Search for Summer 2026 Term Courses

This interdisciplinary course explores the history of New Mexico, from the pre-contact era to the present. In the first half of the class, we will consider New Mexico's successive and overlapping waves of human settlement, from Pueblo Indians, the Spanish empire, the Mexican Republic, and the United States, with particular attention to the complex relationships between Native peoples, Hispanos, and Anglo-Americans. Then we will turn to a handful of key topics that continue to define the so-called Land of Enchantment even today: religion and spirituality; the natural world (particularly New Mexico's scarce water resources); and its enduring cultural symbolism as reflected in literature and film. Carefully planned field trips will significantly enhance student learning.

The Taos campus allows for experiences in physical activity that the Dallas campus cannot. Using the unique surroundings allows the course to expose students to activities and areas they might never have considered participating in, ensuring that they learn how to properly prepare themselves to engage in those activities.

This course examines Native American, Spanish, and Anglo arts and cultures of the American Southwest between 100 CE and the 21st century. It considers the effects of ethnicity, gender, and community identity on regional art traditions and places artworks within their material, religious, political, and economic contexts. Astronomical alignments, water, earth and sky, spirits and saints, the living and their ancestors; these are among the themes in the art of the region. The course is designed for SMU Taos. Many class days include field trips or interactive projects. Films, readings, and PowerPoint slide talks set the stage for visits to artists' studios, archaeological sites, pueblos, churches, and museums. Hands-on art projects, collaborative projects, and engagement with the community help students understand the socio-political, religious, technical, and aesthetic qualities of the art and architecture we study in this class.My course has rigorous reading, writing, discussion, speaking, and collaborative project requirements that are well-suited to honors students as well as students outside the HP. My courses always include community engagement through field trips to a wide range of sites and personal contact with Native American, Hispanic, and other residents.

This introductory biology course for non-majors focuses on aquatic ecosystems of the American Southwest, exploring how life adapts to challenges like drought, seasonal change, and wildfire. The Taos campus is the ideal setting because students can move directly from class discussions into the field to collect data, observe biodiversity, and connect theory to real-world examples. Our main reading, A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold, blends ecology with history, literature, and ethics. Leopold served as Forest Supervisor of Carson National Forest in the early 1900s, and many essays reflect his time in New Mexico, helping students link science to the landscape around them. By combining fieldwork, place-based reading, and small-group learning, the course uses the unique setting of Taos to create an immersive and memorable experience.

Psychology and the Challenges of Life course is an upper level course that aims to discuss how life trajectories and outcomes are shaped by both our history and experiences (including life challenges and cultural differences) and our differences in personality. It tackles individual growth and life challenges through a scientific lens incorporating findings and theories from multiple disciplines within psychology (i.e., developmental, cognitive, personality, and clinical). These discussions have large implications for student’s own lives and other studies, but seeing some challenges play out with hands-on activities reinforces these lessons in ways that a traditional lecture course could not. For instance, on field trips, students see families, children, and community members from diverse backgrounds different from their own and through connections at Twirl, have a chance to talk with community leaders who support these families as they encounter obstacles such as access to food, education, and medical care. In addition, student’s ability to focus on a single class allows for more critical thinking focused on the challenges of life thereby allowing students to apply psychological science to their own life! Moreover, as noted above, Taos allowed our students to have a greater connect with us in a way that simply is not possible on campus. For example, voluntary activities we led such as team volleyball, campus star-gazing, a group walk to the dig site, hiking the trail to the peak behind campus, all helped provide additional hands-on learning experiences for our students who engaged in them. For instance, students told us the hike to the peak behind campus was one of the most difficult but fulfilling challenges they had ever overcome. As noted, based on student feedback we have worked to add more of experiential learning opportunities, decreasing the number of in-class assignments and increasing the number of field trips. This year, we also hope to further expose students to different forms of challenges by implementing visits to Pueblos or Earthships and add a historical context to understanding what a “challenge” is and for whom. That is, what is a “challenge” for SMU students and how they might tackle it may vary from what communities in Taos perceive as their biggest challenge and solutions to it.

This drawing course is intended to place students in a mode of deep observation. With Taos as the backdrop for inspiration, students will be given an opportunity to learn fundamental drawing skills while exploring the textures of the New Mexican landscape. While a typical introductory drawing course tends to rely on the objects brought into the studio, the Taos course is designed to maximize experiential learning outside the studio. This course will be about exploring the landscape. From a small pine cone to a forest of trees my intention is to give students an opportunity to really see what Taos looks and feels like. Interdisciplinary themes could be museum studies, creative writing (students will be asked to keep a sketchbook/journal) and environmental studies.

We generally do a field trip to the local datacenter (yes, Taos actually has a datacenter) along with the local internet service provider. These are things that uniquely enhance learning.

