The NEH Grant

Reflecting on How to Create a Just World: Ethical Engagement with Community through the Humanities

The one-year NEH ARPO grant enables us to recommit to previous planning while incorporating perspectives gained during a challenging time. The pandemic made apparent the global-local continuum: what is global is local, and what is local is global. As we restart engagement in local and global communities through ACE and off-campus study, we are more mindful of the ethics of engagement, given the disparate impacts of COVID. This grant supports three key activities to develop more ethical community-engaged humanities-based courses, locally and globally.These include: 1) Reflection opportunities for students, 2) a faculty development series, and 3) an engaged department process.

Faculty curriculum developers created reflection materials on ethical engagement for students studying off campus or enrolled in ACE courses. Faculty leaders and peer facilitators have engaged approximately 120 ACE and study away/abroad student participants in reflection sessions before and after their engagement in community. Ethical engagement is grounded in the humanities, both in content and method, with reflection on ethical engagement often occurring through iterative writing and discussion.

Engaged Department work entails a year-long process in which faculty collaborate with staff to review and consider pathways for how community engagement—local and global—integrates into their program so all students gain intercultural and critical skills to engage thoughtfully and ethically with the world. Department’s work may include mapping out their majors with engaged experiences; developing course proposals that reflect ethical community engagement either locally or globally; contributing to a campus-wide repository of reflective practice tools; and generating three-year department plans for ongoing implementation of engaged experiences.