Embedding Place-Based Humanities in the Curriculum

FAIN: AA-277717-21

St. John Fisher College (Rochester, NY 14618-3537)
Deborah Uman (Project Director: July 2020 to January 2021)
Melissa Bissonette (Project Director: January 2021 to present)

Three summer symposia for three faculty cohorts to incorporate place-based humanities perspectives on the history and culture of the Rochester, NY, region into their curriculum.

St. John Fisher College (SJFC) proposes to create up to 18 new humanities core courses, which intentionally embed a place-based humanities perspective. Place-based humanities is an interdisciplinary humanistic inquiry that focuses on the interconnection of geography; local history; community; and cultural, social, and personal identity. Rochester, NY has been the site of critical intellectual American ideas, from abolitionism to women’s rights. While home to leaders such as Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony, the city’s significance plays but a small part in scholarly understanding of these iconic figures. The project objectives are as follows: 1) create spaces for critical conversation around race focused on place-based humanistic texts, while promoting interest in the humanities; 2) embed the teaching of place-based humanities in the core curriculum; and 3) disseminate a place-based humanities pedagogy with other faculty at SJFC and beyond.

Associated Products

Writing as Memory Work: Teaching the Civic Deliberations over Monument Removals (Article)
Title: Writing as Memory Work: Teaching the Civic Deliberations over Monument Removals
Author: Barbara Lowe
Author: Jill Swiencicki
Abstract: Social justice goals are usually sought in civic or community settings in which stakeholders represent competing frameworks about what is just, good, and true. Modeling for students a way to identify these competing frameworks, and then intervene in deliberations to achieve just ends, is the focus of our assignment sequence. We examine civic deliberations over removing racist public symbols in this assignment for first-year students enrolled in linked rhetoric and philosophy courses. We read broadly in theories of public memory and civic identity, examine in depth one community’s deliberation, and reflect on public symbols in our home communities. The final joint assignment asks students to identify the principles that should guide deliberations about contested public symbols. We found that the assemblage of ideas that the students select from these pre-drafting activities shapes what they think is possible in the work of social justice; in other words, their own standpoint enables and limits what they see in the assemblage of ideas, sometimes limiting the arc of social justice insights and solutions, and sometimes unleashing it. For this reason, reflective writing is a necessary entwined process, one that can develop better awareness of how students’ epistemic norms shape their ability to imagine social justice ends. To most fully realize social justice knowledge, students must not stay bound within the contours of particular deliberations, or inward reflection. Instead, assignments must enlarge the context, asking students to make bigger inquiries into history, context, and relations of domination.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: http://https://thepromptjournal.com/index.php/prompt/article/view/86
Access Model: open access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Prompt: A Journal of Academic Writing Assignments

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