The Taos iteration of my PHIL 1318: Contemporary Moral Problems course (which has no pre-requisites and satisfies the PREI CC tag) is special because it focuses on environmental ethics and Native American ethics to take advantages of the opportunities to explore nature, sustainability, and Indigenous culture and history in Taos. We will be studying ethical theories (including the work of Viola Cordova, a Native American philosopher from Taos), and then applying these theories in practice to questions that focus on the natural world, including our relationship to the environment, climate change and sustainability, and animal ethics.To enhance this study, students will visit Taos Pueblo to reflect on Native American philosophical theories in practice, Weeping Willow Farm and/or Earthships to reflect on human efforts towards sustainability, and a nature site (either Bandolier or Williams Lake) to reflect on environmental ethics and how to best understand the value of the natural world. We will also spend some of our class time outdoors on the Taos campus observing nature during our regular class sessions.The themes in this course connect to other courses having to do with sustainability and environmental ethics, and I am very open to collaborating with other Taos faculty on lessons and/or field trips.

My proposed course, Nonprofits at Work in the Community, examines how community-based organizations mobilize resources, empower stakeholders, and address complex social issues. The course blends sociological theory, organizational analysis, and practical engagement, allowing students to understand how nonprofits operate at the intersection of public, private, and civic life.The Taos campus and June term format enhance this course in unique ways. The small cohort model and immersive residential setting provide the opportunity for sustained, focused engagement that is difficult to replicate in Dallas. Students will not only study the nonprofit sector in the abstract but also experience how Taos-based organizations address pressing local issues such as youth education, homelessness, food sovereignty, environmental justice, and community health. The compressed term format supports intensive service-learning, creating a sense of continuity between seminar discussions, cultural field trips, and community service sites.Experiential learning is intentionally built into the structure of the course. Students will volunteer with local nonprofits like the Dream Tree Project and Weeping Willow Farm, develop reflective service photo journals, and conduct applied research projects tied to Taos' community challenges. Field trips to sites such as Taos Pueblo, Earthships, and the Gorge Bridge complement classroom content by situating nonprofit action within the cultural, environmental, and historical dynamics of Northern New Mexico. These experiences provide students with direct contact with community leaders, youth advocates, and environmental organizers, encouraging them to integrate theoretical frameworks with lived realities.The course also incorporates interdisciplinary themes highly relevant to Taos. It connects sociology with environmental studies, public health, indigenous studies, youth development, and civic engagement. By examining issues such as environmental injustice or indigenous community restoration, students encounter intersections of social inequality, cultural history, and sustainability that make Taos a living classroom. This interdisciplinary lens highlights how nonprofits not only deliver services but also embody values, bridge cultures, and foster social change.

This is a version of 1301 especially geared to the Taos experience. Students will be invited to consider religious difference through fieldtrips to the Hanuman temple, Hokoji, Iglesia San Francisco, Taos Pueblo, and Masjeed Khadija. They will also be invited to consider issues of religious appropriation as they consider the marketing of native religious goods in Taos Plaza. The course is interdisciplinary as it utilizes methodology from Anthropology, Sociology, History, Oral History, Latin American Studies, Literary Studies and Material Culture. These are specific to Taos as students consider the paths various religious traditions take on their way to the Taos region, Crypto-Judaism, the marketing of indigenous goods and knowledge pathways, and the blending of diverse traditions at sites such as the Masjeed and Hokoji.

The Taos campus allows for experiences in physical activity that the Dallas campus cannot. Using the unique surroundings allows the course to expose students to activities and areas they might never have considered participating in, ensuring that they learn how to properly prepare themselves to engage in those activities.

This interdisciplinary course uses Northern New Mexico as its classroom. We read food as text, which becomes a portal to understand historical and contemporary practices, technological advances, social issues, and power dynamics in the so-call 'American Southwest.

This course is an introduction to Data Science, which fortunately applies to vast variety of applications. For this reason, there is opportunity to integrate Taos-related themes (tourism, environmental issues, etc.) into the classroom examples. I have had discussions with Matthew Weyer from Taos Ski Valley, who has provided data that could be analyzed as part of the students' projects. This would especially be focused on environmental sustainability, since this is the area in which he works.

Students are able to fly drones and perform in-field experimentation that would otherwise not be possible on the main campus. We also engage with local Native American populations (Picuris Pueblo).

In this course, students will engage directly with the people, communities, environment, and ecologies of Taos, NM to explore how our environments shape our health. Ecologies of human health encompass all sorts of processes and structures, including social, built environments and cultural, political and economic contexts across not only individual human life courses, but also intergenerationally. I have cultivated connections in various sectors in Taos, through teaching and research activities in the Taos community and draw from these to create the unique experience this course offers. It is designed with an interdisciplinary perspective, to benefit students from across the university, from pre-health, civil engineering, to the arts, in its attention to how built and natural environments across time and space, and in the context of the intensifying impacts of climate change, impact human health. The course is relevant to a wide audience of students with the goal of cross-pollinating among disciplines and broadening interdisciplinary inquiry, knowledge, and practice around environmental, both natural and built, and human health. In this course, which I have intentionally cultivated with my connections with the Taos community while teaching and researching in Taos over the past several years, students will learn experientially to apply anthropological epistemologies to understand various ways of knowing about relationships of nature, community, and health and the intergenerational knowledge that undergirds them.