Are you anxious to study abroad but eager to begin your studies at Colorado College? First-year students at CC can benefit from the Fall Semester Away program, a half-semester program in Greece and Italy. The program begins with New Student Orientation and the CC100/120 sequence (also known as the First Year Program) on campus. Afterwards, blocks 3 and 4 will be held in Europe with CC professors and students joining you for an immersive experience abroad.

Shaping the Landscape: Reciprocal Relations Between Geography and Humanity

Shaping the Landscape: Reciprocal Relations Between Geography and Humanity is a critical analysis of the environment and multicultural societies, explored through reasoning, cultural identities, human behavior and textual and historical analysis and writing. The two-block sequence is exclusively designed for Colorado College students who want to experience all the best that CC has to offer under the Block Plan: an immersive learning experience in the context of place. The two blocks are designed to link analysis and interpretation of meaning and societies and human behavior, satisfying two critical inquiry across the curriculum requirements.

Course detail

CO121/EN280 - Literature, Place, and the World: Greek Environments
Block 3 on location in Greece

 “If you dissolve Greece, you will in the end see an olive tree, a grapevine, and a boat remain. That is, with as much, you can reconstruct her.” With these words from the Nobel Prize-winning poet Odysseas Elytis we will read literary masterpieces from antiquity and look for confirmation in the contemporary world. The environments of Greece, landscapes and seascapes, shaped the myths that endure into the twenty-first century as literature and as monuments. Students will explore the intersections of natural landscape, built landscapes in monumental structures, and myths. In the sacred spaces of the Athenian acropolis, the rich olive groves and vineyards of the Peloponnesos, and Homer's "wine-dark sea", we will come to understand the role the natural environment continues to play in the building of the human environments and the creation of "Hellenismos" or Greek identity. Satisfies the all college requirement of Historical Perspectives or Analysis and Interpretation of Meaning.

Lisa B. Hughes, Associate Professor of classical languages and literature, has a position split between English and Comparative Literature and teaches regularly in the FYP program. She has taught dozens of CC blocks abroad in Greece and Turkey including the World of Odysseus: History and Myth, Landscape, Monuments, and Myth, Gender Trouble on the Acropolis, Naked Olympics: The Spirit of Competition in Ancient Greece. As a senior member of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens she is currently at work on a book on Greece as a setting for Hollywood Romantic Comedies, The Greece Effect and the Rebirth of Romantic Comedy.

ED250 - Ecology, Resistance, and Liberation
Block 4 on Location in Rome and Florence, Italy

What shapes a society? This course is set in two distinct, yet historically important cities in Italy. We transition from Athens to Rome and examine what it means to give a voice to narratives where fixed borders are the constructs of parochialism. Maps are never innocent and only represent the ideological topographies of those in power. As we venture from Rome to Florence, we develop a new paradigm from the old, to form a new, personal ontology that incorporates social, political, economic, and personal values. We develop a deeper understanding of the relationship between the inquirer and the object of the inquiry, including ethical concerns that arise from subjectivity. The goal of this course is to raise students’ critical consciousness to Earth and societies through epistemology, ontology, and praxis; to give a voice to the forces, signs, wounds, and messages dispersed upon the political ecology, always keeping in mind the link between ecologies is grounded in cultural, political, and physical systems that give rise to conflict and resolution. All-College Requirement:  societies and human behavior

Mike Taber, Professor of Education and Environmental Science, has a passion for understanding the how societies form from the human capacity to join groups, to learn in social contexts, and embrace and surrender our individuality in order to feel part of a collective. Mike has worked for nearly 28 years on the topic of education and climate change, focusing on interpretation of data through the lens of the proletarian, particularly as climate change effects social systems. His teaching interest is the result of many years of focusing on how scientists, philosophers, cognitive scientists, and educational researchers construct new pedagogies for extended learning progressions, particularly in historically rich contexts such as Italy.

For information about Fall Semester Away, please contact Allen Bertsche.

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