Humanities & Liberal Arts

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

Maker-Centered Learning and the Development of Self: Preliminary Findings of AbD

Over the last two years we have simultaneously pursued three strands of work: 1) a review of pertinent literature; 2) interviews and site visits with leading maker educators; and 3) action research and concept development. We’re now commencing our third year of work. Our active data collection stage is over. We are well into an analysis of our results and are currently preparing several publications—including a book. However, in the put-it-out-there-and-tweak-as-you-go spirit of the maker movement, we offer this white paper as a preliminary glimpse at the emergent findings from our work, and as an open invitation to the maker educator community to continue to connect with us and share ideas.

On the Trail with Out of Eden Learn and Paul Salopek

Finding Our Way Into Each Other's Worlds: Musings On Cultural Perspective Taking

Perspective taking, the capacity to understand how others view their world is at a premium in a world of increasing diversity and complexity. It was also the topic of a class on global learning that Liz Dawes Duraisingh and I taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Education before the end of the year. In this class, a group of students and I experimented with trying to take on the perspectives of different individuals described in Paul’s dispatch Tomatoes – a moving description of his encounter with Syrian refugees eking out a living on the fringes of the desert in Jordan. We tried to imagine these individuals’ worlds shaped by majestic deserts and stubborn wars. Our efforts proved both challenging and generative as they raised essential puzzles of cultural perspective taking.

Finding Our Way