campus partner(s)

Texas A&M System

state(s)

TX

amount

$50,000

initiative

Cornerstone: Learning for Living

award date

05.2022

project director

Doug Julien; M. Clay Hooper; Sharon Kowalsky; Carlos Blanton

Grant Summary

$50,000 over 12 months to develop a humanities certificate program that will be integrated into the general education requirements of the eleven schools within the Texas A&M system and deliver a common humanities experience to a substantial portion of the system’s more than 120,000 undergraduates, most of them in STEM and pre-professional fields. The certificate will be anchored by a gateway course, The Human Experience, that introduces students to the humanities partly through the use of transformative texts.  The gateway course will be reinforced by other humanities courses, distributed through each institution’s Core Curriculum and also designated as Human Experience courses, that use transformative texts and employ a common assessment strategy to ensure that students engage with the humanities in ways that inspire deeper thinking about citizenship and ethical decision-making in relation to their own lives and aspirations. Students who complete the gateway course, two additional Human Experience courses, and one upper-level humanities course will earn a humanities certificate.