The Courses

There’s no feeling as a learner to match what it is to stand above Omaha Beach in the American military cemetery there, as your History class walks you where the brave soldiers of D-Day fought and fell to launch the liberation of the European continent. In this course, you’ll have that experience. Along with a full week in London to explore how that great city and citizens experienced the battlefront when it came to them with the horrors of “the blitz.” Finally, as you walk the quiet streets of Paris where the Jewish ghetto had thrived for centuries, you’ll have your feet on the cobblestones of what was occupied France from June 1940 until August 1944. What was occupation like? How did the Holocaust happen to French Jews? What did the French do to resist the Nazi occupation? And why was the greatest film ever made about this time period called “The Sorrow and the Pity?” You’ll have other great college courses to be sure, but you’ll never learn with your whole heart and soul like you will with us in London, Normandy and Paris on this special learning adventure.

When students finish college and go on to their busy professional lives, plenty of things are forgotten from four years on campus. This course will see to it that almost nothing you see and do on your study-abroad summer with us will fail to live into the future. Because if there’s ever been a time when sophisticated visual story telling has mattered to the brands we love and the brands we are, that time is now. In our course, you’ll take two weeks to learn how to see beauty all around you and to capture that beauty. London and Paris will be your classrooms each day, as our class uses museums, galleries, streets, parks and outsider art/street art to change forever how you use your own visual fluency and images to tell the story of your life and of the world around you. Warning: your Instagram and Snap followers might just come to hate you after seeing the world of London and Paris through your images. Click here to the the Shutterspeed 2017 syllabus (1)

William Shakespeare has been rightly called the greatest writer in the English language. What’s less know about is the sweep his works have enjoyed for centuries beyond the English speaking world or the merry olde England where he was the ultimate “player.” As we read his plays and sonnets and attend productions of his works, we will seek each day to understand who Shakespeare was and why his genius has spoken so powerfully for centuries to both the powerful and the oppressed.

Part of searching for Shakespeare will mean walking along the once-seamy South Bank of the Thames in London, where in the “Bard’s” era bawdy theatre, fire eating and bear baiting were popular amusements to enjoy before going to The Globe for a performance of Hamlet.  While our course will take a day to visit Stratford-upon-Avon, where Shakespeare was born and died. What can we learn about the writer from his own will and testament? How can we meet his genius more intimately by seeing where he lived and wrote? Part of our search will also feature the green spaces of London and what it feels like to sit in them and passionately unpack some of the most lyrical and hilarious lines ever written in our native tongue.

Finally our course will take a global view on the majestic legacy of the international settings and controversial play stagings that have been the history of many of Shakespeare’s works. As we explore how his history plays in particular were performed all along the western front in France during World War One. And the life that his works enjoyed in France under the Nazi occupation, as covert performances became resolute reminders that eventually liberation from and victory over Hitler would come. And how he imagined a great city like Paris–where we’re quite sure he never visited other than in texts and images–with sufficient clarity and conviction to write it as he needed it to be written for his plays to be effective.

Our class gets our hands dirty, as we muck around the dig sites of the old Rose and Curtain theaters. While we also clean our hearts of some of the clutter and confusion that we all carry with us in life. Because from London to Stratford to Normandy and Paris, we’ll search for clarity and the eternal in our quest to know the sources and the scope of William Shakespeare’s stunning genius and literary reach.

Madness has been conceptualized in many ways over the centuries. From the iconic statues of “Raving and Melancholy Madness” that stood outside of Bedlam in the 17th century; to the fits and poses of the “hysterics” in Charcot’s La Salpetriere; to the mute soldiers of the Great War suffering from “shell shock”; to modern day notions of “mental illness”. This class travels to these historic institutions and takes a close-up look at the connections between trauma and the development of human problems over the centuries. The course also explores what social psychology teaches us regarding the development of historic political movements like the French Revolution? This course will use social psychological concepts to analyze these movements, the coming to power of individuals like Napoleon, and Robespierre and the various methods and workings of propaganda during the eras of the two world wars. An analysis that informs not only the past, but current political movements and world leaders as well, Hysteria–as we explore trauma, propaganda, and leadership, will definitely not be your typical psychology class. But then, London and Paris are far indeed from you normal classrooms! And neither are the D-Day landing beaches, where we’ll study first-hand the battlefield context for what what would be called “battle fatigue” in the era of World War Two.

Vast bodies of research have shown that the negative stories we tell ourselves are contrary to our own wellness. Similarly, it’s well documented that higher expressions of personal and collective wellness can correlate with the mindful practice of everyday life. This course explores how positive psychology is understood and developed in the UK and France by various governmental and institutional entities today.

One wintery afternoon in 1943 at the greatest university in Munich, a college student named Sophie Scholl walked nervously into the central administration building and climbed the stairs. From the top floor, she leaned out over the bannister and dropped hundreds of clandestinely printed leaflets that called for the end of Hitler’s regime and the Nazi party. Sophie Scholl made history that day. She paid for it not long after, when she was guillotined as a member of a secret cell of youthful resistants called the White Rose. Her final words carry with them the generous if tragic promise of a young woman no longer innocent of the life and death stakes of political engagement: “It’s such a find sunny day, and I I have to go. But what does my death matter if through us thousands are awakened and stirred to action?”

