EMBEDDING THE HUMANITIES IN CROSS-DISCIPLINARY GENERAL EDUCATION COURSES
Jean HENSCHEIDa, Michael O’ROURKE b, Gary WILLIAMSc*
University of Idaho
Moscow, ID 83844
a Director of the Core Curriculum, University of Idaho, Moscow, ID 83844-2436
b Department of Philosophy, 407 Morrill Hall, University of Idaho, Moscow, ID 83844-3016
c Department of English, P.O. Box 441102, University of Idaho, Moscow, ID 83844-1102
* Contact author:
jgw@uidaho.edu
Abstract
In this paper, we present the University of Idaho model of general education, one in which all undergraduate colleges have responsibility for teaching the humanities. Within this model, the humanities are delivered to first-year students in the form of cross-disciplinary “Core Discovery” courses that are (a) theme-based, (b) skills-focused, and (c) often taught by faculty without advanced degrees in the humanities. While this approach addresses concerns among those in the humanities that these disciplines are becoming less relevant to many college students, it may, at the same time, threaten to weaken these disciplines. While this threat is cause for concern, we argue that our approach has to this point resulted in Core Discovery courses that provide a substantive and stimulating humanities experience.
Introduction
Are the humanities relevant enough to the average undergraduate to be included as a required part of a general education program? Our question arises from various objections reported in the literature, such as: “They [the humanities] don’t have anything to do with my major and I just don’t have interest in those subjects” (Dallinger and Mann 2000, p. 98), and “… Americans, including Congress, think of the humanities as increasingly marginal contributors to the sum of knowledge and the well-being of society” (Kernan 1997, p. 7). The University of Idaho (UI) is currently eight years into the challenge of implementing a cross-disciplinary, university-wide general education program—the UI Core—that has the attention, if not always the support, of many on campus.1 Those charged with the task of delivering the UI Core2 firmly believe that the humanities are relevant enough to justify their central place—they are relevant as long as human experience is relevant.3 However, they recognize that to convince students that the humanities are important, they must, first, rethink the traditional content of humanities instruction and second, ask instructors to do more to make students aware of the particular contributions the humanities make to intellectual growth.
In 2003, the UI faculty voted to replace the traditional distribution-model general education program (in which students took introductory courses in disciplines such as English, history, and philosophy) with a Core that requires first-year students to fulfill half their humanities requirement by enrolling in cross-disciplinary, themed humanities/social science courses. These “Core Discovery” courses are taught by faculty members from across the university. The UI Core aims to interest students by embedding humanities instruction within broad topics relevant to their lives, presenting humanities content and methods in the context of themes familiar to the students. Requiring faculty members from across the institution to participate is one way to ensure that there is a range of familiar contexts represented in the courses offered. Under this model, faculty members from different colleges have formed cross-disciplinary teams to develop themed Core Discovery courses such as “The New Wild West,” described in greater detail below, which is staffed by faculty from the College of Natural Resources as well as from the College of Letters, Arts & Social Sciences.
While this approach to the humanities may address the concern about relevance, it raises another significant worry, namely, trivialization of these disciplines.4 Without watchfulness, three aspects of the program would be especially susceptible. First, Core Discovery courses replace discipline-based courses with a theme-based approach that tends to focus on contemporary issues, an atypical approach to humanities instruction. Second, the UI general education approach spreads responsibility for delivering the humanities across eight colleges, most of which do not contain teaching faculty trained in the humanities. Third, in seeking to make Core Discovery instruction more inclusive, the university has deemphasized content-mastery in favor of skills development;5 thus, instructors are given more freedom in identifying what counts as humanities than is traditional in a discipline-based general education program, so long as the coursework strives to enhance certain intellectual skills (e.g., communication and critical thinking). But (a critic might say) by calling courses “humanities” that are infused with content that is not traditionally regarded as humanities, taught by instructors without formal humanities credentials, and focused on intellectual skills, do we not inevitably trivialize what practitioners of the humanities do? Are we not sending our students the message that when it comes to courses in this area, they can be about anything and taught by anyone? If the humanities are so important as to be a centerpiece of the UI Core, might we not be shortchanging our students by possibly enabling this impression?
