Applied Humanities - ERIC

SCHOLARSHIP AND TEACHING in the humanitiescan sometimes be overly self-referential. Ratherthan foster citizenship and social engagement,undergraduate literature classes are often lim-ited to exercises in textual interpretation asstudents learn to compare and contrast formaldevices and thematic motifs. How do we mea-sure the student’s mastery of Dostoyevsky’sCrime and Punishment, for example? Is it by hisor her ability to retain the plot and characteractions? Is it by the number of different motifsthe student is able to identify? Is it by his orher ability to recognize verbal polyphony? Or,

rather, is it by the stu-dent’s refusal to hurt

another person regardless of how miserable anddespicable that person may be? Is it by his or herdecision to volunteer at a homeless shelter be-cause poverty, as Dostoyevsky depicts, corrodeshumanity? The step from analyzing verbal poly-phony to fighting poverty is not a short one,and only rarely does teaching and scholarship inthe humanities help students make that step.

Ultimately, fostering the ability to own (en-act and embody) a literary or philosophical in-sight should be central to humanities learningin college. Withdrawal into informationtransfer without a view of tangible action orapplication is a serious failure of education.“We know we can teach [students] Keynesianeconomics and the history of the Italian Re-naissance,” Richard Hersh and Carol GearySchneider explain (2005, 10). “But if that isall we do, then we have failed them. If, in theprocess, we don’t also teach students about pas-sion and the relationship between passion andresponsible action, then we leave them dulled.”

If this insight is true of science, it is doublytrue of the humanities. Science students atleast have the advantage of practicing theapplication of scientific concepts to phenomena

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SVETLANA NIKITINA is assistant professor ofEnglish at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

Applied Humanities

Ultimately, fosteringthe ability to own(enact and embody)a literary or philosophical insightshould be central to humanities learning in college

S V E T L A N A N I K I T I N A

Bridging the Gap between Building Theory & Fostering Citizenship

Worcester Polytechnic Institute

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ities students, however, the transfer of knowl-edge from concept to action often goes untestedand unrealized. Yet, the stakes in the humanitiesare just as high as in science, if not higher. Ifwe cannot afford to have students fail in theapplication of trigonometry concepts, we defi-nitely cannot afford to have them read RobertGraves and easily justify a war, or to have themread Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael and remain indif-ferent to animal extinction. Embodied andenacted humanism is more powerful than itstheoretical counterpart, and it results in betterconceptual learning as well.

Strategies for making concepts tangibleHow can we foster this type of learning in thehumanities classroom? In attempting to an-swer this question here, I propose five strate-gies for making concepts tangible: throughmedia and the arts, through activism, throughcocreation, through contemporizing, andthrough cross-pollination. Underlying thesestrategies are three interconnected ideas thathave been suggested in the literature on thecrisis of the humanities. These ideas are cen-tered on overcoming extreme specialization andformalism (Spellmeyer 2003), opening a widerframe of reference through interdisciplinarycrossover (Klein 2005; Gallagher and Green-blatt 2000), and reattaching the humanitiesto the arts (Scholes 1998; Spellmeyer 2003;McBride 2004).

The five strategies derive from my own per-sonal teaching experience at two colleges as wellas from the observation of countless classroomsacross the country in the course of a nationwidestudy of interdisciplinary education conductedby the Harvard Graduate School of Education.The course examples discussed below arecomposite portraits of courses either observedor personally delivered. The idea behind propos-ing specific strategies is not to foreclose furtherexperimentation, but rather to open doors widefor building upon these pedagogies by way ofextension, critical development, and adapta-tion to individual instructional needs.

1. Embodiment through media and the arts.The media and the arts strategy calls uponstudents to embody abstract concepts throughthe creation of artifacts. Literary styles orphilosophical ideas are transformed into objects(masques, models, designs, drawings) executedin a medium of the student’s choice (clay,

charcoal, wood, computer animation, poetry,music). Students have to capture—and beable to articulate—the essential aspect(s) ofthe humanistic concept studied. As a result,reading the textbook description of the con-cept becomes not an end in itself but an ideagenerator for the creative project. The physi-cal expression of an abstract idea through artmakes the concept more real and personallymeaningful for students. Through creative em-bodiment, students acquire ownership of ideas.


The application of this strategy transformsthe teaching of Introduction to Humanitiesfrom a dates-and-names course into a studioenvironment. Instead of overloading studentswith reams of data, the instructor identifies corethemes and categories of the topic (e.g., theRenaissance, linearity, the mechanical uni-verse of the Enlightenment) and then asksstudents to represent them in an artistic mediumof their choice. The creative process may takeplace inside or outside the classroom, depending

on time and material constraints. The critiquesession takes place in class and involves boththe presentation of the artifacts by studentsand their justification of creative choices bythe content of the explored concept.

