In first year seminars, students "react to the past," exploring through reading and role-playing, re-enacting (sometimes with different results) key historical moments, like the Constitution Convention, Independence in India, or the French Revolution.

In Community Writing, students collaborate with inmates at the Mitchellville Women's Correctional Facility, producing and publishing a collection of the women's writings.

In Business & Administrative Writing, students form a land use and management firm to re-conceive stores, storefronts, signage, logos, and layouts of University Avenue and the Drake area businesses, buildings, and green spaces to create a coherent, yet individualized, neighborhood attractive to consumers, residents, and investors/merchants.

In a course on the Salem Witch Trials, students re-stage the trials, taking on roles and using the actual court documents.

In Writing, Literacy, and Schooling students mentor students at a local high school.

Students in Teaching English as a Second Language engage in service learning, working with second language learners at local businesses, organizations, and schools.

More than half of the faculty have employed students, who have served as teaching assistants for their first year seminars.

Students and faculty work together on a variety of research projects, like the culture of science, or the truth and reconciliation hearings in South Africa, or curriculum reform, or cultural change in Iowa communities, just to name a few.

Each semester, students devise their own independent studies or internships, with topics ranging from "Homosexuality and the Theater," "Holocaust Literature" "Language Acquisition," "Teaching Shakespeare" or "How to Get an Internship at an Anime Company."