We argue that we do not trivialize the humanities by teaching them in this way. This concern remains in the minds and on the tongues of the humanities faculty members at the UI who have strongly supported development of the new Core and worked to sustain it. As detailed in the next section, the institution has built an administrative system to guard against delivery of second-rate humanities instruction. After providing a brief history of the development of the framework within which Core Discovery courses are offered, we describe these administrative supports and the role they play in maintaining both the framework and the integrity of the humanities content of Core Discovery courses.6 With this groundwork in place, we go on to examine some of the humanities content in “The New Wild West,” a Core Discovery course built around a natural resources theme. Through description of the course and of the collaboration between instructors with and without advanced training in the humanities, we argue that a theme-based, skills-focused Core Discovery course taught by a scientist, for example, can offer an experience that deserves designation as humanities.
Development of a New Model for General Education at the University of Idaho
Prior to 1985, the UI had no general education requirement, requiring only a course in writing of all students. A few colleges, such as Letters & Science and Business, had college-wide requirements for their students that included a humanities component, but there was no university-wide educational experience that all students shared. In 1985, the university adopted a standard-issue, distribution-style general education program that required all students to take courses in a range of topic areas: humanities, social science, science, mathematics, and communication. The College of Letters & Science shouldered most of the responsibility for delivering courses in these areas, which were primarily offered at the first-year level.
Over the next 10-15 years, many UI faculty members joined others around the nation in growing dissatisfaction with the distribution model, which created a disconnected experience for students, as well as with the large-section, survey nature of many of the courses taken to satisfy general education requirements (Association of American Colleges 1994). A new university president, arriving in 1996, made modification of general education part of his strategic plan. In his view, changes in general education could both improve the quality of the student experience at the UI, distinguish us from our regional rivals, and set us apart from the nation’s other land-grant institutions.
In early 1999, the administration hired William Voxman, a mathematics professor with nearly thirty years of service to the university and a man of wide personal learning, to lead a task force charged with reviewing the general education program. Voxman’s leadership was catalytic, bringing disparate parts of the university together around a unifying vision of what general education could be at the UI. His vehicle for change, the General Education Task Force (GETF), numbered around 40 and included representatives from all the colleges that engage in undergraduate education. The group’s discussions were infused by a wide literature review, conference participation (e.g., the Association of American Colleges and Universities Conference on Best Practices in General Education in Atlanta in March 2001), and a site visit to Portland State University, an institution that combined a public mission, large enrollments, and a commitment to innovation in general education (White 1994, Rennie-Hill and Toth 1999a and 1999b). Excitement and energy grew when the UI received a $500,000 grant from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) in 2000, facilitating the transition from the discussion of ideas to the design and delivery of new courses that would become an important part of the new UI Core model.
Among the articles that influenced the GETF was William Cronon’s “ ‘Only Connect…’: The Goals of a Liberal Education” (1998), which advocates connection across traditional fields of study as the primary goal of general education. Standard educational goals involving communication and critical thinking were a central part of the Core model that emerged from the GETF’s work, but its primary emphasis was on connection across disciplines, colleges, and the students’ years at the university. University students, going from class to class, typically have a richly cross-disciplinary experience, but they often lack the tools necessary to make explicit intellectual connections across these disciplines. GETF members felt that faculty could design courses in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences that featured disciplinary integration, supplying models as well as tools that students could use in making connections. While this project might have been accomplished within the liberal arts division of the university without involving other colleges, the GETF concluded that the quality of the Core would be enhanced if the professional and technical colleges participated in delivering coursework. This structure would expose general education students to talented faculty in agriculture, forestry, business, and engineering, and simultaneously send the message to students in those colleges that general education was not irrelevant to their academic pursuits. Finally, the GETF sought to establish connections vertically through a student’s time at the university by creating a graduated model of delivery: students would have a distinct first-year experience that would provide a basis for further general education classes in the sophomore, junior, and senior years. This structure, GETF members hoped, would discourage students from seeing the Core as something to “get past,” and it would also reinforce the scholarly connections between introductory and more advanced coursework.
