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Humanities reaching out

Scholar, UW officials discuss ways undergrads can help teach K-12 students

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REBECCA MCKEAG/Herald photo

Julia Lupton, director of Humanities Out There, discusses her initiatives at the Pyle Center.

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A humanities scholar told a crowd at the University of Wisconsin Tuesday that academic outreach programs help share the humanities with the Madison community and world, promoting a discipline currently ailing in the public eye.

The address was part of the Humanities Exposed program’s second annual conference, and it illustrated the success UW programs have had exposing the humanities to larger publics.

Earlier this year, Chancellor Biddy Martin told members of the UW community the humanities have suffered at the university level because of an inability to connect with the general public.

Keynote speaker Julia Lupton, founding director of Humanities Out There, an educational partnership between the school of Humanities, UC-Irvine and local public schools, said she has devoted much of her professional career to developing programs that seek to make this connection.

Her guiding question in doing so has been “how do I begin pushing the envelope, by which I mean taking the humanities to new publics and trying to get others to do the same?” Lupton said.

Lupton said there are a variety of answers to these questions, all of which recognize a common truth.

“It is transformative to take what you’re doing inside the university outside and have something happen, to have sparks fly, to have communication occur, to have some sense of a new kind of relationship between academia and the rest of society,” Lupton said.

Humanities Exposed is one program striving to achieve this relationship at UW. HEX seeks to bring a more public orientation to research in the humanities and to create a cadre of public scholars in UW’s graduate programs that are unafraid to work in and with communities.

The basic structure of the program allows graduate students to develop units on humanities topics and train undergraduates to do small group learning with students in local K-12 classrooms, Lupton said.

“It is astonishing, the kinds of things that are suddenly possible when we bring six to 10 undergraduates into a classroom with 40 students,” Lupton said.

The reach of programs like HEX extends beyond the classroom as well.

“There are forms of intellectuality that grow organically out of various kinds of embedded labor and community practices,” Lupton said.

New forms of media have proven to be a valuable resource in establishing this type of intellectuality and allowing it to permeate around the globe.

Programs like HEX are prime examples of grassroots intellectualism, an indispensable method in exposing the field of humanities to broader society, according to Lupton.

“I think what the HEX program exemplifies is our shared sense that the task of publicizing the humanities needs to be drawn away from the demands of marketing … and towards concrete acts of engagement,” Lupton said.

Sara Guyer, director of the center for humanities, recognized this necessity for concrete acts of engagement also reinforces a foundational part of the Wisconsin Idea.

“One of the university’s commitments is to a larger public, understanding that the university is not just about students, faculty and staff, but about the whole community,” Guyer said.

She went on to identify this as one of the event’s main goals “to both showcase work that is doing that and to inspire new work.”