UMass Amherst’s College of Humanities and Fine Arts Receives $300,000 Grant to Establish the Learning for Living Program as a Cornerstone Initiative
Professor Moira Inghilleri, Associate Professor Patrick Mensah and Senior Lecturer Barry Spence from the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures have been awarded a $300,000 from the Teagle Foundation and the National Endowment for Humanities to implement a curriculum reform initiative designed to revitalize the role of humanities in general education.
Through the grant assistance, participating faculty mentors have begun teaching multiple sections of two new Gateway gen-ed courses that are aimed mostly at incoming students and grounded substantially on a common set of famous texts that are meant to help build a sense of intellectual community among the students and faculty members through the common learning and teaching experiences.
Students who complete the Gateway courses earn the opportunity to partake in a Cornerstone Scholar Certificate program by electing to take a set of gen-ed Pathway courses from one of the following four thematically organized clusters: environmental humanities; science and technology and the humanities; business and the humanities; and global studies and the humanities. The award of the Cornerstone Scholar Certificate comprises five courses and up to 20 credit units.
Within a two-year span, the grant will help install a program of curricular reform that will build – through a renewed richer, and more meaningful engagement with the humanities – an enhanced sense of intellectual community among its participating students and faculty members. It will also provide students guided options to follow pathways of intellectual growth that are more purpose-driven and compelling.