2. Activism. The activism strategy providesopportunities for students to act upon insightsdeveloped through conceptual learning in thehumanities classroom. Not all humanities courseslend themselves equally well to an activist ex-tension (interdisciplinary or problem-based

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Worcester PolytechnicInstitute

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both instructional and institutional effort tomake this work. But when established, onhowever limited a scale, these opportunitiesoffer the most direct way to experience human-istic concepts in action.

In the course Literature and the Environ-ment, for example, the discussion and inter-pretation of texts (e.g., Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael,Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac, AnnieDillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek) is reinforcedby real-life opportunities to act upon newlyforged beliefs through limited service at a localenvironmental organization. To make a transi-tion from understanding biocentrism to prac-ticing it, students may engage in investigativereporting on industrial pollution, participatein tracking a compromised species, or addressK–12 audiences on a particular environmen-tal issue. They also write a “call-to-arms” termpaper documenting their experiential learningand calling attention to an urgent civic issue.Students in such a class develop a new approachto the environment and to the humanities asthey begin to see the world-changing poten-tial of the texts they read. Their writing stylematures through better argumentation, in-creased social engagement, and the develop-ment of a distinctive personal voice. Studentsemerge from this course as concerned citizens—asking why before they ask how, and driven totranslate humanistic insight into social practice.

3. Cocreation. The cocreation strategytransforms a student of literature from an ad-miring reader into an involved cocreator. Stu-dents read texts with a view to their potentialtransformation, extension, or critical develop-ment. They see in “Great Books” the act ofgreat creativity and craftsmanship in whichthey, too, can take part. Such creative partici-pation tends to foster deeper understandingand appreciation of literature, while also de-veloping in students a more critical stance.

A course that focuses in-depth on a few lit-erary texts or authors is a good candidate forthe application of this strategy. One way tomake interpretive efforts vibrant and vital tostudents (and not too formal or abstract) is toconnect them to students’ own imaginationsand writings. A student may be asked to act ascoauthor of Middlemarch, for example, and toexpand upon or further develop the originalmasterwork. The student may invent a newcharacter and insert it into the story, provide a

different ending to a novel, or situate the eventsof a novel within a different culture or time. Byenacting these transformations, the students be-come deeply immersed in the style and subjectmatter, and they are empowered by cocreativelicense to change and critique them. The resultis critical and mature ownership of both themechanics of the text and its core ideas.

4. Contemporizing. The contemporizingstrategy brings abstract concepts to life bysteeping them in the present moment. As en-gaged participants in their own culture, stu-dents read the past through the lens of thepresent and develop deeper insight into it. By“trying on” a particular concept that is madeobscure and abstract by spatial and temporaldistance, students become aware of the partic-ulars of their own cultural experience, whichthey begin to see as more malleable and opento transformative action and intervention.This strategy involves the process of embeddingremote ideas within contemporary culture andpersonal experience.

Teaching Daniel Defoe’s novel Moll Flanders,for example, may involve a dry analysis of thematerialism of early capitalism in the Age ofEnlightenment. Alternatively, the instructorcan make this historical period come alive bycomparing and contrasting Moll Flanders’sacquisitiveness to our own cultural obsessionwith profit, image, and personal security. Whatis our judgment of our own materialism? Is itsimilar to or different from Moll’s? Studentscan also be asked to find a contemporaryequivalent of Moll among media personalitiesor to rewrite an episode of the story—using thecocreation strategy in addition to contempo-rizing—for a contemporary audience. Throughthe search for points of connection and dis-connection between the text and their ownculture, students emerge as historically in-formed readers of classical texts and as criticalconsumers of their own culture.

5. Cross-pollination. New insights or plansof action are often born at the intersection oftwo ideas, methodologies, or concepts. Sincethe humanities disciplines are in the business ofcommenting on, critiquing, and contextualiz-ing events, experiences, and phenomena, theylend themselves most naturally to interdiscipli-nary crossover. The cross-pollination strategyinvolves bringing a humanities perspective tobear on topics or methodologies outside of itsrealm or on different disciplines within its own


realm. Substance and depthare imparted by linking con-cepts from different disciplines.

A more complex and multi-faceted understanding of hu-man memory is bound to emerge within acollege classroom when, for example, the per-spectives of a neuroscientist and a literarycritic converge. In a class such as Science andLiterature of Memory, students learn aboutmemory mechanisms as manifestations of brainfunction. But by also reading biographies andautobiographies, they recognize that differentmemory mechanisms lead to different ways ofrecording or retaining life events. Students dis-cover both the fallibility and the internal logicof memory through the lenses of neuroscienceand creative writing. In the process, the wholenotion of memory is enlarged, concretized,and transformed into a tool for self-inquiry.

