Kresge College

Kresge College Administration Building
831-459-2071
https://kresge.ucsc.edu

Academic Programs

Academic Emphasis

Kresge was the sixth college to be built on the UC Santa Cruz campus. The college was founded on principles of participatory democracy and experiential education, with a set of core values that remain integral to its academic and co-curricular activities and student organizations: creativity, sustainability, collaboration.

Kresge College is a living-learning community that strives to blend the promise of a traditional liberal arts college with its distinctive and prominent legacy of experimental and interdisciplinary education. Its curriculum is designed to create opportunities for community-building, community-strengthening, and personal growth, to foster creative and critical thinking about the world we live in, to cultivate good citizenship, and to facilitate stewardship of a just and sustainable society.

Kresge’s academic curriculum emphasizes participatory learning, hands-on experience, and conscientious academic inquiry that transcends the walls of traditional classrooms. The wide-ranging topics of its curriculum include (but are not limited to) media studies, writers' workshops, transformative justice, natural history, journalism, and learning with intention. Kresge’s courses offer varied ways for Kresge students to fulfill general education requirements while broadening their educational experience by working within the company of dedicated and imaginative faculty.

All entering first-year students enroll in KRSG 1, Academic Literacy and Ethos: Power and Representation, a fall-quarter seminar that is the building block for students’ continued success at the university. The core course teaches foundational concepts for intellectual and personal development in an academic community—analysis, critical thinking, metacognition, engagement with others across difference, and self-efficacy—through a thematic focus on the power of education to imagine the world anew. The course is framed by four overarching questions: How did I get here? Why do I learn? From whom can I learn? And What kind of world do I want to help create?

Following that course, Kresge students have the option to extend their core learning in courses that deepen those questions into specific domains. KRSG 2, The Power of Filmmaking, explores how films represent and enact struggles for justice. KRSG 60C, Prison Narratives, analyzes systems of incarceration in the U.S. and explores movements to abolish those systems and envision alternative forms of justice. KRSG 25, Successful Transition to Research University (for transfer students), and KRSG 100, Learning with Intention and Purpose, enable students to carefully and consciously design their path at UCSC.

In KRSG 3, Natural History Practicum, students practice critical and empirical reflection in the shared multi-species ecology of the UC Santa Cruz campus. KRSG 65W, Creative Writing Workshop, offers students an opportunity for creative writing. In KRSG 67, Transformative Justice, students consider practices of restorative justice and collaborate on imagining campus justice practices anew. KRSG 51 and 52 are practicums for City on a Hill Press, the campus newspaper.

Students can collaborate with the provost to encourage developments to this curriculum, including proposing student-driven or student-led courses.

Orientation

All new frosh and transfer students who start fall quarter are required to enroll in one of two online orientation courses. Frosh will enroll in KRSG 1A, Kresge 1A: Introduction to University Life and Learning. Transfer students will enroll in KRSG 1T, Kresge 1T: Introduction to Research Universities and the Liberal Arts. KRSG 1A and KRSG 1T integrate introductions to academic skills with the online Slug Orientation process, and begin to prepare students for their studies at Kresge College and throughout UC Santa Cruz.

KRSG 1A Introduction to University Life and Learning (1 credit)

Offered online in summer quarter

KRSG 1T Introduction to Research Universities and the Liberal Arts (1 credit)

Offered online in summer quarter

Core Course

KRSG 1 Academic Literacy and Ethos: Power and Representation

Offered in fall quarter

Offered to entering frosh, Kresge’s core course, KRSG 1, Academic Literacy and Ethos: Power and Representation, teaches foundational concepts for intellectual and personal development in an academic community—analysis, critical thinking, metacognition, engagement with others across difference, and self-efficacy—through a thematic focus on the power of education to imagine the world anew. The course is framed by four overarching questions: How did I get here? Why do I learn? From whom can I learn? and What kind of world do I want to help create? Through a variety of media (books and articles, videos and short films, oral histories), students reflect on trajectories to college, including their own; the purpose of education; and the history and politics of UCSC and the local region. Throughout the course, students learn to read in different genres and formats, and to reflect on their reading and learning practices. Students also use the framing questions to produce a two-part multimedia project that tells the transformative story of someone important to them, combining text with other forms of expression. In addition to their seminar meetings, all students in KRSG 1 meet periodically with peer navigators—fellow Kresge students who model successful learning styles. The entire core cohort also meets periodically during the quarter for the required evening Plenary Series, guest lectures that deepen engagement on specific topics of the course. All students admitted as frosh are required to complete the core course. Students admitted as transfer students with sophomore standing or above (45 or more credits in transfer) are exempt from the core course requirement.

Visit Kresge Core Course for additional information about Kresge College academics, including core course requirements and other academic programs.

College Advising

kresgeadvising@ucsc.edu
Phone: 831-459-2071

Kresge has a team of three academic advisors who work collaboratively with students to support them as they explore majors, navigate university policy, clarify academic goals, and develop strategies for success. Kresge’s advisors serve as advocates for students who are experiencing institutional barriers to their success, while also upholding university policy when necessary.

Kresge’s advising staff conscientiously stays abreast of new research and best practices in the wider academic advising community. They celebrate and reflect the diversity of the Kresge student body and seek to model the goal of being lifelong learners.

College advisors work with students from Summer Orientation and Welcome Week through graduation, although much of the interaction is concentrated in the student’s first year or two on campus before they’ve declared a major. Students come to the College Office with all of their questions, and college advisors and front desk staff frequently facilitate connections with other campus resources as appropriate.

In addition to one-on-one in-person and virtual advising, Kresge’s advisors collaborate with the provost, Residence Life office, and campuswide academic and student support services to offer holistic programming. Past workshops have covered topics such as options for summer enrollment, how to choose a major, and finding family away from home.

Other Academic Programs

Kresge is a rich and multidimensional academic community, uniquely oriented toward media studies and creative communication, participatory democracy and collaborative leadership, and ecological ethics and sustainability.

Kresge is home to Media and Society, a collaborative student-faculty initiative that takes up questions of justice and the role of various forms of media in exposing injustice and imagining the world otherwise. Media and Society hosts public lectures and workshops, and works with City on a Hill Press (the campus newspaper) and Writers House (a Kresge residential community) to bring journalists, writers, and artists to campus. Kresge is also home to a series of student-led initiatives, including City on a Hill Press, the Third World And Native American Students Collective Press (TWANAS), and the Kresge Garden Co-Op, as well as the Kresge Writing Center (a west-campus home of the UC Santa Cruz Writer’s Society, Matchbox Press, Red Wheelbarrow, and the Creative Writing Archives).

College Scholars Program

Kresge College participates in the UC Santa Cruz College Scholars Program (CSP), a stimulating home for highly motivated students to have community with like-minded peers during their first and second years as they explore research at a research university. The program recruits and supports a diverse cohort of College Scholars across all five academic divisions and all ten colleges who show potential to cultivate academic and non-academic strengths in a learning community. Between 20 and 25 students are housed in close proximity in each college and together participate in an enriched program of study designed to prepare them to take advantage of opportunities for undergraduate research at the upper division. Across four quarters, students have access to supplementary activities, special courses, small seminars, and a faculty research colloquium to explore what questions drive researchers and what forms research can take. To facilitate participation in these program requirements, CSP students receive priority enrollment during their time in the program.