Humanities in Action: The Future of the Humanities at Liberal Arts Colleges | June 7-10, 2021
Grinnell College is pleased to announce a virtual summer institute for liberal arts college faculty on the theme “The Humanities in Action: The Future of the Humanities at Liberal Arts Colleges.” This event will take place from June 7–10, 2021, and will feature four days of discussion about curricular and pedagogical change in the humanities, arts, and humanistic social sciences, with a particular focus on two themes: the creation of new gateway courses to welcome students to humanistic study and the development of new opportunities in community-engaged learning.
Community Friday
The Teaching Archive, with guest speakers Laura Heffernan and Rachel Sagner Burrma
Friday, May 7, starting at 12:00 (WebEx)
We cordially invite you to this week’s Community Friday event, starting at 12:00 noon, when we will be joined by Laura Heffernan of the University of North Florida and Rachel Sagner Buurma of Swarthmore College. In their recent book The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study, Professors Heffernan and Buurma show how understanding teaching as central to the discipline of literary study offers us a radically new view of both the past and the future of work in the humanities.
Community Friday:
“Do the Humanities have a Future? Thinking Beyond Crisis” with guest Eric Hayot, Pennsylvania State University
November 20, 2020 starting at 12:00 (WebEx)
We cordially invite you to this week’s Community Friday event, starting at 12:00 noon, when we will be joined by Eric Hayot, Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies and Director of the Center for Humanities and Information at Pennsylvania State University. Professor Hayot is the author of five books, including The Elements of Academic Style and the forthcoming Humanist Reason (Columbia University Press, 2021), and is a leading voice in discussions of the humanities curriculum and the future of higher education. He will discuss the future of the humanities at a time of uncertain enrollments, touching on how individual departments and programs can best respond to challenges that are national in scope.
We hope you can join this discussion, which is sponsored by the Humanities in Action grant.
Community Friday:
“Curricular Change in Hard Times”, sponsored by Humanities in Action
Friday, October 16, 2020, starting at 12:00 (WebEx)
We cordially invite you to this week’s Community Friday event on Oct. 16 at noon, sponsored by the Humanities in Action grant. The pandemic environment threatens to drain our teaching community of the intellectual, professional, and personal motivation to continuously improve our curriculum. How can we balance short-term necessities and long-term goals in our teaching and departmental work? When we need to design a new course or change our approach to teaching, what techniques can make the job easier? How can the College support the ambitions of its faculty and the long-term needs of its students during a difficult time? Our panelists will discuss these questions while describing their experiences working on new curricular projects under trying circumstances. Joining the panel are John Garrison, Professor of English; Joseph Neisser, Associate Professor of Philosophy; and Jennifer Paulhus, Associate Professor of Mathematics & Statistics.
Community Friday:
Discussion of “Generous Thinking in Hard Times” with guest Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Michigan State University
Friday, July 10, 2020, starting at 12:00 noon (WebEx)
We cordially invite you to this week’s Community Friday event, starting at 12:00 noon, when we will be joined by Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Director of Digital Humanities and Professor of English at Michigan State University. Professor Fitzpatrick is the author of the 2019 book Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University, which she discussed at a 2018 Scholars’ Convocation talk at Grinnell. Fitzpatrick argues that there is often a troubling disconnect between American higher education and the larger public and that colleges and universities should make stronger efforts to promote the public good and the needs of the community; she champions an approach that she calls “generous thinking,” a mode of engagement that “emphasizes listening over speaking, community over individualism, and collaboration over competition.” More recently, she has written a blog post touching on the challenge of building a culture of generous thinking during a time of crisis in higher education.
We hope you can join this discussion, which is sponsored by the Humanities in Action grant. The event will not require previous knowledge of Professor Fitzpatrick’s work (though the blog post mentioned above will provide a quick introduction for those who are interested.)
Humanities in Action Summer Workshops
Two sessions held: June 8, 2020 (~14 participants) and August 3, 2020 (~13 participants)
Proposal description: “Many disciplines in the humanities and humanistic social sciences are debating how introductory and gateway courses can be most effective in introducing students to a field, attracting them to a discipline, and shaping their education more broadly. Participants in this workshop will discuss different models of humanistic gateway and introductory courses, both from Grinnell and from other institutions, and will ask a series of questions about the goals behind intro classes. What are the advantages and disadvantages of thematic gateway classes and more traditional introductory surveys? What can we learn from new models for course development, such as the humanities lab and the “big idea” course? When can a course at the 200-level serve as a gateway to fields in the humanities and social studies? This workshop will be supported by the Humanities in Action grant and is intended for faculty in the humanities and social studies who are interested in helping to refine or re-envision their department or program’s approach to gateway courses.”
Workshop in February 2020:
Equity By Design: A Workshop by Antionette Carroll
–Using Equity-Centered Community Design to Co-Create Community-Engaged Projects
Equity by Design workshop (sponsored by Humanities in Action Mellon grant, CLS, and Iowa Campus) Compact)
Faculty Friday: Humanities in Action: Funding Opportunities through Mellon
Friday, November 1, 2019, starting at 12:00 (on campus, JRC 101)
Earlier this fall, Grinnell College received a four-year, one-million-dollar institutional grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation on the theme “The Humanities in Action.” Please join us for the next Faculty Friday on November 1st, where Edward Cohn and Susan Sanning will lead a discussion of the ways this grant can support teaching and learning in the humanities, arts, and humanistic social sciences at Grinnell.
The grant will focus on three themes–the development of new gateway courses (broadly defined), the expansion of community-engaged learning, and the humanities and postgraduate life–and our Faculty Friday will give participants the chance both to think about how the grant can support their teaching and to begin larger conversations about how the campus community can use Mellon funding to strengthen humanistic study at Grinnell.
The CTLA thanks the Humanities in Action team for their generous support of this event.
