Gateway Courses

HIA seeks to help faculty and departments develop courses that welcome students to the humanities while highlighting the contemporary power of humanistic inquiry. ​

We are defining “gateway courses” very broadly, and below are some possibilities:​

• New intro classes​

• New 200-level courses with potential to draw students to a discipline, a field, a new set of methods, or the humanities as a whole​

• A course introducing students to multiple fields or disciplines​

• Extra-departmental courses with HUM or SST designation (such as HUM 101 rather than History 100)​

One of the goals of the Humanities in Action grant is to help departments and faculty attract students to humanistic study through the development of new gateway courses—classes designed to welcome students to a field or discipline. Studies at Grinnell and across the country have emphasized that students often gravitate to the first field that fully captures their imagination, and the grant is designed to support new classes likely to help change the conversation around humanistic inquiry and to highlight its appeal.

We have a broad definition of “gateway classes,” including traditional intro classes and other courses likely to attract students to a field of study. Gateway courses will often be at the 100-level but will include some 200-level classes, as long as those classes are open to first-year students and are designed to introduce students to a field of study or to humanistic inquiry more broadly (making few assumptions about what students already know about a field).

The grant can support gateway course development in several ways. It can support the creation of a new gateway course for a department, concentration, or field, as well as the creation of an alternative gateway (in fields where this is appropriate) or the revision or redesign of an existing course. (Some fields have recently taken steps to globalize or decolonize their intro courses, for example.)

The grant can also support the development of new “humanities labs” without prerequisites (such as those recently developed at Colby College and Arizona State University), which can attract new students to humanistic study through applied or experiential work. It can also support the development of thematic “big idea” courses (open to first year students) and extra-departmental gateway classes, such as Humanities 101.