Grand Challenge Student Experiences
The Grand Challenge Seminars incorporate hands-on learning opportunities that ask students to think critically about complex problems in today’s society.
This section features a variety of student work and experiences from past Grand Challenge seminars, ranging from final projects and field trips to culinary experiences.
66-139: Reducing Conflict: Perceptions of Culture and Identity
Learning to reduce conflict requires an understanding of cultures and identities, and why and how society builds barriers between and among us. In this interdisciplinary course, students learned how to talk to each other and strangers about identity: its defining characteristics and how our bias influences our judgments, before even getting to know one another.
66-128: Palestinian and Israeli Food Cultures
This class filters Palestinian and Israeli history, culture and conflict through the lens of food. Topics range from regional and culinary history to gender roles in Israeli and Palestinian communities to the ways displacement and military occupation affect the production of produce.
Read "A Recipe for Understanding"
JOURNEYS INTO THE CULINARY LANDSCAPES OF ISRAEL AND PALESTINE: THE VIRTUES OF COTEACHING ON CONFLICT
66-137: You Make Me Sick: Causes and Consequences of Health Disparities
Why do some people live well into their nineties while others are more likely to die at an earlier age? The answer to this question can be more complex than one might think. Life expectancy can be influenced by a host of individual and population-level factors. This course is designed to critically examine the social factors research has found to impact individual and population health experiences.
View student field trip and projects
Read "First-Year Students Explore Drivers of Health Disparities"