"The Teaching Archive" shows us a series of major literary thinkers in a place we seldom remember them inhabiting: the classroom. Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan open up "the teaching archive"--the syllabuses, course descriptions, lecture notes, and class assignments--of critics and scholars including T. S. Eliot,…

For several years, I taught a general education course on the Manhattan Project for students majoring in the arts and humanities who needed a physical science credit as a condition of their graduation requirements. As might be imagined, the challenge in teaching this course was to find a balance between quantitative and qualitative content. A…

The centennial of the First World War has offered instructors across the humanities an exciting opportunity to enhance students' disciplinary expertise while reflecting on the significance of an event that continues to shape the world today. Drawing on established courses on the history and literature of the war, respectively, the authors designed…

In particular, the study of history--its scope, reliance on analytical narrative, and methodology of tracing change and continuity over time--provides for an exchange of meaningful narratives. As historians Martha Howell and Walter Prevenier argue, "All cultures, all peoples, tell stories about themselves, and it is these stories that help…

Moreover, the cross-curricular integrative writing approach implemented by the instructors of these courses (the authors) provided students enrolled in the Colleges of Education and the College of Social Sciences, Arts, & Humanities a unique opportunity to become actively engaged in a multidisciplinary approach to learning. The assignment not…

Research on authentic learning has been predominantly focussed on skills-based training: there is a paucity of research on models of authentic learning available for adaptation in the humanities undergraduate classroom. In this article, I will seek to address this gap by proposing that legal trials are ideal models for designing authentic learning…

This article examines a hybrid graduate history course called "Teaching Hidden History." Team-taught in Summer 2015 across two universities, the course fundamentally tasked graduate students in history and history education with creating online learning modules based on the idea that hidden within any artifact is a larger historical…

This article describes a unique interdisciplinary course on social media and the self developed and taught by the authors at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. The article describes challenges facing humanities faculty who wish to teach on topics with high societal currency and student interest. Current research into humanistic approaches…

"Popular culture" and "culture studies" have become mainstays of the humanities in higher education. Like most other humanities courses, popular culture courses today mainly serve the usual politically correct program of the existing dominant class in the academy. Nevertheless, such courses can also be a powerful tool for instructors who wish to…

Teaching for cultural understanding has always posed many challenges regarding exactly what should be taught and how it should be presented. For instance: should students be taught a list of facts about another culture, which may lead to stereotyping? Should there be comparison between one's own and another culture, which may involve dealing with…

General education requirements have long been a component of college and university baccalaureate programs. The courses have traditionally focused on the disciplines in the arts and sciences including mathematics, sciences, humanities, social sciences, and the arts. Family and consumer sciences (FCS) programs also offer courses in areas such as…

"Computing in the Humanities," an undergraduate course for Computer Science Department majors and minors and Web Programming minors at New York University, represents a unique collaboration between the Computer Science Department and the University Archives. The course's final assignment required students to select, digitize, and contextualize…

This article seeks to inspire humanities and social science faculty to explore ways of utilizing existing scholarly online communities to engage students in the process of academic inquiry. The author discusses her own experience using a discipline-specific listserv, shares successful assignments, examples of student postings and a grading rubric.…

Describes a year-long core humanities course at Washington State University in which freshman composition is linked to a world civilizations context. Explains how the linked course aims to prepare students for the writing and thinking tasks they need for other courses in college and after they graduate. (MG)

Describes two double-period humanities courses taught in the 10th and the 11th grades (based on the rigorous New York State Regents standards) that interweave literature, history, political philosophy, art, historical documents, and personal experience. Describes the 10th-grade course that includes Western civilization and the 11th-grade course…