DePaul receives $750K from Mellon Foundation to launch Experiential Humanities Collaborative

Known as the Experiential Humanities Collaborative, the initiative will champion the power of the humanities to make meaningful social impact through experiential engagement in higher education and the community.

“The humanities are rooted in the study of the human condition and the human experience, including our most profound challenges. They teach us to think critically, but also to develop the robust creativity that will be essential if we are going to develop solutions to the pressing problems facing our society,” says Margaret Storey, associate dean and professor of history.

With the Mellon Foundation grant, the college will build on DePaul’s long history of community-engaged teaching by launching a team-teaching model that allows for humanities faculty, community partners and students to collaboratively design project-based courses. Each year of the collaborative will be organized around a topic of social significance, such as immigration, gentrification, mass incarceration, gun violence, youth political engagement, ethnic diversity or issues around democracy.

“Faculty in the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences have long offered our students a rich array of community-based, experiential, project-based courses. The academic emphases of these courses, however, has tended to be in the social sciences,” says Dean Guillermo Vásquez de Velasco.

“Until recently, humanities courses — specifically, literature, writing, history, art history, languages, ethnography, cultural studies, philosophy and religious studies — have had fewer opportunities to engage in project-based learning,” Vásquez de Velasco notes. “We decided to make a strategic shift in the college with this new approach, to show that project-based humanities courses can engage with and respond to community needs, while providing valuable learning experiences for students. The collaborative will champion the humanities’ potential to tackle the most seemingly intransigent social issues.”

“Co-teaching in the humanities is relatively rare,” Storey explains. “And when it happens, it usually involves two faculty working together over a single academic term. The Mellon grant allows us the extraordinary opportunity to expand the team-teaching model to include community practitioners and students, and to extend their interdisciplinary collaboration over the course of an entire academic year. We believe this will offer the time and support necessary to create and deliver sustainable, meaningful projects for the community partner.”

After a preparatory year in which the college establishes the structures and processes necessary to run the program, implementation of the collaborative will begin in August 2020. It will be led by a faculty director and a nine-member advisory committee who will jointly design the first cohort theme, develop application materials and processes, initiate the first call for applications, offer pre-application support, and review and accept applicants for the first cohort.

In each of the following three years, the collaborative will host three teams of five fellows: two DePaul humanities faculty fellows, a community fellow, a DePaul undergraduate student fellow and a DePaul graduate student fellow.

All full-time faculty (both tenure-line and term, at all ranks) in the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences who hold the terminal degree in their fields, and who have teaching or scholarly fields in the humanities, will be eligible to form a team to apply for a fellowship within the collaborative. 

Once accepted to the collaborative, the six faculty fellows will receive release time from their normal teaching load, as well as one unit of summer salary, to support their participation. They will be responsible for teaching two courses for the college in their areas of expertise in the fall and winter quarters, as well as the collaborative course in the spring quarter.

Student fellowships will be open to those who are majoring, minoring or pursing master’s level work in the humanities.

Each team will collaborate to develop a course in the humanities in which students will work on a project for the benefit of the community fellows’ organizations or their constituents. In the first two quarters, the teams will engage in professional development, interdisciplinary colloquia about the year’s focal topic, and course design. The project-based class will be taught in the spring quarter by the two faculty fellows and the community fellow. During the summer, the teams will analyze and reflect on their work, and share those findings publically.

“The collaborative aligns with DePaul’s strategic plan, ‘Grounded in Mission,’ in which the university pledges to uphold a shared commitment to broad-based liberal arts education as integral to students’ success in an interconnected global society,” Vásquez de Velasco says. “A core pedagogical outcome for the college is developing a robust model of co-teaching that supports this mission.

“By structuring the collaborative to include community organization leaders as fellows alongside faculty, and as colleagues in the program, the college also will develop a new type of academic-practitioner model for these kinds of collaborations, a field-tested model that can be shared with other universities,” Vásquez de Velasco notes.

“This approach is consistent with DePaul’s foundational belief that it is embedded in the community it serves, and that students and faculty can best learn and practice in an environment that integrates a wide range, and broader definition, of academic, theoretical and experiential expertise,” Vásquez de Velasco says. “We are grateful to the Mellon Foundation for its support of this initiative that will exemplify the role that the humanities and an urban university can play in developing innovative solutions to pressing social problems.”