Classes for Alumni
You did it! Graduating from a Clemente Course is a huge accomplishment, whether you finished last week or decades ago.
We like to say, “Once a Clementine, always a Clementine.” Whichever program you participated in, you are part of a larger community that stretches from the West Coast to the East, from the American South to Canada. And we hope you’ll want to be involved in this larger community in the years to come.
Clemente offers classes and workshops specifically for our graduates. You can drop in on a monthly Clemente Conversation or sign-on for a semester-length class. We’re excited to share the virtual classroom with you.
Bridge Courses for Graduates
Bridge Courses offer the opportunity to take a deep dive into a humanities topic and earn additional credits toward a degree. Our first national Bridge Courses are called "Inflection Points," offered in partnership with Antioch University and funded through a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Course Objectives
By the end of each course, students will be able to analyze how artists, writers, philosophers, and historians have attempted to find meaning and reconciliation in times of uncertainty. In doing so, they will discuss a diverse range of topical texts, identifying both stylistic and thematic concerns, and describing the historical context and contemporary significance of works studied. As part of scheduled class activities, students will design and implement a topical applied humanities project in partnership with a local community organization.
Course Structure
Depending upon your time zone, these will be late afternoon or evening online courses. They meet for two hours, twice a week, for 12 weeks. All course materials are
provided for students. Access to computers and the internet, as well as childcare, will be available to students who need this support.
Just like traditional Clemente Courses, these courses emphasize close reading, discussion, and writing. There are no tests and no grades. Students who wish to earn college credit may do so through our academic partner, Antioch University. Students may enroll in 1 or more courses and earn 3 credits per course.
Applicants will be reviewed on a first-come, first-served basis with priority given to Clemente graduates, regardless of where or when they took the course, or if they received credit. However, with recommendations from Clemente graduates and/or faculty, other candidates will be considered as well.
Course Descriptions
Time, Memory, and Transformation: Restoring the Salish Sea
How do the humanities prepare us to respond to environmental degradation in a particular region and how might Indigenous knowledge help to reverse it? How have writers, thinkers, artists, and historians found meaning, reconciliation, and transformation in the wakes of colonization and genocide? This course will explore Indigenous moral philosophy, comparative art, literature, dance, and storytelling of the region known alternatively as Puget Sound or the Salish Sea in Washington State alongside essential texts and images from ancient and contemporary traditions. With the Salish Sea as a case study, our goal is to better understand the important role that the humanities play in protecting and reclaiming critical cultural and environmental resources.
This Land: Environmental Humanities
In this course, students will examine how the humanities can better prepare us to make decisions in response to environmental degradation. Often, communities with the fewest resources experience the most severe effects, and many already struggle to access clean water, soil, and air. In the coming decade, it is possible that we will face even more uncertainties, as both humans and non-humans feel the effects of environmental degradation. In the face of such change, what is the role of music, literature, history, or art? How can we, as Donna Haraway suggests, learn to stay with the trouble in our environment and our entangled relationships with one another?
No Borderlands/Sin Fronteras
This course will explore the border and the borderlands, both the physical and cultural space of the US/Mexico border as well as the metaphorical borders we experience every day when we transition from our homes to our communities, workplaces, and classrooms, and sometimes, even among our families and friends. By exploring contemporary and traditional art and literature, both fiction and memoir, we will appreciate the cultural resilience emerging from our borderlands and encounter creative ways in which people have responded to colonization as well as the psychological and emotional borders we encounter in today’s society. The course is taught by Dr. Patricia Garcia, an instructor in the English Department at The University of Texas at Austin and literature professor in Free Minds, the Clemente Course in Austin. Guest faculty will integrate creative writing, art history, digital storytelling, and more into the curriculum.
Civil Rights: No Silence Among Friends
We will study the lives and voices of slaves and racism, suffragettes and feminism, native Americans, civil and gay rights activists through a variety of texts and images that will enrich our understanding of the challenges and resistances at work in our own time. This class will draw on these moments through literature, primary texts, art history, and philosophy to engage with the present and ultimately speak up for the change we want to see in our community, state, nation, and the world.
Further Bridge Courses Offered
Facilitating & Reflecting Conversations
This class will help you strengthen your skills in planning and facilitating conversations on issues you care about within your organization or in the broader community. Taking this course will equip you with the skills and resources to get people talking across differences about challenging questions and issues that affect our lives. You will learn the tools to design and facilitate participatory conversations and leave the class with confidence and tools to use reflective conversation tools in “real world” situations upon completion. The course is taught by Dr. Adam Davis, Executive Director of Oregon Humanities and former professor in the Odyssey Project, the Clemente Course in Chicago. Participants who attend at least five of the six classes and complete course exercises will receive a certification of completion in facilitation.
Shaping Your Story for College and Career Success
How do we assess our strengths, stay true to ourselves, and make a convincing case that we belong at the college or job of our dreams? In this seven-week course, we will read literary works and discuss who we wish to be in the world. What are our interests? Who inspires us? What strengths have we developed over time? We will also consider how writers tell their personal stories and explore how our own stories can be shaped for different purposes and audiences. Step by step, we will hone writing skills and thinking skills in relation to resumes, cover letters, and personal statements. As we organize our experiences into these different forms, we will stay mindful of how the pieces work together to form an accurate and compelling application. The course instructor, Laurie Filipelli, is a writer and writing coach, as well as the author of two collections of poetry and the Mighty Writing College Application Essay Guide. She has coached students of all ages to tell their own stories, and to become stronger writers and more creative thinkers. She also taught writing in Free Minds, the Clemente Course in Austin, Texas.
Environmental Humanities: Place, Race, and the Artist as Activist
with Jane Paul, instructor of urban studies at Antioch University Los Angeles
Thinking with Du Bois in the 21st Century
with Janine de Novais, sociologist and author ofBrave Community: Teaching for a Post-Racist Imagination
Meet the Filmmaker: Screening and Discussion ofACCEPTED
with Dan Chen, director of the critically acclaimed documentary,ACCEPTED
Cultivating the Creativity Mindset: An Alum Shares Her Story
with Samantha Jordan, Chicago based rapper and graduate of the Chicago Odyssey Project