Academic Civic Engagement Courses and Research

Academic Civic Engagement (ACE) courses put academic skills and learning to work in the service of community priorities.

Carleton faculty offer about 20 ACE courses each term, including both applied and theoretical designations, across all majors and disciplines. Most ACE courses are project-based, with students using their academic skills and learning in the classroom to create videos, archives, oral histories, data visualizations, statistical analyses, digital resources, and more, while learning firsthand from community leaders.

  • ACE courses may be Applied, which generally indicates that a civic engagement project is an integral part of the course and often involves collaboration with community partners.
  • ACE courses can also be Theoretical, meaning that the course focuses on the theoretical exploration of civic engagement. These courses intentionally focus on issues related to democracy, civic engagement, or systems change, and may include case studies, scenarios, and class visits from scholars, community, and business leaders outside of Carleton.

Academic Civic Engagement Research

  • Students can work with individual faculty members on faculty-led ACE research projects with a community partner. These projects are initiated and directed by a faculty member, are for-credit, and are often worked on as a longer-term project with partners that can be more than one term. These can be either individual or group projects, depending on the needs of the faculty member.

ACE Learning Objectives

  • Understanding issues in their real-world complexity
  • Recognizing and honoring different forms of knowledge that may reside in/with community partners
  • Awareness of your positionality, or who you are as you seek to do civic engagement efforts (such as gender, race, socioeconomic background, ability, and level of formal education)
  • Doing — how can you take your course content and do something with it beyond the classroom while learning in the process?
  • Developing leadership skills
  • Nurturing a commitment to life-long civic engagement

In the 2024–25 academic year, Carleton offered 80 ACE courses:

  • 27% Theoretical / 73% Applied
  • 73% of the class of ’23 took at least one ACE course

Sample ACE Courses

All academic departments at Carleton can offer ACE courses, and most departments have at least one ACE course. You can search for ACE courses in Workday by choosing ACE Applied and ACE Theoretical under “course tags.”

These are three ACE courses that were offered in 2024-25.

Immunology (Biology 310)

Professor: Debby Walser-Kuntz

Community Partners: Community Action Center, HOPE Center, Young Chefs, SHAC, OHP

Issues: Role of the immune system in defense, allergic reactions, and autoimmunity

Contribution: Public health educational materials and resources for diverse audiences
Debby Walser-Kuntz

Intro to Indigenous Histories (History 116)

Professor: Meredith McCoy

Community Partner: Hocokata Ti, Shakopee Mdewakanton Cultural Center

Issues: Indigenous histories in what is currently the United States, including settler colonialism and Indigenous sovereignty, resistance, and persistence

Contribution: Database clean-up in partnership with the Hoċokata Ti Collections and Archives team
Meredith McCoy

Southeast Asian Migration and Diasporic Communities (SOAN 125)

Professor: Cheryl Yin

Community Partner: Cambodian American Partnership of MN (CAPMN)

Issues: Post Vietnam War Southeast Asian refugee resettlement and current local cultural communities

Contribution: Oral history project with Cambodian Elders
Cheryl Yin