The development and implementation of an annual common book program for students enrolled in Tulsa Community College’s First Year Experience Seminars.

Tulsa Community College (TCC) proposes an annual common book program (CBP) called “TCC Public Good-Reads.” The inaugural CBP, subtitled “Back Home,” explores Iraq War veteran Phil Klay’s short story collection, Redeployment, and focuses on trauma, adjustment, freedom, and other significant humanities themes intended to promote understanding of veterans’ experiences. The 18-month project is structured in three phases: 1) faculty development and planning, 2) course-related training, and 3) a pilot launching the CBP in 150 sections of TCC’s first-year experience seminar and 24 additional core course sections, culminating in a public lecture by author Phil Klay. The project will expand humanities teaching by creating humanities-based learning communities, incorporating professional development, and facilitating adoption of high-impact practices. TCC intends to sustain Public Good-Reads as an integral part of the College and for its annual events to have long-term impacts on the community.

A three-year faculty and curriculum development project on the history, culture, and folklore of the Antietam Creek region.

Bridging the Antietam, a project designed to boost student performance in composition classes and produce curricula to support writing across the disciplines, will focus on memory and its constructions as expressed through the folklore, narratives, and interpretation of history of the Antietam Creek region (western Maryland, south central Pennsylvania, and eastern West Virginia) Hagerstown Community College (HCC) serves. Specific grant deliverables include faculty professional development, a summer bridge program, revised humanities curriculum, a summer institute, and a digital archive featuring local "finds," to include oral history narratives.

A three-year curriculum development project on the art and architecture of Santa Monica and west Los Angeles County.

Serving west Los Angeles County in California, Santa Monica College’s Humanities Initiative at Community Colleges project will explore the diverse stories of west Los Angeles, using its visual art to move beyond the dominant narrative and incorporate the lesser known stories of color that have helped to shape the region. Working collaboratively with students and community organizations, faculty from the Art History program will integrate these stories into their courses as a means for engaging the college’s diverse student population and building community connection. Faculty will house these stories in a digital database that provides faculty and students with access to non-linear knowledge that can move through time and establishes a ground that fosters deeper context with the material. Once established, the digital database will serve as a resource for other humanities programs interested in using visual studies as a means for strengthening learning and promoting engagement.

A two-year faculty and curricular development program to incorporate the study of Chicago’s art, music, and history into courses for early childhood educators.

The integration of English language arts and humanities-based study of culture specific to Chicago into the Early Childhood Education (ECE) curriculum by designing and implementing increased English language humanities teaching and learning that is both relevant and authentic to the Chicago area. The project’s intellectual goal is to improve the quality of humanities teaching and learning through the following strategic objectives: (1) increasing humanities content knowledge of participating faculty and students; (2) infusing the study of Chicago’s art, music, and history into the ECE program through syllabus and curriculum development; (3) creating a robust community of practice centered on the teaching and study of humanities in ECE; and (4) improving students’ writing skills through cultivation of enhanced critical-thinking skills and promotion of more effective expression of cultural engagement.

A two-and-a-half-year collaborative project to strengthen humanities learning and pathways to higher education for underserved high school students.

This proposal to the NEH Humanities Initiatives at Community Colleges partners the Rose State College Humanities Division with the Mid-Del Public School District to create a collaboration that will strengthen pathways to higher education for students in the public school district’s two most underserved high schools. The project will expand humanities throughout the entire community in ways that are fully sustainable after the grant funding period ends. This will be done by creating the following at the high schools through extension of existing college resources: 1) a visiting humanities professor rotation, 2) a shared labs practice in reading and writing, and 3) an enriching cultural events attendance project.

A three-year partnership to incorporate the study of primary sources into community college courses and establish transfer pathways for students.

Anne Arundel Community College (AACC) will partner with St. John's College in Annapolis, a renowned liberal arts college with a curriculum focused on the most important books and ideas of Western civilization. Tutors and faculty will develop a Great Books curriculum and seminar-style teaching methodology, and AACC faculty will learn seminar-style Great Books instruction from the expert tutors at St. John's college. The goals of the projects are to 1. deepen faculty knowledge of seminar-style pedagogy using primary source Great Books in humanities teaching; 2. engage community college students in Great Books humanities learning around the themes of equity and inclusion, while at the same time enabling Masters level students to gain experience in community college education; and 3. establish pathways and financial incentives for community college students to transfer to liberal arts institutions.

The development of new curriculum for an applied ethics minor.

To better prepare associate degree students for meaningful careers in health care and technology, and to be citizens of the universal community, Trocaire College in Buffalo, New York, proposes, “Community and Mission: Building a New Applied Ethics Minor.” This 30-month humanities initiative will strengthen the college’s focus on ethical deliberation through creation of Trocaire’s first minor program for associate degree students. The primary goal of the new minor is to link applied ethics explicitly and deliberately across Trocaire’s general education curriculum and the associate degree programs in allied health, technology, and general studies. Through the proposed project, Trocaire will build an interdisciplinary learning community that will engage in intensive professional development, learn from other Sisters of Mercy institutions, revise three philosophy courses, and create two new courses to deepen curricular connections in the new minor.