Can a small group of college students change their society? What can ordinary people do to bring about social change? What can and have young people done to disrupt existing power and order? In this exciting travel study course we will engage with and be inspired by brilliant and bold young people who challenged power and changed our world. We will meet in coffee shops, museums, and parliaments to discuss youth political movements and revolts. Through site visits and cultural experiences in Berlin and Prague, we will enrich our understanding of youth culture and the vitally important politics of rebellion.

Our course will look closely at the hard history and politics of the later Nazi period, through the rise of the Cold War and the Soviet Bloc. As we explore the ways in which Individuals in every society are enmeshed in powerful political, social and economic systems that are resistant to change, while we look at the architecture and apparatuses of that power as they existed in Berlin and Prague from 1943 – 1989. Our main focus, though, will not be the political tactics of power and the status quo in those places and in that era. Rather, we will give our closest attention to the heroic and sometimes doomed young people who banded together against all odds to challenge these systems. We will read their essays, look at their acerbic political cartoons and trace the evolution of their organizational energies.  While  we walk where they marched, sat-in and picketed, we’ll consider, too, how our own historic age today is seeing a proliferation of youth protest and demands for change, from memes posted online to twitter storms of every flavor. This course offers an exploration of youth culture and politics of revolt in a specific time and place. Yet our larger goals will be to examine the origins, dynamics, strategies, organizational tendencies and consequences of youth protest as a social movements in a very general sense.

No cities on Earth offer a more rich setting to ask our questions than Berlin and Prague. We’ll have class in the former headquarters of the Gestapo, where heroic student dissidents were tortured to death. We’ll see other sites of institutional power that were used to silence dissent and rebellion, including Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp and the most notorious of all the Soviet era prisons in Berlin. As we use the monuments and memory sites as our classrooms, too, we’ll stop in Prague’s breathtaking old town and stand where the Soviet tanks rumbled through and butchered the high hopes of the Prague Spring. While we take the rest of the city to assess carefully how Communism was ultimately destroyed by the very forces that crushed the Berlin Wall in 1989.

In its long and sometimes terrible history, the city of Berlin has known claims of fake and real news more fully than almost anywhere on earth. Our class will walk right into the darkest history of propaganda and a state-controlled media as we explore media history in Berlin during the Nazi and Soviet-bloc eras. We’ll also explore the counter history to those repressive eras, as we interrogate how liberation struggles and resistance movements used media under the Third Reich and when the Berlin Wall cast its horrible shadows all across the globe. Then we’ll explore what media has become in its modern moment in Europe, as we use edgy content companies, PR firms, radio and TV stations and more as our roving classrooms in both Berlin and Prague. This course meets General Education Breadth requirements in the Social Sciences for students at the University of West Florida.

Few classrooms can compare to Berlin and Prague when it comes to studying Nazism and the Holocaust. Berlin was the epicenter of the New Order that Hitler built, and the vestiges of the 1933-1945 era remain very present here.  From the museum that stands today where Gestapo Headquarters were in the Nazi era to the roll call field at Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, our class will walk the terrible trail that was the path of the Nazis and their war against the Jews and others whom the regime deemed “undesirable.”  From Berlin, we will go as the Nazis did and follow their swath of occupation and murder East, to the Jewel of former Czechoslovakia, Prague.  Where Hitler and Himmler installed their most trusted and brutal soldier. General Reinhard Heydrich, to govern the conquered city and the “protectorate” of which it was the centerpiece. And where the covert mission “Anthropoid” crystallized in the 1942, in the assassination of Heydrich.  We will study how the Nazi occupation worked, as we also explore how resistance movements grew up in Prague and elsewhere, as we take as our classrooms such hallowed places as the village of Lidice, the Cathedral of St. Cyril and St. Methodius and Prague Castle itself. Click here to review the 2017 syllabus for Nazism and the Holocaust Syllabus (1) (1)

Camera optics were originally not fast enough to keep up with the human smile. By the time that changed, the pace of modern life had increased to a frenzied degree that nobody could have imagined when photography began. If you love art, museums, cameras and photography, this course should be at the heart of your Catalyst journey. As you traverse The Catalyst cities, you will make galleries, museums, urban ruins, monuments and the hidden vestiges of Europe’s complicated past your unforgettable classrooms, while you take time to delve deeply into the techniques of art photography and prepare a professional-grade portfolio from the images you shoot. Click here to review the Multiple Exposures 2017 syllabus (1)

Fascism. Communism. Totalitarianism. Nationalism. Existentialism. Cubism. Dadaism. Surrealism. To the student of culture in the 20^th century, it would seem that the century was driven by belief systems and movements that controlled art and politics. The individual caught in the force and current of these movements often had few options for survival; the currents of destruction and terror and isolation seemed overwhelming. This course examines these historical forces, but more importantly, it looks at the human response to these historical forces: the attempt on the part of the individual to maintain some semblance of routine and normality, the attempt on the part of the individual to maintain some sense of self and individuality, the attempt on the part of the individual to maintain some sense of meaning and purpose. Click here to review our Being and Nothingness Syllabus 2017 (1)