All five of the preceding strategies for makingconcepts tangible aim to take students beyondtheoretical abstraction and put them in touchwith tangible reality: the reality of one’s cre-ative process, wordsmithing, or craftsmanshipin any medium (strategies 1 and 3); the realityof social life (strategy 2); the reality of one’sown time and culture (strategy 4), and the re-

ality of knowledge as revealedin transfer (strategy 5). Noneof the strategies shortchangesconceptual learning in anyway. But they all view con-

ceptual learning as a means, not as an end initself. To embody concepts in clay or charcoalor to push them further through coauthoringrequires close reading and sophisticated inter-pretation. To implement ideas—such as envi-ronmental agency—in a real-world setting,one needs to possess thorough and criticalknowledge of those ideas. The act of “tryingon” in the present concepts that may berooted in the remote past or converging ideasfrom several different fields make it imperativethat students know the historical and disci-plinary context well enough to be able to en-gage in a productive compare-and-contrastprocess. Thus, the goals of liberal educationand the personal ownership of ideas impart ahigher purpose and motivation to the study ofthe humanities and enhance, rather than com-promise, theoretical and conceptual learning.

This conclusion is echoed and substantiatedby Scholarship in Public: Knowledge Creationand Tenure Policy in the Engaged University, anew report from the Tenure Team Initiative of


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None of the strategiesshortchanges

conceptual learning in any way

Worcester PolytechnicInstitute

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and Scholars in Public Life.The authors of the reportpoint out that “significantnumbers of faculty believethat public scholarship andcreative work are driving vitalnew areas in the humanitiesand arts” (Ellison and Eatman2008, iii). Therefore, theyurge, initiatives of public en-gagement on the part of artsand humanities faculty need to be supportedby “the reward system, the incentive system,our communication practices” (x). Hopefully,the many examples of public engagement inthe humanities scholarship cited in this reportas well as the recommendations to supportthem administratively indicate a turning tide.

Engaged humanities scholars Many more strategies could be developed tohelp move academic practice beyond theorybuilding to active reengagement with sociallife. The obstacles to this goal of liberalizinghumanities education, however, are many.The tenure system pushes for ultraspecializa-tion and for the formalization of humanitiesdisciplines, cultivating the ivory purity oftheir abstract conceptual bases. The continu-ing dominance of postmodernist thought inresearch and criticism challenges and decon-structs the role of the humanities as a positiveforce in society. Yet there is reason for hope.A number of top humanities scholars are gain-ing recognition for pioneering approaches thatbring the humanities out of the ivory towerand back into the thick of cultural life. By at-tending to the goals of liberal education, thesescholars inspire hope that humanities researchand teaching may move in this direction.

Elaine Scarry, the Walter M. Cabot Profes-sor of Aesthetics and the General Theory ofValue in the English department at HarvardUniversity, keeps a very close eye on how lit-erary theory can be applied to the most urgentissues in the world—war, electronic signaling,plane crashes, nuclear weapons, and the expe-rience of pain. She applies the same analyticalenergies to the study of Thackeray as she doesto reading documents on the 1996 crash ofTWA flight 800 or naval weapons manuals.Scarry sees her mission as that of an engagedpublic intellectual. “There is nothing about

being an English professorthat exempts you from thenormal obligations of citizen-ship,” she observes. Literarycriticism provides a method-ology for “reading” contem-porary culture and even for“solv[ing] social problems andsav[ing] lives” (Eakin 2000).Passion for disciplinary cross-over and public activism markScarry’s work in the humani-

ties and demonstrate that, even from atop theivory tower, humanists can branch out intothe real world and make their voices count.

With doctoral and master’s degrees in elec-trical engineering and computer science aswell as a Master of Fine Arts degree in music,Diana Dabby, associate professor of electricalengineering and music at Olin College of Engineering, bridges two academic worlds: thesciences and the arts. A concert pianist and acomposer, Dabby feeds initial musical themesinto a “chaotic mapping” engine she devel-oped to produce nonlinear musical variationsof the original works. Composers around theworld use her engineering innovation to gen-erate creative nonlinear variations on musicalthemes. This technique for connecting chaostheory and musical expression can also be ap-plied to other art forms—visual or kinetic in-puts in graphic art, word sequences in poetry,or dance movements. In a sense, Dabby makesphysics concepts audible and tangible in hermusical compositions. This cross-disciplinarytranslation is a form of cocreation: she actuallyextends and enriches her musical expressionthrough subtly engineered variations. She alsodemonstrates the creative range of scienceand makes her students aware of its power tochannel personal expression.