The development of curriculum and resources illuminating the history of labor in career areas such as fashion design, retail services, and advertising and marketing.

"Shop Girls to Show Girls" an interdisciplinary project intended to improve student understanding of the historical contexts for the professional fields they are pursuing. The initiative is being developed to address needs initially identified by faculty during a pilot project at FIT. The pilot revealed that the inclusion of robust labor history in pre-professional course curricula can have broad value for a diversity of disciplines at community colleges. "Shop Girls to Show Girls" is grounded on the premise that the humanities bring essential context and a deeper subject understanding to pre-profession studies. By learning about the historical influences that have shaped the professions they will enter, community college students will be better-prepared for the demands of the 21st-century workplace. This knowledge will enhance their own careers and potentially empower them to improve the industries in which they are working.

Three iterations of a two-week summer bridge program for area students where they would research a topic on the region’s cultural heritage and produce a documentary film of their work.

Helena College proposes a summer bridge program for high school and at-risk college students to research topics that situate present issues of small-town, rural America in the context of the past; produce documentary films; and enroll in humanities pathways. Students will learn interdisciplinary humanities methodologies, principles, and debates as they select appropriate historical photographs, newspaper articles, literature, and moving images, write a script, interview local experts and historians, design graphics, and develop the promotion and distribution plan for their production. Three summer programs will focus on topics that represent under-explored aspects of the region’s cultural heritage: 1) a comparative analysis of Montana’s pandemics in 1918 and 2020; 2) the crucial yet overlooked role of people of color in the region’s formation; and 3) the impact of mining waste on community and ecology. The program will utilize community resources and strengthen humanities pathways.

Two summer institutes for twenty faculty members and ten students, centered on the emerging field of critical border studies.

We are proposing two year-long institutes in which CUNY community college faculty and students engage in interdisciplinary debates about terrestrial and maritime borders. Our institutes have three goals: 1) to contribute to course development and curriculum design in Global Learning at CUNY community colleges; 2) to support faculty in developing their own scholarship; and 3) to allow a group of LaGuardia students to learn about borders alongside faculty. Our first-year institute will explore political and terrestrial borders – past, present, and future. Our second-year institute will examine border waters, including their functions and the impacts of rising sea levels. At each institute, faculty and students will read scholarship in the field, meet visiting scholars, and take an experiential learning field trip. Faculty will then develop and share new courses or teaching modules on the topic of borders. Faculty will also share their own scholarship related to borders with colleagues.

A two-year project to develop faculty workshops and experiential learning activities on teaching students how to conduct oral histories in the community. 

The goal of Oral History in Interdisciplinary Community College Pedagogy is to empower community college faculty with the skills to bring oral history interviews into their own pedagogical practices through a series of year-long workshops. The faculty will engage in interviewing, deep listening, and analysis of oral history materials in their disciplines. Through this engagement, the faculty will explore how oral history practices can help re-center their teaching practices to the vantage points of individuals and community of the minority groups whose perspectives are often marginalized in published materials and media.

A three-year project focused on curriculum development and the creation of an archive combined with campus and community activities exploring a natural and cultural heritage site adjacent to the college’s Palamanui campus.

In keeping with the National Endowment for the Humanities’ “Protecting Our Cultural Heritage” and “Providing access to NEH-funded products” priority areas, Hawai’i Community College will engage students, faculty, and the community in a project that utilize a wide array of humanities-based activities in a newly formed Palamanui Forest Preserve adjacent to our campus. Combining experiential learning, we plan to study, teach, and share the rich cultural heritage of indigenous Hawaiian people in a region containing an important remnant of the world’s most endangered ecosystem, the lowland tropical dry forest. The project includes creating a map and digital archives of the ancient and modern trails and rich cultural heritage of the forest, establishing a cultural speaker series and workday for the community, and faculty professional development opportunities to develop curriculum that recognizes the region as a cultural heritage.

A three-year project to create experiential learning courses and community-based student projects at a two-year college.

This project seeks to develop and expand a robust experiential, project-based learning program focused on identity and place-making on the six diverse campuses of Perimeter College, a two-year degree granting college of Georgia State University, by training faculty, creating resources, and piloting “Project Lab” courses. These courses will be embedded in pre-existing “Perspectives” courses, core classes that focus on critical thinking and humanities-focused topics and will engage students with community-facing projects developed around the theme of identity and place-making. The program will consist of faculty development workshops, resource building, and community-engagement that will lead to the creation of humanities-focused project lab courses.

A three-year oral history project on the history of Silicon Valley.

This project is intended to increase access to the oral histories of De Anza College’s California History Center (CHC), while also creating new oral histories, digital stories, and an educational walking tour, within a Humanities context and curriculum. De Anza College is eager to undertake the work of reframing historical narratives that better reflect an authentic identity for the people of Silicon Valley. In keeping with the National Endowment for the Humanities' special initiative, A More Perfect Union, this project is motivated by the recognition that the American story is incomplete without the stories of the countless Americans who have been bypassed, ignored, and forgotten. By addressing such marginalization, this project: (1) increases accessibility of the local oral histories already housed at CHC; (2) promotes the creation of new historical narratives, and (3) works with campus and community partners to develop new curriculum and experiential learning activities.