Community Learning: A Public Humanities Approach to Teaching

Abstract

This workshop explores how teaching within the humanities is affected, challenged, or improved by public outreach. This question arises from growing concerns that the humanities has become disconnected from the general public or incoherent outside of a post-secondary institutional setting. Research suggests that in addition to the demands of their own research, scholars in the humanities are facing the added pressures of “policy-makers [who] are increasingly demanding that academics justify themselves in terms of the returns that result from investing in their scholarly domains” (Benneworth, 2015, p. 4). These concerns inform the public humanities movement which seeks to foster relations between scholars and their local communities in an effort to champion civic engagement/learning and accessible scholarship. The goal of this workshop is to consider in detail how teaching practices in the humanities might benefit from such community outreach, as well as to support and offer resources to instructors looking for new ways to engage students in this way. The workshop introduces participants to the public humanities movement, initiates debate on the relationship between humanities teaching and public outreach, and suggests strategies and resources for instructors to connect with local communities and outreach programs.