The new Core overlapped with the old in a few ways. All students still fulfilled communications, mathematics, and lab science requirements, which did not change. The novel features of the new Core were these:
1. First-year experience: each first-year student would take a two-semester, cross-disciplinary, theme-focused, and team-developed “Core Discovery” course in partial satisfaction of their humanities and/or social science requirements (e.g., “Contemporary American Experience,” “The Monsters We Make,” “Sex and Cultures”). Students would remain with the same instructor and classmates through the full year in classes limited to 35.
2. Integrated science: all students would have the option of replacing a lab science course with one of several newly-developed introductory-level cross-disciplinary science courses (e.g., “Color, Chemistry, and Art,” “Natural Hazards and Disaster Preparedness,” “Human Reproduction: Science, Ethics and the Law”).
3. Clusters: students would finish their humanities and social science requirements by completing several courses from thematically-grouped clusters of disciplinary offerings at introductory and more advanced levels, extending the Core into a student’s later years.
4. Capstone: each student would be expected to take a senior-level capstone course that was at least in part a synthesis of several disciplines.
The leading challenge in implementing the new Core lay in developing the year-long Core Discovery courses. Several faculty members in the late 1990s had created one-semester collaborative cross-disciplinary courses, and these courses, along with the design process, became models for the new task. In the spring of 2000, the first cross-disciplinary faculty teams (from the departments of sociology, anthropology, history, English, political science, and teacher education) began development of two pilot courses, “Contemporary American Experience” and “School Daze: American Education and Society.” The courses enrolled about 150 students in eight sections in the 2000-01 academic year, each section taught individually by a member of the two teams from syllabi developed collectively within each team. One point of emphasis for these courses was that they be delivered by the university’s senior faculty, ensuring that the students would have a high-quality academic experience in their first year. Another point of emphasis was significant classroom interaction between faculty and students, with a premium placed on discussion-based and experiential pedagogy. Since Core Discovery courses were to be a substantial and central part of the student’s educational experience at the UI, they were associated with several fundamental learning outcomes related to communication, critical thinking, research skills, cross-disciplinary synthesis, diversity, and history. Above all, Core Discovery courses were intended to enable students to connect—with each other, with a talented faculty member, with the theme of the course, with the university, and with the disciplines of which the course was comprised.
The new Core was approved in spring 2002 and fully implemented campus-wide for all first-year students in fall 2004. There have been growing pains. The FIPSE grant was a critical boost at the beginning, providing generous stipends to faculty developing Core Discovery courses and replacement costs to departments releasing faculty to teach general education courses. But FIPSE funding expired in 2005. Maintaining a flow of development without the replacement costs and incentives provided by the FIPSE grant has proved challenging.7 But the new Core remains in place and, over the years, has compelled the development of a structure that supports it, in particular its efforts to avoid trivialization of the disciplines represented in it. Three components of this structure—central administrative and academic department-level support, instructional development, and maintenance of instructional team strength—have been key in maintaining strong thematic, skills-based courses designed and delivered by teams of humanities and non-humanities faculty.
Maintaining the Integrity of a Cross-disciplinary General Education Course
The University of Idaho is now, in 2007-08, eight years into its experiment to engage the considerable talents of faculty from across the university toward design and delivery of general education courses. Thousands of first-year students enrolled in Core Discovery have received humanities content and methods from economists, natural resource scientists, interior designers, and others far removed from traditional humanities disciplines. Such a bold and risky approach depends on a deep sense of mission and constant vigilence at the university, department, and most especially, as will be detailed below, at the faculty team level.
