Led by top scholars and practitioners in their fields, these first semester courses connect students to the city of Chicago and encourage reflection on those experiences with a cohort of student peers. Students investigate aspects of Columbia College Chicago's diverse urban and cultural setting. Courses introduce students to different learning environments, issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and deeper ways of engaging the urban contexts and communities of Chicago.
Section 01: The Shapes of Chicago
Taught by: Beth Davis-Berg and Chris Shaw (Design)
Tuesdays 12:30-3:20pm, 618, #207
The shapes and forms that make up a city have been designed with a purpose: architects and engineers may design buildings with stability in mind; artists may look for beauty and harmony; the natural processes that guide plant and animal growth aim for efficiency and utility. Shape and form designs can be incredibly complicated, informed by all of the elements above, as well as politics, history, and economics. In this class, we will explore the neighborhood maps, architecture, life, and other shapes that make up the urban city of Chicago. We will discuss how these shapes and forms are used together in both natural and man-made environments. How do shapes and forms change by neighborhood within the city, in the design of buildings, in interior design, and in furniture? Why are certain shapes better for certain tasks, and how have people interpreted the meaning of harmony in different ways? We will learn about some of the science and geometry that govern the shapes and forms we study, take photos, and create notebooks that document our observations and reflections on shapes in the city. We will go on field trips around the city and document these trips in our journals. We will do work individually and in groups to learn about these topics. Students will present on their research and take photos of shapes and forms found around the city.
Section 02: Haunted House
Taught by: Jerry Brindisi (Business and Entrepreneurship)
Wednesdays 9:00-11:50am, 618, #LL01
Visitor attractions are a driving component of entertainment and tourist destinations. This course will examine various attraction types, markets, operations, and management. Students will learn about themed attractions and storytelling, marketing strategies, as well as safety, security, and risk management. World-class attractions in Chicago will be presented and visited. Students will have the opportunity to participate in the planning, production, and operation of a functioning haunted house attraction as part of Chicago’s Arts in the Dark and Halloween celebrations.
Section 03: Ecosystem of Chicago Comedy
Taught by: Grace Overbeke (Theatre and Dance)
Tuesdays 9:00-11:50am, 618, #207
Chicago is a comedy hub of the United States, especially when it comes to improvisation. This course will introduce students to the vibrant world of Chicago comedy, which includes sketch comedy, improvisation, theatre, stand-up, and more. Through team-learning activities, presentations, comedy writing exercises, and field trips (using public transit), students will learn to navigate their way around the Chicago comedy scene, and analyze how the many comedy clubs, artists, schools, and institutions contribute to the city.
Section 04: Everything is a Photograph
Taught by: Ross Sawyers (Visual Arts)
Tuesdays 9:00-11:50am, 618, #LL02
Since its inception, photography has and continues to change our understanding of the world around us and it is estimated that 3.2 billion photographs are uploaded to various online platforms every day. Using the city of Chicago as a backdrop, we will explore some of the most photographed locations in the city such as Cloud Gate (aka “The Bean”) as well as more obscure locations in Chicago. Through making photographs with our cell phone cameras, and reading about and looking at photographs, we will investigate how photography reshapes our understanding of reality and reshapes our understanding of place, ourselves, and each other.
Section 05: Haunted Stockyards
Taught by: Taylor Hokanson (Visual Arts)
Tuesdays 9:00-11:50am, 623, #807A
In this class, we'll work collaboratively to map the incredible diversity of cultural events and neighborhoods that define the city of Chicago, including the famous Chicago Union Stockyards. A major part of this class will be creating masks inspired by this research and performing them at Arts in the Dark, a citywide Halloween parade that draws an audience in the tens of thousands.
Section 06: Chicago Arts Support Systems
Taught by: Alexis Pride (Communication and Culture)
Tuesdays 3:30-6:20pm, 618, #LL02
This course investigates how Chicago's arts communities demonstrate that creativity thrives amid strong support networks, shared identity, and cross-pollination of ideas. Acting as cultural laboratories and engines for social change, these communities reveal how creative ecosystems drive innovation. Students will analyze support systems for artists—past and present—with Chicago’s artistic mecca at the center. Historical precedents include Paris in the 1920s and Harlem during its cultural renaissance. Students will research institutions—foundations, community art centers, salons, clubs, and informal networks—that provide funding, instruction, exhibition space, and peer collaboration. By examining art emerging from these environments, students will assess how support structures shape style and subject matter and spur cultural innovation. The course emphasizes that art is never isolated, but rooted in community, infrastructure, and shared purpose.