Stephen Greenblatt has long been a propo-nent of “treating cultures as texts” (Gallagherand Greenblatt 2000, 13). The New Historicistapproach, of which he is considered the founder,treats a literary text as a product of its timeand social environment rather than a thing initself. The placement of a text within its broadersocial and historical context transforms itinto a tangible cultural artifact, the carrier ofcontemporaneous social concerns, economicpractices, and philosophical beliefs. The NewHistoricist project, according to Greenblattand Gallagher, is concerned with “finding the


A number of top humanities scholars are gaining recognition

for pioneering approaches that bring

the humanities out of the ivory tower

and back into the thick of cultural life

creative power that shapes literary works out-side the narrow boundaries in which it hadhitherto been located, as well as within thoseboundaries” (2000, 12). In this effort, Green-blatt “contemporizes” the literary text; hemakes it aware of its historical and culturalroots and connects it powerfully to the audi-ence. Students process the text on more levelsthan the linguistic and become engaged read-ers of the whole culture that produced it.

Scott Gilbert, an accomplished biologist atSwarthmore College and author of a majortextbook of developmental biology, is alsotrained in cultural and feminist theory andteaches a course called History and Critiqueof Biology. Humanistic insight helps him putbiology in a broader social context. In thisencounter, cultural theory of gender roles,for example, meets with biological facts onmimicry, gender cannibalism, and the processof fertilization. Some of the theory stands upto the test and is enriched by scientific data.Other concepts and metaphors—for example,“sperm as a warhead”—prove to be biologicallyfallible and misleading. Gilbert sees both scienceand the humanities as two interpretive sys-tems—one bent on limiting interpretationsand paring away false assumptions (science),and the other (humanities) on generating asteady stream of new interpretations. Thiscross-disciplinary dialogue helps Gilbert’s stu-dents overcome the misconceptions that scienceis just solid truth and that humanistic con-cepts are pure abstractions. They realize thatthe conceptualizations of the humanities referto phenomena and tangible relationships inthe real world and that the real world bothlearns from these ideas and metaphors andinforms them in a reciprocal way.

ConclusionThe efforts of these scholars are driven by thesame core impulse as the five strategies pro-posed above, namely, the desire to restore tothe humanities its liberal education missionof fostering involved citizenship and activeownership of ideas. Scarry imparts the sophis-tication of literary analysis to the interpretationand resolution of urgent issues of the day. Dabbyextends musical ideas by translating them intoa physical medium. Greenblatt opens up literarytexts to the larger culture that produced them.Gilbert tests and probes humanistic insightsby bringing relevant scientific data to bear on

them. These approaches indicate the varietyof opportunities for connecting the humanitiesto real issues and physical phenomena and forfostering in students a sense of tangible own-ership. Following the lead of these scholarscould create momentum for reawakening hu-manities teaching to its civic duty.

The engagement of students in cocreation,action, and ownership of concepts does notcompromise conceptual learning in the hu-manities. On the contrary, it enhances it. Ona par with measuring students’ conceptual un-derstanding and skill at textual analysis, newoutcomes should be developed within the hu-manities disciplines to measure the maturityof students’ moral judgment, their degree ofsocial awareness, and their ability to own andembody their beliefs and theories. ■■

To respond to this article, e-mail [email protected],with the author’s name on the subject line.

REFERENCESEakin, E. 2000. “Elaine Scarry has a theory.” New York

Times, November 19.Ellison, J., and T. K. Eatman. 2008. Scholarship in public:

Knowledge creation and tenure policy in the engageduniversity. Syracuse, NY: Imagining America.

Gallagher, C., and S. Greenblatt. 2000. Practicing NewHistoricism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hersh, R. H., and C. G. Schneider. 2005. Fosteringpersonal and social responsibility on college anduniversity campuses. Liberal Education 91 (3): 6–13.

Klein, J. T. 2005. Humanities, culture, and interdiscipli-narity: The changing American academy. Albany:State University of New York Press.

McBride, K. D. 2004. Visual Media and the humanities:Pedagogy of representation. Knoxville: University ofTennessee Press.

Scholes, R. E. 1998. The Rise and fall of English: Recon-structing English as a discipline. New Haven: YaleUniversity Press.

Spellmeyer, K. 2003. Arts of living: Reinventing the humanities for the twenty-first century. Albany: StateUniversity of New York Press.


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Applied Humanities - ERIC