From the outset, support from the university’s central administration and individual
academic departments has been critical to maintaining a program that asks instructors to teach outside their academic disciplines. This support is based in a campus-wide consensus about the processes and purposes of general education, evidenced by a near-unanimous vote in the Faculty Council to make the Core Discovery course mandatory for all new UI students. With this vote, the university community voiced its belief that faculty members in every college should, and could, have a role in delivering humanities and social science instruction to the university’s first-year students. All colleges should assist these students as they establish skills to carry them through the academic major and beyond graduation (Cummings 1996). Visible support from the highest adminisrative levels has helped these courses garner and retain academic solidity. Early in the program’s history, an all-campus memorandum from the then-president and then-provost urged that Core Discovery course development and teaching be given weight equal to writing an article for a refereed journal. The intent was to assure faculty members that service to the Core would be a help, not a hindrance, to a faculty member’s pursuit of promotion and tenure. Recently, the current provost has declared his intention to base his evaluation of college deans, in part, on faculty and funding contributions they make to the program. The Core Discovery program received yet another major boost in October 2006 when the Faculty Council approved new university-wide learning outcomes that closely match those of Core Discovery. All units now measure performance against their ability to facilitate student learning across disciplines, provide student opportunities to improve creativity, communication and citizenship skills, and clarify life purpose and perspective. As a natural location for helping students achieve these outcomes, Core Discovery can now attract faculty from across campus to develop and deliver these courses.
As university-wide learning outcomes were underscoring the cross-disciplinary and skills-based emphases of Core Discovery classes, a full-time Core Curriculum director was hired, and departments in the College of Letters, Arts & Social Sciences began to include in vacancy announcements an expectation that newly-hired faculty would take a turn teaching these courses. At the same time, deans from other colleges began expressing interest in regularizing participation of their faculty in the team-design and delivery of these cross-disciplinary courses. The deans of Art and Architecture and Education, for example, communicated their view that service to the Core Discovery program is an opportunity for their faculties to stretch, intellectually and professionally, and to churn energy and new ideas back into their discipline-based courses. Such ideas include methods for developing students’ academic skills, use of themes as course organizers, and infusion of the content and processes of multiple disciplines in a single course.
Visible upper- and college-level support has prompted instructors from across the institution to participate in Core Discovery, where they find opportunities not only to stretch intellectually but to (re)learn how to teach new undergraduates. As is typical at most comprehensive research institutions (Erickson, Peters, and Strommer 2006; Pascarella and Terenzini 2005), robust research and outreach agendas at the UI had decreased faculty opportunities to teach first- and second-year students and increased the number of teaching assistants and adjunct instructors taking responsibility for this instruction. Four years into campus-wide implementation of the new UI Core, that responsibility is shifting back to regularly appointed tenured and tenure-track faculty, who are supported in their efforts with regular instructional development workshops, program-wide and instructional team gatherings, and shared scholarly articles on innovative instruction. Instructional development heavily emphasizes active pedagogies, a centerpiece of Core Discovery courses and upper-division humanities, but a more rare component of courses taught in the first year (Hakel and Halpern 2002).8
Administrative support and faculty development can encourage and aid instructors involved in Core Discovery, but responsibility for maintaining the integrity of the humanities in these courses rests on the shoulders of the faculty teams. In contrast to most curricular design experiences (Fink 2003), these courses are created by teams of colleagues from different disciplines who negotiate instruction in methods and content. Each team member is responsible for contributing materials and a clear sense of the methods important to his/her discipline in a way that makes it plausible for other team members to assimilate and deliver them in the sections they teach.9 Team members also help each other conceive of a course extending through the full academic year, the feature of Core Discovery that allows for intensive community building. The team’s collective responsibility is to envision how student learning will be scaffolded throughout the year and instructional goals achieved by year’s end. Frequent team and program-wide meetings and course evaluations hold each member accountable to each other and to the program.
