Humanities & Liberal Arts

An Introduction to Out of Eden Learn

The Good Collaboration Toolkit

The Good Collaboration Toolkit, a collection of materials designed to help individuals develop, nurture, and reflect on good collaborations. One can use this Toolkit for a variety of different reasons. Reasons why you may find it useful to work with the Toolkit are: →You have started a collaboration but are uncertain about who should provide leadership. →You have a launched a collaboration and are discovering that the values of your organization clash with those of another member organization. →You have held a series of meetings, and at each one, the time seems wasted.

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

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. 

Children as Citizens Video

2-minute video of Mardell and Krechevsky discussing documentation and young children as citizens.

Humanities Craftsmanship: A Study of 30 Years of Illinois Humanities Council Grant-making