Humanities & Liberal Arts

The Humanities and Liberal Arts Assessment (HULA) project (a research and consulting group led by Danielle Allen and based out of Harvard’s Project Zero) has developed new research methodologies for deepening our understanding of just how humanistic pedagogy works, what humanists expect it to accomplish, and what methods for assessing it might be.

 

For academics who are interested in studying philanthropy, our research might illuminate fruitful lines of inquiry into, for example, what types of humanistic craft practice are more likely to be funded and why. For philanthropists, our analysis suggests ways to both more effectively assess potential projects and to evaluate funded projects: by considering known mechanisms that humanists employ to achieve goals, philanthropists can more effectively consider if and how projects might achieve their stated purpose.

 

An initiative of Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Out of Eden

Learn is an online learning community that connects school-age students from

around the world to engage together in “learning journeys” of cross-cultural inquiry

and exchange. These learning journeys invite young people to do several things: to

slow down to observe the world carefully and to listen attentively to others; to

exchange stories and perspectives related to people, place, and identity; and to reflect

on how their individual lives connect to bigger human stories. Out of Eden Learn

accompanies Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and National Geographic Fellow Paul

Salopek’s epic Out of Eden Walk: his multi-year journey on foot around the world

along the migratory pathways of our ancient human ancestors and experiment in

“slow journalism.”

 

This white paper is intended to explain the underlying philosophy and model of Out of

Eden Learn.

 

Use the link under Resource Links to download the entire white paper.

Many of the most pressing issues of our time—climate change, economic inequality, human rights—require interdisciplinary solutions. Yet facilitating collaboration among individuals from disparate fields can often be challenging. A recent study on what contributes to successful interdisciplinary work has found that the “emotional aspect” of such collaborations is at least as important as their intellectual aspect.

 

The study, by professor of sociology Michele Lamont, lecturer on education Veronica Boix Mansilla, and Kyoko Sato, now a lecturer at Stanford, closely examined nine interdisciplinary networks funded by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Santa Fe Institute. These networks all brought together scholars from at least three disciplines; their research topics ranged from brain development to urbanization. Drawing on documents, observation, surveys, and interviews, the authors concluded that the markers of successful interdisciplinary collaborations include not just an intellectual, but also emotional and interactional elements, and they proposed a “shared cognitive-emotional-interactional platform” for evaluating such projects.

 

Read the full article on the Harvard Magazine website.

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.