The dual role of the humanities representative on each team is to help create a student learning experience worthy of the humanities designation and to quell other team members’ concerns about whether they can, indeed, teach humanities content and methods. Reassurance begins with program and team-level discussion of the goals of traditional humanities instruction. The humanities representatives lead in integrating their disciplinary artifacts and methods into the course—which means helping to prepare all team members to instruct writing, critical thinking, and humanities-related information literacy skills, as well as providing specific study aids for the humanities materials on the syllabus. The humanities faculty members are also chiefly responsible for developing effective assessment strategies for measuring student achievement in humanities learning and for scanning the campus environment for co-curricular resources to enhance the classroom learning experience, including plays, speakers, films, service opportunities, student organization events, and residential campus activities. In essence, humanities faculty members on Core Discovery teams are expected to serve as instructional development specialists to colleagues from a wide range of other disciplines.10
Embedding the Humanities: An Illustration
Even with all the supports, instructors without advanced training in the humanities confess to continued apprehension about teaching humanities materials and methods. Cases of cold feet multiply when the talk turns to introducing a poem, a painting, or a piece of music into the syllabus. Dealing with these chilly feet, and thereby addressing the criticism that Core Discovery courses trivialize their humanities content, has proven to be one of the recurring challenges in maintaining the program’s integrity in the eyes of the faculty. In the previous section we noted the program-wide supports in place to help meet this challenge. To illustrate some of the ways in which particular Core Discovery courses reflect it, we offer for consideration a few elements of one of the early Core Discovery courses, “The New Wild West,” a course in which, because of its thematic focus, one might not expect to find—and in fact will not find—an effort to embed traditional humanities materials. We intend this discussion neither as a critique nor as a celebration of this particular course, but rather as an illustration of issues across all Core Discovery courses. Our illustration addresses three distinct issues: the academic training of the instructors, the nature of the materials used in the course, and the role of writing assignments.
Currently one section of “The New Wild West” is taught by a faculty member with an advanced degree in American Studies and an M.F.A. in creative writing. Let us call him Professor Silver. Silver holds a position in the English department. Another current instructor, Professor Gold, holds a Ph.D. in conservation genetics and is the Director of the Ecology and Conservation Biology program in the College of Natural Resources. The two sections use syllabi that are roughly 80% congruent in terms of materials and requirements. Both sections of the course bear three humanities credits.
Phrases from Gold’s course description suggest the range of topics addressed in both sections: “endangered species … energy production and consumption … dams, rivers, and western water … tourism and land management … urban sprawl … agricultural sustainability … mining and logging impacts.” Two sentences from Silver’s syllabus (which do not appear on Gold’s) suggest the particular emphases that his section of the course develops:
The history, myths, and identities of the Old West reverberate today in conflicts over many issues in the New Wild West: feed lots and water quality, sprawl and ranchettes, salmon and timber, reintroduction of species, nuclear contamination, ecoterrorism, farm workers’ rights, and cell phone towers. The New West is a great case study and starting point for understanding the current complex and varied aspects of people and the environment.
By situating current issues in the West within a context provided by history and myth, as well as emphasizing “understanding … people,” Silver offers assurance that time-honored matters associated with humanities instruction are part of the experience that students in his section will have. The question of materials aside, the perspective suggested in these sentences is identifiably humanities-focused. The Core Director and the members of the University Committee on General Education (UCGE) rely on examination of syllabi and on statements like Silver’s as evidence that students who complete the course have justly earned three humanities credits.
What of Gold’s section, though (a critic might wonder)? Have Silver and Gold discussed approaches to the course’s topics sufficiently so that students in Gold’s class encounter the same contextualizing of issues, an equivalent focus on the way individuals make sense of complex environmental controversies? Should those charged with quality-control devise means to measure such outcomes? And if these measures, whatever they are, are applied to Gold’s section, mustn’t they also be applied to Silver’s, no matter what credentials he brings to the classroom? A faculty member’s academic credentials, after all, do not guarantee that s/he can or will bring traditional humanities perspectives or tools of analysis to the project of teaching a topic remote from his/her area of expertise.
