Experiential Learning Opportunities
Experiential learning is the process in which students engage in the field of history through hands-on, direct experiences outside of the classroom. This includes participating in oral and public history projects, contributing to digital archives and historical databases, and exploring historical sites through study abroad programs and internships. By participating in experiential learning opportunities, students build community, develop practical skills, and enhance their overall undergraduate experience. Current and past experiential learning opportunities are shared below. To learn about more opportunities, visit the Humanities Division’s Employing Humanities website.
Egypt, Ancient to Modern, the Undergraduate Student Travel and Experiential Fellowship Program
Egpyt, Anicent to Modern, the Undergraduate Student Travel and Experiential Fellowship Program offered students the chance to study the deep history of Egypt from the ancient world through the modern. In preparation for the trip, students enrolled in two upper division courses on Egyptian history, HIS 156C (Living the History of Cairo) and HIS 159C (Temple and City: The Egyptian New Kingdom and the City of Thebes). Following exams, students flew together to Egypt and visited Cairo and Luxor, two of Egypt’s most iconic cities. Site visits and experiences were closely tied into content from course instruction, enhancing classroom learning and providing a life-changing opportunity to interact in-person with the built environment of the past.
video credit: Jaxon Chester, UCSC Film & Digital Media and Global Economics '24
The Intra-American Slave Trade Database
The Intra-American Slave Trade Database is a research tool that documents more than 28,000 trading voyages that forcibly moved hundreds of thousands of enslaved people between locations in the Americas. The database spans the hemisphere, including journeys as far north as Newfoundland and as far south as Argentina. Many of the people trafficked were African-born individuals in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most of whom were recent survivors of the infamous Middle Passage across the Atlantic, forced to endure subsequent journeys in the Americas. Other captives in traffic, especially in the nineteenth century, were American-born individuals, uprooted from the families and communities they built under slavery as traders moved them to different American regions as slavery evolved and expanded. The project was cofounded by historians Gregory E. O’Malley (UCSC) and Alex Borucki (UCI), and the database is freely available to researchers and the general either online or as a downloadable spreadsheet. To enhance accessibility, the website is available in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.
video credit: Jaxon Chester, UCSC Film & Digital Media and Global Economics '24
Okinawa Memories Initiative (OMI)
Launched in 2014, the Okinawa Memories Initiative (OMI) is a public history project driven by a spirited collaboration of students, faculty, alumni, researchers, oral historians, and artists based at UC Santa Cruz with partnerships with Cal State Monterey Bay, Cal State East Bay, and the University of The Ryukyus. OMI employs methodologies of experiential learning and community service to explore the dramatic changes in life, society and environment experienced by the islanders in the aftermath of the Battle of Okinawa. Training and employing undergraduate and graduate students to do oral history interviews, archival research and processing, and media production in collaboration with partners in Okinawa and among the Okinawan diaspora in North America, OMI has conducted 7 research exhibitions on historical photography and 30 oral histories in Okinawa and California to date. OMI also is organizing and digitizing the collections of the Okinawa Association of America in Gardena, CA. In 2024, OMI launched a multi-year food history project.
video credit: Jaxon Chester, UCSC Film & Digital Media and Global Economics '24
Watsonville is in the Heart (WIITH)
Watsonville is in the Heart (WIITH) is a research initiative between the University of California, Santa Cruz and The Tobera Project, a Filipino community organization based in nearby Watsonville. Launched in early 2021, the initiative seeks to document, preserve, and uplift the history of the first Filipino settlers and farmworkers to arrive to California’s Pajaro Valley in the early twentieth century. Upon U.S. colonization of the Philippines, tens of thousands of Filipinos voyaged across the Pacific to work in agricultural fields and plantations in Hawai‘i and along the United States’ western seaboard. Today, the descendants of these first migrants are working with UCSC faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates to ensure that their families’ stories are cared for and publicly remembered.
WIITH prides itself in its ethics of co-creation. Its researchers work to fulfill this by partnering with community members, who co-create the research direction, content, and principal objectives of the initiative. Based on visions of WIITH’s community partners, WIITH has developed a digital archive of oral histories and family collections, high school-level curricular materials based on Philippine and local Filipino American history, and an arts and history exhibition set to debut in Spring 2024. These projects also engage students at every stage, giving students the opportunity to enact their own agency as oral historians, digital archivists, curriculum developers, and exhibit curators.
For opportunities to get involved with WIITH, please email wiith@ucsc.edu and Professor Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez at gutierrezk@ucsc.edu.
video credit: Jaxon Chester, UCSC Film & Digital Media and Global Economics '24
