Undergraduate Overview Major/Minor Requirements Forms Student Projects
Scholars & Awards Engaged Study Video: Undergraduate Program

Engaged Study experiences are essential components of the AmCS curriculum and also of our students' intellectual development. The major requires six units of Engaged Study in the form of directed research, directed fieldwork, collaborative research, or some combination of these, while the minor allows students to pursue these same opportunities in fulfillment of their multidisciplinary course requirement.

Whether working individually--participating in a research practicum, a service-learning course, or a place-based summer seminar--or working as part of a team on a collaborative project, AmCS students acquire vital research, field and analytical skills that serve them throughout their lives. Engaged Study moves them beyond the classroom, fostering cultural knowledge and intellectual independence, and enhancing multidisciplinary study of their subject. At the end of an Engaged Study project, each student produces a paper or presentation that describes their experience--research questions asked and answered, conclusions reached, possible future inquiry, etc.--for the purposes of reflection, as well as to guide other participants and future students.

Students should work with their AmCS faculty advisor and the Academic Coordinator (Dr. Heidi Kolk) to identify Engaged Study opportunities that are available and suited to them. All such opportunities must be pre-approved by the Academic Coordinator before a student may register for the course or receive academic credit.

Engaged Study opportunities generally fall into one or more of the following categories:

• Individual Projects.These projects challenge students to develop their own ideas and research questions, and to seek a fuller understanding of the relationship between academic work and other forms of cultural knowledge. Many students have taken these opportunities to explore possible careers or to connect their academic experiences to their lives beyond the university. Others have sought to deepen or extend their study of culture through a program of directed study guided by an advisor who helps them develop new perspectives on their subject of research.

• Archival Projects. These projects allow students to explore the ways that culture--texts, sites, people, places, ideas--have been captured and preserved in various collections, including digital, library and oral history archives. Past projects have ranged from digitizing the Wayman Map collection at the Missouri Historical Society to creating an on-line exhibit about land claims in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania to working with and cataloguing film content in the Henry Hampton archive.
  
  
• Collaborative Research Initiatives. AmCS develops research initiatives of its own and collaborates with a variety of partners. Students have been vital participants, bringing their own expertise and helping to generate new knowledge about culture. Past collaborations have involved work with the Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse, the St. Louis Circuit Court Historical Records Project (in partnership with the Missouri St. Archives and the St. Louis Court), the American Lives Project, and the Mapping Culture through Artifacts (Campbell House) Project. Typically each student not only contributes to the overall collaborative project, but uses the opportunity to engage in some individualized study based on the materials at hand.
   
  
• Directed Fieldwork. AmCS students work at various off-campus locations throughout the year and in the summer that are suited to directed fieldwork. This kind of Engaged Study is usually developed as a kind of formal internship, and allows students to gain important career experiences while considering an institution, organization or project in its cultural contexts. In the past, students have worked at many different sites and institutions, including law firms and museums, political advocacy groups and schools. All directed fieldwork must be pre-approved by the Academic Coordinator and your AmCS faculty advisor, and requires formal academic work:

  1) a daily journal (maintained throughout the internship);
  2) a 2-3 page summary of the directed fieldwork (completed at the end of the internship); and
  3) a 12-15 page paper that explores some aspect of the directed fieldwork in relationship to culture.
  
  The daily journal helps students to identify a topic of interest, and serves as a place to record observations, explore issues, collect data, and pose questions they might pursue with further research and reflection. The final paper can build directly on the fieldwork experience, but -– like the other Engaged Study options -– should also involve academic work on a cultural topic or issue with which your fieldwork is associated. Please fill out this form and send it to Dr. Heidi Kolk to begin that process.

• Senior Honors Thesis. All majors have the option of writing an honors thesis in AmCS. Although thesis projects are as varied as are the interests of our students, a thesis in AmCS should reflect a commitment to multidisciplinary inquiry of some cultural topic. Often, AmCS theses emerge out of students’ work within their major, but address questions about culture that are best answered by multidisciplinary research and/or which cannot be fully explored in their home department. Students interested in pursuing a thesis who are not sure where to begin should start by consulting the Academic Coordinator, Dr. Heidi Kolk, who can describe the process, help them identify a faculty sponsor and, if possible, connect them with other AmCS thesis writers who might read and respond to their work.