Although these questions are sources of concern, UCGE has determined that it cannot effectively pose them, given the scope of the program and the enormous range of materials used in the forty-eight sections of Core Discovery courses. The program relies on the solidarity of the teams and on periodic opportunities for all Core faculty to discuss and share materials and approaches. Specific oversight, to the degree that it is carried out, must necessarily be limited to asking two relatively benign questions: what materials are assigned, and what is the nature of the assignments given?
One of the works that both “New Wild West” instructors taught in spring semester 2007 was David James Duncan’s essay “A Prayer for the Salmon’s Second Coming” (2000). The essay is a passionate argument for removing four dams from the lower Snake River in eastern Washington in order to restore the salmon spawning runs to pre-dam levels. Consider this paragraph:
On the eastern edge of Idaho last fall, 700 miles from the sea, I watched a single female chinook, with great, crimson-gilled gasps of effort, turn her ocean-built body into a shovel and dig, in the unforgiving bone of the continent, a home for offspring she would not live long enough to see. I watched her lay eggs so tender the touch of a child's fingertip would crush them; eggs exactly the color of setting suns. I watched the darker, fierce-kyped male ease in front of those suns without once touching the female, and send milt melting down into her nest of stones. I watched the paired chinook circle their pebbled redd, tending it, guarding it. Only incidentally did they touch each other. Because they weren't making love to one another. They were making love to the very land and water, to broken bits of mountain and melting snows. (Duncan 2000, p. 33)
Approaching this passage from the perspective of literary analysis, one might call attention to the power of language to give emotive force to issues. Duncan’s compound adjectives and infusion of metaphors, his care with the sounds of phrases (“eggs so tender the touch of a child’s fingertip would crush them, eggs exactly the color of setting suns”), his deliberate repetitions, and his emotionally-charged verbs all are in the service of developing a stunningly lovely image of salmon reproducing themselves. Examining the text through this lens would certainly qualify as humanities instruction, as would an approach that examined the essay’s effectiveness as persuasive discourse. Taught in these ways, the text itself takes on credibility as an appropriate humanities artifact.
For some, however, the shadow of trivialization might still loom. We have already suggested that administrative oversight cannot effectively ask for assurances that Professors Silver and Gold do, in fact, approach Duncan’s essay as a work exhibiting literary qualities. Can we simply say that study of this text, or this kind of text, provides an equivalent experience to that found in other classes in which the university delivers humanities instruction for general education students? To point the comparison: another course in which a student may earn three humanities credits toward fulfilling the general education requirement is a sophomore-level course called “Literature of Western Civilization,” beginning often with The Tempest. Shakespeare’s last play offers an instructor numerous opportunities to generate discussion around topics central to the traditions of Euro-American culture (exploration, colonization, social/racial hierarchies, familial relations, the nature of power), as well as any number of passages ripe for literary analysis. Consider this famous speech by the play’s central character, Prospero’s farewell to illusions, theatrical and existential:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep. (Shakespeare 1952, p. 1495)
An instructor trained in literary studies, teaching this passage, would call attention to the sonorousness of the language, its sly metaphors (“great globe itself”), its musical rhythms, the fact that the play seems to refer to itself (performance as metaphor for earthly life). With The Tempest generally, an instructor is likely to examine its formal dramatic properties in light of earlier works for the theatre, its embrace of earlier texts such as Michel de Montaigne’s “Of the Cannibals” and other new-world exploration narratives, its production history beginning in the 17th century, critical debates through the centuries about its implicit value-system. A student ideally would emerge with an appreciation for a well-made literary object, a sense of the play’s historical moment, an enhanced ability to identify and evaluate the effectiveness of figures of speech and syntactical complexities, an understanding of the properties of an aesthetic genre (viz., drama), and an experience of examining her own values in the context of a story in which possibly-conflicting values are set into motion.