Section 07: Haunted Chicago
Taught by: Terence Brunk (Communication and Culture)
Tuesdays 12:30-3:20pm, 600, #306
Dare you enter? The ghosts of Chicago are waiting for you! Step across the creaking threshold and into the cobwebbed corners of our haunted city. We’ll explore Chicago’s most chilling legends and infamous ghostly tragedies – from Resurrection Mary and the Devil Baby of Hull House to the reported supernatural echoes of the Eastland disaster and the Iroquois Theater fire – to consider how tales of haunting and horror reflect the anxieties, struggles, and resilience of Chicago’s many diverse communities. On our journey, we’ll visit locations celebrated for rumored paranormal activity and cursed by the poignant catastrophes they witnessed. We’ll blend our experiences of the city with eerie readings, architecture analysis, investigations of the psychology of horror, and artistic representations of the uncanny and macabre. You’ll draw from these materials as you collaborate with each other to make creative projects of your own – possessed objects, protective charms, ghastly tales, dramatic spirit summonings, or other manifestations of your spookiest musings about the city, its rich culture, and its collective memory. Through the projects you build, you’ll take part in Chicago's vibrant scene of imaginative expression that blurs the line between fact and phantasm. By connecting folklore, urban history, and contemporary creative practice, we’ll try to understand why tales of the supernatural refuse to die in Chicago - and how they continue to shape the city’s ever-evolving, ever-haunted urban identity.
Section 08: Musical Theatre in Chicago
Taught by: Amy Vargas Rivera (Theatre and Dance)
Tuesdays 3:30-6:20pm, 600, #306
Learn about the history and development of musical theatre in Chicago while exploring the rich theatrical traditions, key venues, and influential artists who have shaped the city's vibrant performance culture. In this course, you'll examine how social, cultural, and economic factors have contributed to Chicago’s role in the evolution of musical theatre. This class will help you build connections with other first semester students and engage with the Chicago theatre scene through local performances, institutions, and creative communities at Columbia and in Chicago's rich urban environment.
Section 09: Live Action Iliad: Chicago
Taught by: Bill Guschwan and Dave Gerding (Design)
Wednesdays 9:00-11:50am, 618, #207
What if your college class felt more like a game than a lecture? In this immersive live-action roleplaying (LARP) course, you turn the Iliad and the city of Chicago into a living, playable experience. You step into roles inspired by Achilles and Hector, navigating alliances, rivalries, and high-stakes decisions that unfold across real spaces. Instead of sitting through lectures, you move, collaborate, negotiate, and compete in scenarios where your choices shape what happens next. You use Chicago itself as your game world, exploring its architecture and environments as systems of design and power. As you play, you don’t level up with points—you develop your own character, building emotional intelligence, self-awareness, and agency. You work in teams, face challenges that evolve in real time, and learn how to operate under pressure, lead, and adapt. Along the way, you use AI as a creative partner to explore ideas, test strategies, and reflect on your decisions, while remaining the author of your own experience. By playing through the Iliad as a system of human behavior, you gain practical tools for navigating your college experience with greater clarity, confidence, and purpose.
Section 10: Carnival Art: Chicago Stories
Taught by: Lisa Gonzales (Theatre and Dance)
Wednesdays 12:30-3:20pm, 618, #LL01
This collaborative, hands-on class invites you to bring a section of Chicago’s Arts in the Dark parade to life! Together, we’ll explore shared histories that celebrate artists and art-making and connect Chicago’s vibrant cultural celebrations such as the Bud Billiken Parade, Mexican Independence Day Parade, and Puerto Rican Parade with processions like New Orleans’ Mardi Gras, Mexico City’s Day of the Dead, and Rio De Janeiro’s Carnival. Through puppet and mask making, costume building, and procession choreography and dance, students will transform their experiences into a dynamic public spectacle for the Arts in the Dark parade. We’ll craft large multi-person puppets, masks, and costumes that embody the rich tapestry of student experiences within Chicago's cultural landscape, experiencing how movement and objects can act as powerful vessels for community connection and transformation. Rooted in the rhythmic ties between celebrations across the Americas, local artists and neighborhood partners, this class offers a chance to make, dance, and celebrate your place in Chicago’s living cultural story.
