained garden and cooking educators in transitional kindergarten through fifth-grade classrooms.
The sequence concludes in a future quarter with an experiential learning opportunity through Sixth College that builds on the students' previous experiences in the program.
Application to the program is selective-only a maximum of 25 students committed to positively impacting their community are accepted-and is open to any first- or second-year Sixth College student, regardless of grade point average, enrolled in the college's opening course.
The program's structure celebrates the value of the communities surrounding UC San Diego and focuses on the university's commitment to collaborating with them. "We want to enhance and support the larger San Diego region through community partnerships," Geibel said. "Experiences outside of the classroom can be transformational and perspective-changing for our students. Simultaneously, we recognize our privilege as a university and understand the need for higher education to break down those ivory towers."
Changemakers in the Community
Sixth College believed that the best way to foster greater collaboration between UC San Diego and the surrounding San Diego community was to reimagine the college's honors program.
Among the general education requirements for a Sixth College student are the writing core sequence for incoming first years, which integrates culture, art and technology, and an experiential learning component for upper-division students.
The college's Experiential Learning program speaks to the college's mission, according to Phoebe Bronstein, Sixth College's Director of Academic Programs and an associate teaching professor of Culture, Art and Technology. The goal, she says, is to create an inclusive community dedicated to fostering curiosity and critical inquiry and to ensure students have hands-on work experience before they graduate.
With that as a framework, she and Geibel wanted to provide students with real-world experience working alongside local organizations that serve diverse populations. They blended two of the core writing classes with the Experiential Learning program to create a core community-engaged class.
In 2021, the pair applied for and were awarded UC San Diego's Changemaker Fellowships to develop their project, receiving a $10,000 faculty development award over two years. For the first year, Bronstein and Geibel team taught the class with four local climate-focused partner organizations. The pair garnered feedback from students and community partners, tweaking the program to better serve all constituents.
Community-Driven Engagement
Ultimately, the program's biggest development came from Bronstein's own experience in the community while teaching about the climate crisis. She was volunteering in her children's elementary school garden when she began teaching the community-engaged class at Sixth College. The school was working with the Sage Garden Project, which takes a trauma-informed approach to teaching students how to garden and cook the food they grow. The more Bronstein volunteered with Sage Garden Project, the more she felt like their work and Sixth College's fledgling program informed each other.
"I thought about connecting Sixth College students to the earth, teaching them about the ethics of stewardship and connecting what they grow to what they eat," Bronstein said. The partnership would grow the students' environmental consciousness and social awareness while supporting Sage Garden Project's work in San Diego schools.
Bronstein proposed the partnership to the organization's executive director, Kimberly Orias: Sixth College students would work alongside garden and cooking educators in the schools, assisting in the gardens' maintenance and overseeing small groups of students.
She was met with an openness to create a long-lasting and mutually beneficial partnership. "We want the elementary students to feel like even at a young age, they can be good citizens of their world," Orias said. "UC San Diego students are working with children at such an important stage in their learning. They provide the elementary students with a different voice to learn from and are wonderful role models."
The UC San Diego students' interactions with younger San Diegans speaks to one of the program's core missions: intentionally sparking social change and fostering personal development. Through a sense of empowerment and agency, the students' confidence grows, which sets them on a path to becoming changemakers in their local community.
The partnership is also beneficial to the educator with whom the students partner. "It's one thing to teach, but it's another thing to teach other people how to teach," Orias shared. "Sometimes you forget the power of what you're doing. It reminded the garden and cooking educators of the importance of their work."
As the partnership with Sage Garden Project developed, Bronstein and Geibel further aligned the program's structure with its audience: elementary students and educators. For their final project, Community-Engaged Honors Program students create a piece of children's media that explains what happens when an ecosystem is threatened by climate change. Some examples of past final projects include a book about a superhero made of kelp who fights pollution and a story about an alien who lands on Earth but can't find its way home because of light pollution.
"The underlying ethic of the honors program is that how we tell stories matters," Bronstein noted. "Climate change is a science problem, a societal problem, and a rhetorical and narrative problem." The goal ultimately is for students to craft media that can feed back into Sage Garden Project and be used by educators in their gardening and cooking curricula."
"The underlying ethic of the honors program is that how we tell stories matters." Sixth College Director of Academic Programs Phoebe Bronstein
Community-Engaged Honors Program students present their final projects to classmates, Sage Garden Project educators and staff at partner schools.
Empowering Students
The partnership between Sixth College and Sage Garden Project was an immediate success, benefitting both the Sixth College students and the schools they served. "We have received positive feedback from the schools and we are so grateful for their partnership and support of our mission," said Geibel. "Our partnership gives younger students a glimpse into being a UC San Diego student and helps build connections and relationships that can change how both sets of students view their surroundings and the world."
UC San Diego students benefitted greatly from working alongside elementary educators and students. "Our students talked about the joyfulness of being with younger kids and putting their hands in the dirt," Bronstein added. "They learned it's okay to be goofy and not know what you're doing. Joy and playfulness are foundational parts of teaching and education and this partnership fosters that."
Second-year student Gabriel Nobleza feels that the program made him more connected to and knowledgeable about the environment. "Having compassion and fostering community is inherently connected to environmental solutions," he said. "We must all work together with future generations to combat the climate crisis."
Classmate Brook Sannella agreed that the honors program altered how she sees the world. "Daily, I now think about how I can be more environmentally friendly. This class paired nicely with volunteering and I love applying my learning to the real world."
By pairing community engagement with writing and reflection, the Community-Engaged Honors Program responds to the needs of today's students, growing the next generation of changemakers who will leave a mark on their communities.