Some on the UI campus (and no doubt elsewhere) argue that such instruction is what should exclusively qualify as humanities education. As fine a piece of writing as Duncan’s essay is (this argument would go), studying it cannot possibly offer an experience equivalent to studying The Tempest (or other standard works of the Western canon--the Nicomachean Ethics or More’s Utopia or Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 or Picasso’s Guernica). Is there an intrinsic good in students possessing information about The Tempest? Yes, arguably, but instructors (and those charged with overseeing general education) must measure that good against the task of persuading many students that what they will possess after tackling The Tempest is superior to what they might acquire using texts that address issues seemingly more relevant to their world. The debates surrounding dam breaching and salmon preservation in the American West resonate sharply with our mostly-Western students. As lovely as The Tempest is as an object of contemplation and discussion, other carefully-chosen texts can work as well for the purposes of the course and the program.
We take additional assurance from the kind of writing assignments given to students in both Silver’s and Gold’s classes. In the project detailed below, a multi-phase “reflective” writing assignment, students must adopt a persona, a point of view, develop a persuasive rhetoric, and learn to get along with people who don’t agree with them:
For this project, small groups will research key stakeholders on the issue of
wolf recovery in the west. These inquiries and analyses will serve as key
components for individual reflective papers. They will also inform a class panel
discussion. The Constituent Groups
The following constituent groups will be drawn from a hat and assigned to teams:
• Federal Biologist or Game Manager
• State Biologist or Game Manager
• Guide or Big Game Hunter
• Environmentalist
• Animal Rights Activist
• Rancher (opposed to wolf reintroduction)
• Rancher (cooperative with wolf reintroduction)
• Politician (local)
• Politician (state or national)
Once assigned a group, each team will then begin conducting preliminary research
to familiarize themselves with the issues and arguments that their stakeholder
represents. The object is to see the debate through another’s eyes, and to argue
from their standpoint. And finally, you will take this information and write
your final reflective essay that incorporates what you have learned with how you
view the issue of wolf recovery.
Such a series of tasks, although the assignment does not rely on study of traditional humanities materials, does inculcate methods that have traditionally been emphasized in humanities courses. We argue that such an understanding of humanities education lends weight to the practice of authorizing those without advanced training in a humanities discipline to teach classes bearing humanities credit (Mignolo 2000). Rather than knowledge of humanities content, role-playing tasks emphasize humanities know-how, enabling students to enlarge their conception of the human predicament through empathetic engagement with the points of view of multiple personae. One need not have advanced humanities training to guide students toward embracing roles in an assignment like this, and a careful, reflective approach in facilitating the assignment can ensure a positive, humanities experience for the students.
Tasks like this revel an important characteristic of what it is to embed humanities instruction, a sense echoed in the articulated goals of many of the state-based divisions of the National Endowment for the Humanities. A statement on the website of the Idaho Humanities Council, for example, notes that the Council works “to foster the understanding of culture and to inspire a more literate, tolerant, and intellectually inquisitive Idaho citizenry.” The Council’s statement argues that the humanities are “fundamental to ourselves as human beings, to encourage societal responsibility and find deeper meaning in everyday occurrences” (IHC 2005). One might also note, in other efforts to describe work in the humanities, an emphasis on cross-disciplinary exchange. The online International Journal of the Humanities, for example—a vigorous and progressive site for discussion, in tandem with its well-organized series of semi-annual conferences and symposia—describes the humanities as “a place of dialogue between and across epistemologies, perspectives and content areas.” Such conceptions of the humanities are not dependent on particular kinds of materials or a particular kind of instruction. These process- and application-based constructs are entirely congruent with the UI vision of embedded humanities instruction in Core Discovery classes.
