Humanities & Liberal Arts

Because of numerous factors, education in the liberal arts and sciences, particularly at the college/university level, is under threat in the United States. For this form of education to thrive, it is necessary to understand how various stakeholders think about education that is not primarily vocational, and which approaches and programs are most appropriate for these key stakeholders.

Resources

Article
HULA-ETTLE Code Book
A resource from Humanities & Liberal Arts Assessment (HULA)

HULA-ETTLE Code Book
A resource from Humanities & Liberal Arts Assessment (HULA)

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Book
Children Are Citizens Book 2017
A resource from Children Are Citizens

Children Are Citizens Book 2017
A resource from Children Are Citizens

People from all around the world know about Washington, DC. They talk about it, write about it, draw it, and make movies and TV shows about it. But almost always, we hear only the opinions and ideas of adults.

For this book we invited some of our youngest citizens—preschoolers, kindergartners, and first graders from DC Bilingual Public Charter School, Sacred Heart School, Seaton Elementary School (DCPS), E.W. Stokes Community Freedom Public Charter School, Sunshine Early Learning Center, and J.O. Wilson Elementary School (DCPS)—to tell us what they think of our city. We asked them to share their ideas in order to help other children (and adults) learn about what is important about DC. We asked their teachers to help students research the city and discuss their ideas with classmates and children from the other schools. Each teacher guided the children in different ways. The result is Washington, DC: "What People Like Most is in This Book!,” a title suggested by the children that conveys their connection to their city. In this book you will find a set of descriptions, theories, and stories—shared in pictures, words, and photographs—that are thoughtful, informative, and sometimes surprising. As Sergio Spaggiari, a veteran educator from Reggio Emilia, Italy, notes, "It seems that for cities to be understood and appreciated, they should be talked about in stories." You can learn a lot about our city from the stories in this book.

Jim Reese
Director, The Professional Development Collaborative at
Washington International School

On behalf of the Children Are Citizens coordinating team: Mara Krechevsky, Ben Mardell, Nathalie Ryan, Joanne Seelig, Stacy Steyaert, and Tim Wright

Use the resource links on the right to view the full book.

Children Are Citizens Book 2017

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Book
Slow Looking: The Art and Practice of Learning Through Observation
A resource from Out of Eden Learn

Slow Looking: The Art and Practice of Learning Through Observation
A resource from Out of Eden Learn

Slow Looking provides a robust argument for the importance of slow looking in learning environments both general and specialized, formal and informal, and its connection to major concepts in teaching, learning, and knowledge. A museum-originated practice increasingly seen as holding wide educational benefits, slow looking contends that patient, immersive attention to content can produce active cognitive opportunities for meaning-making and critical thinking that may not be possible though high-speed means of information delivery. Addressing the multi-disciplinary applications of this purposeful behavioral practice, this book draws examples from the visual arts, literature, science, and everyday life, using original, real-world scenarios to illustrate the complexities and rewards of slow looking. ISBN-13: 978-1138240407

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Tool
Ethical Dilemmas and Value-Based Decisions
A resource from The Good Project

Ethical Dilemmas and Value-Based Decisions
A resource from The Good Project

All of us encounter challenges in our lives. Sometimes they are quickly or easily resolved, but other times, it is not clear what to do, and there is no right or wrong answer. This is a dilemma. When we are faced with a dilemma, it is important to stop and consider our choices carefully and recognize how our values will influence our decision. We must also think about how our decisions will affect others. Ethics is a word for the sense of right and wrong we have about our actions and their consequences.

This interactive online unit from The Good Project is intended for a teenage audience and is based on the project’s GoodWork Toolkit curriculum. It includes two animated videos in which young people encounter ethical dilemmas, which are paired with reflective values-based activities and questions. Through this unit, students will learn to recognize how personal values influence decision-making and also come to understand what it means to make an ethical decision.

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Article
Humanities & Liberal Arts Assessment White Paper
A resource from Humanities & Liberal Arts Assessment (HULA)

Humanities & Liberal Arts Assessment White Paper
A resource from Humanities & Liberal Arts Assessment (HULA)

Discussions of the humanities in popular media frequently identify the humanities as “under attack.”1 While humanists have made theoretical arguments about the value of the humanities, relatively little empirical research has focused on understanding the contribution of the humanities to human development. Rigorous tools for assessing the benefits of humanities programs are even less common and those that exist have been borrowed from other fields rather than being built to assess programs in the humanities specifically. The Humanities and Liberal Arts Assessment project (HULA) is an effort to build a base of empirical evidence concerning the value of the humanities and to build tools for assessing humanities programs that are based on the craft practices of humanists. Our goals are both to provide humanists with a better and more explicit understanding of how their own practices “work” as drivers of human development and to provide empirical data about the value of the humanities in the cultivation of human development, preparation of a workforce, and maintenance of a democratic society. This paper describes HULA’s methodology for analyzing humanist craft practices and developing assessment tools. The first section of the paper outlines a theoretical argument for our approach to studying and building tools for assessment in the humanities. The second section of the paper will describe the methodology that HULA has developed to study the craft logic of humanistic practices in order to build assessments from this understanding. Finally, we offer some brief conclusions about the value of the theoretical frameworks and methodologies described here.

Use the resource links on the right to download the full paper.

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