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Humanities & Liberal Arts

Because of numerous factors, education in the liberal arts and sciences, particularly at the college/university level, is under threat in the United States. For this form of education to thrive, it is necessary to understand how various stakeholders think about education that is not primarily vocational, and which approaches and programs are most appropriate for these key stakeholders.

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Out of Eden Learn White Paper

A resource from Out of Eden Learn

Out of Eden Learn White Paper

A resource from Out of Eden Learn

An initiative of Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Out of Eden

Learn is an online learning community that connects school-age students from

around the world to engage together in “learning journeys” of cross-cultural inquiry

and exchange. These learning journeys invite young people to do several things: to

slow down to observe the world carefully and to listen attentively to others; to

exchange stories and perspectives related to people, place, and identity; and to reflect

on how their individual lives connect to bigger human stories. Out of Eden Learn

accompanies Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and National Geographic Fellow Paul

Salopek’s epic Out of Eden Walk: his multi-year journey on foot around the world

along the migratory pathways of our ancient human ancestors and experiment in

“slow journalism.”

This white paper is intended to explain the underlying philosophy and model of Out of

Eden Learn.

Use the link under Resource Links to download the entire white paper.

Download White Paper

Book

Education and Equality

A resource from Humanities & Liberal Arts Assessment (HULA)

Education and Equality

A resource from Humanities & Liberal Arts Assessment (HULA)

American education as we know it today—guaranteed by the state to serve every child in the country—is still less than a hundred years old. It’s no wonder we haven’t agreed yet as to exactly what role education should play in our society. In these Tanner Lectures, Danielle Allen brings us much closer, examining the ideological impasse between vocational and humanistic approaches that has plagued educational discourse, offering a compelling proposal to finally resolve the dispute.

What Makes Teams Tick?

A resource from Interdisciplinary & Global Studies

What Makes Teams Tick?

A resource from Interdisciplinary & Global Studies

Many of the most pressing issues of our time—climate change, economic inequality, human rights—require interdisciplinary solutions. Yet facilitating collaboration among individuals from disparate fields can often be challenging. A recent study on what contributes to successful interdisciplinary work has found that the “emotional aspect” of such collaborations is at least as important as their intellectual aspect.

The study, by professor of sociology Michele Lamont, lecturer on education Veronica Boix Mansilla, and Kyoko Sato, now a lecturer at Stanford, closely examined nine interdisciplinary networks funded by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Santa Fe Institute. These networks all brought together scholars from at least three disciplines; their research topics ranged from brain development to urbanization. Drawing on documents, observation, surveys, and interviews, the authors concluded that the markers of successful interdisciplinary collaborations include not just an intellectual, but also emotional and interactional elements, and they proposed a “shared cognitive-emotional-interactional platform” for evaluating such projects.

Read the full article on the Harvard Magazine website.

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Article

Humanities & Liberal Arts Assessment White Paper

A resource from Humanities & Liberal Arts Assessment (HULA)

Humanities & Liberal Arts Assessment White Paper

A resource from Humanities & Liberal Arts Assessment (HULA)

Discussions of the humanities in popular media frequently identify the humanities as “under attack.”1 While humanists have made theoretical arguments about the value of the humanities, relatively little empirical research has focused on understanding the contribution of the humanities to human development. Rigorous tools for assessing the benefits of humanities programs are even less common and those that exist have been borrowed from other fields rather than being built to assess programs in the humanities specifically. The Humanities and Liberal Arts Assessment project (HULA) is an effort to build a base of empirical evidence concerning the value of the humanities and to build tools for assessing humanities programs that are based on the craft practices of humanists. Our goals are both to provide humanists with a better and more explicit understanding of how their own practices “work” as drivers of human development and to provide empirical data about the value of the humanities in the cultivation of human development, preparation of a workforce, and maintenance of a democratic society. This paper describes HULA’s methodology for analyzing humanist craft practices and developing assessment tools. The first section of the paper outlines a theoretical argument for our approach to studying and building tools for assessment in the humanities. The second section of the paper will describe the methodology that HULA has developed to study the craft logic of humanistic practices in order to build assessments from this understanding. Finally, we offer some brief conclusions about the value of the theoretical frameworks and methodologies described here.

Use the resource links on the right to download the full paper.

Download PDF

Book

Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality

A resource from Humanities & Liberal Arts Assessment (HULA)

Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality

A resource from Humanities & Liberal Arts Assessment (HULA)

The Declaration of Independence matters because it helps us see that we cannot haev freedom without equality. It is out of an egalitarian commitment that a people grows -- a people that is capable of protecting us all collectively, and each of us individually, from domination. If the Delcration can stake a claim to freedom, it is only because it is so clear-eyed about the fact that people's strengths resides in its equality.

The Declaration also conveys another lesson of paramount importance. It is this: language is one of the most potent resources each of us has for achieving our own political empowerment. The men who wrote the Declaration of Independence grasped the power of words. This reveals itself in the laborious processes by which they brought the Declaration, and their revolution, into being. It shows itself forcefully, of course, in the text's own eloquence.

Read more in Our Declaration: A Reading of The Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality.

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Humanities & Liberal Arts

Resources

Out of Eden Learn White Paper

Education and Equality

What Makes Teams Tick?

Humanities & Liberal Arts Assessment White Paper

Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality

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Projects

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Project Zero Classroom 2015

Future of Learning 2015

Project Zero Perspectives: Zeroing in on Learning

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