Section 11: Natural Chicago
Taught by: Lisa Fishman (Communication and Culture)
Wednesdays 3:30-6:20pm, 600, #306
Although Chicago is the third-largest city in the U. S., it is also a place of richly diverse ecosystems, landscapes, and waterscapes that can look and feel nearly untouched by human intervention. Even within walking distance, we will explore sites, paths, woods, and shores that confirm this statement by the Chicago Parks District: “From rich pond life teeming with frogs, herons, and dragonflies, to dense shrublands where birds stop to rest or nest, to lush prairies filled with native grasses and wildflowers, there are many places to find nature across the city.” This class involves a significant amount of walking and being outside as we consider natural areas as urban oases and their effect on human well-being. Is it true that immersion in non-human-made nature can “reduce stress and increase imaginative play”? Let’s find out. We will meet people deeply committed to the preservation of the city’s ecological health, such as an urban beekeeper/farmer and others involved with urban agriculture. You’ll learn about opportunities for volunteering with the Community Stewardship Program, NeighborSpace, and other organizations in the city. This section is taught by a poet who is also a farmer, so we will sometimes incorporate creative writing and poetry, as well as tech-free experiments, into our experiential study of natural Chicago. NOTE: It’s important to be aware that this class entails a lot of time outside in various kinds of weather and environments, with walking distances of up to 4 miles per class period, or two hours total of walking—such as to the hidden gem, Northerly Isle. (Extra belongings will be secured in the locked classroom during our frequent excursions).
Section 12: Celebration as Urban Culture
Taught by: Jeanne Petrolle (Communication and Culture)
Thursdays 9:00-11:50am, 618, #207
Parties, parades, festivals, and other joyful events allow communities to give visible form to values, ideas, identities, and connectedness. Chicago is home to many communities, which we will learn about this semester through their celebrations. In addition to learning about Chicago's Chinese New Year, St. Patrick's Day, Bud Billiken, and Pride parades, you will have opportunities in this class to experience Chicago's Annual Native American Powwow and Pilsen’s Día de los Muertos processions and ofrendas, which make Native American and Mexican identities and cultural values visible. You will also have an opportunity to participate in Chicago's 11th Annual Arts in the Dark Halloween parade, which takes place on Saturday, October 18, from 6-8 p.m., celebrating creativity as a central value and showcasing an identity that unites Columbia's community of creatives. As a class, we will also help plan the rocking after-party Columbia hosts following the celebration.
Section 14: Chicago Feminists
Taught by: Mel Potter (Visual Arts)
Thursdays 12:30-3:20pm, 618, #LL02
Women-identified people have shaped the history of Chicago for centuries - from The Janes, to Mary Blood, the founder of Columbia College Chicago. Come on a journey to uncover an emerging history that will inspire your practice and engage your passion for purpose. We will plan tours including the Jane Addams Hull House Museum, the Field Museum, and the Women’s History Museum, among many others. As this is an evolving history, you will help shape the class with your research and objectives. What is missing from the Chicago Feminist landscape? What is the story you wish to tell? How can we create a more intersectional future with women-identified people properly recognized for their power, conviction, and creativity? Through our work together, we will produce a zine for distribution reflecting your contribution to the story of Chicago Feminists.
Section 15: Haunted Cinema
Taught by: Ted Hardin (Film and Television)
Thursdays 3:30-6:20pm, 600, #306
From early cinema to present day, the working-class city of Chicago has been a prominent setting and filming location for horror films and television shows. Urban hustle and bustle combined with tales of the supernatural in iconic films ranging from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1908), Candyman (1992), Perpetrator (2024) and television shows The Beginning of the End (1957), Shining Girls (2022), Dark Matter (2024) suggests that Chicago is as mysterious as many of its dark alleyways beneath the city. Through visits to film locations, reenacting scenes using smart-phone cinema techniques, organizing footage into short presentations and cinematic essays, students of all majors will document activities and even share their experiences during the Arts in the Dark parade happening in October. Additional course excursions will intersect with Mexico's Day of the Dead Parade in Chicago, Chicago Horror Film Festival, discussions with programmers for Music Box of Horrors, and guest visits by local horror film directors - all to explore the dynamics of fear and anxiety that inform many horror films from the safety of our classroom.
Section 16: Art and Design in Chicago
Taught by: Greg Foster-Rice (Visual Arts)
Fridays 12:30-3:20pm, 600, #306
This course will orient you to Chicago and get you started as a young creative through field trips to museums, galleries, and cultural centers across the whole city. For about half of our weeks we will travel across the city to explore, understand, and engage with historic and contemporary art and design objects in a process of hands-on inquiry and experiential learning. In the classroom we will use visits from guest speakers across campus, small group discussions, and group/individual projects to address your general orientation to Chicago and transition to college, as well as topics like the role of cities as cultural incubators, the importance of images in understanding cities, the role of art and design as a tool for empowering diverse communities, and your role in Chicago’s current art and design culture. Whatever your major, we promise to incorporate and engage your interests and their intersection with art, design, and visual culture.