It need not be felt as a capitulation to cynicism to understand the humanities as a family of processes rather than as particular epistemologies or discrete stores of information. Developers and overseers of the UI Core Discovery classes have argued that the skills and practices involved in pedagogy of this sort, such as critical thinking and oral communication, are what justify the awarding of humanities credit for this course.11 Whether they are the exclusive domain of the humanities is, perhaps, an open question. But eight years into this project at the UI, the resolution to deliver instruction according to this understanding remains firmly in place. The continuing challenge facing instructors and overseers is to make it clear to students that these goals are the farthest thing from trivial—that, indeed, this sort of experience must remain at the center of a first-rate education. We believe that UI’s efforts to carry forward this conversation mirror and inform an important national conversation.
Notes
We express our gratitude to the instructors whose syllabi and materials form the basis for the discussion in this essay’s third section, and to the office of the Vice Provost for Academic Affairs for grants that allowed this collaboration to begin.
1. We use “cross-disciplinary” as a way of remaining neutral about the level of integration attained in these courses. The UI Core is intended to provide students with guidance in integrating information and methodology from across the disciplines, from their first year through their final year. As such, one goal is to provide a rich, interdisciplinary experience through a variety of courses, but this is not achieved consistently across the Core. However, since our focus here is on the nature of the humanities instruction delivered to first-year students and not on the interdisciplinary character of their experience or the Core in general, we use this term to indicate that the topic of interdisciplinary integration is outside the scope of this essay.
2. Two of us, O’Rourke and Williams, were part of the development team from the beginning; Williams is currently chair of the University Committee on General Education. Henscheid joined the development efforts in 1999 and is currently Director of the Core Curriculum.
3. The Idaho Humanities Council expresses this point of view nicely in noting on its website that the humanities concern “the record of human experience—exploring, assessing, interpreting, and refining it, while at the same time adding to it” (IHC 2007).
4. This concern has received attention recently in academic circles. For example, the 2007 International Symposium on New Directions in the Humanities held at Columbia University invited scholars to address “perceptions” of the humanities and, further, to consider the question, “How to avoid trivialization?”
5. This shift is not unique to the UI, of course. It appears in various statements made about the humanities by humanities organizations across the country. For example, the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities defines humanities
as a way of thinking about and responding to the world—as tools we use to examine and make sense of the human experience in general and our individual experiences in particular. The humanities enable us to reflect upon our lives and ask fundamental questions of value, purpose, and meaning in a rigorous and systematic way. (MFH 2007)
By taking the humanities to be “a way of thinking”, or a set of “tools” used for examination and reflection, this foundation recommends that skills be seen as constitutive of the humanities. (Cf. the statement concerning the humanities made on the website for the International Journal of the Humanities (IJH 2007).)
6. The importance of a viable process for restructuring and maintaining general education requirements is cogently detailed in Steele (2006).
7. See Jacobs (2006) for a discussion of related institutional challenges for integrated approaches to general education.
8. Hursh, et al. (1983) refer to delivery of this sort of course to first-year students as “heroic,” arguing that it is less challenging to aim such content at more seasoned college students.
9. Team-teaching can be a way around this challenge (Davis 1995), but such a move does not come without costs. In particular, as argued in Richards (1996), team-teaching can make it difficult for the faculty to make the connections that are so central to the course, generating the problem of “serial tunnel-vision” (p. 127). In a Core Discovery course, then, having a single instructor who can model the very synthesis that is being taught is actually a virtue.
10. See Kardonsky and Leist (2005) for one account of the complexity of bringing a humanist and non-humanist together in the teaching of a humanities course.
11. This point of view is reflected in language associated with the NEH, such as on the website of the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, a state-based division of the NEH mentioned in note 5. The site characterizes the humanities in terms of skills such as “critical and imaginative thinking; reasoned and open-minded discussion; efforts toward understanding and appreciating the experiences of others and the ways in which the issues that confront us now have been understood in other times, places, and cultures” (MFH 2007).
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