Course Description
Facing History, Democracy, and Ourselves is an interdisciplinary Honors study abroad course exploring democracy as a dynamic and contested practice through immersive travel in Greece and Poland. Students examine the origins of democracy in ancient Greece alongside contemporary efforts to defend democratic values in Poland by engaging historical sites, museums of memory, and civic institutions. Guided by Design Thinking, the course integrates historical inquiry, arts-based reflection, and civic design to foster ethical responsibility, democratic imagination, and global citizenship.
This course targets SDGs 16 & 17. It invites students to move beyond learning about democracy to practicing how democratic values are understood, challenged, and renewed across time and place. By engaging directly with historical landscapes and contemporary civic actors in Greece and Poland, students develop the insight, empathy, and ethical awareness needed to navigate democratic challenges in their own communities. The purpose of the course is to cultivate reflective, globally minded citizens who can connect historical memory to civic responsibility and imagine creative, just responses to the democratic questions of our time.
The course aims to help students develop:
- Empathy: understanding experiences different from their own
- Historical perspective, seeing pattern across time and context
- Systemic thinking, understanding how structures shape individual experiences
- Comfort with complexity, resisting simple narratives about people and places
- Civic agency, believing they can take action to make change
For more information on the travel portion of the two-semester program, please refer to its Study Abroad page.