The Humanities at Work in US Community Colleges

Over the course of more than a decade, there has been a radical shift in vision, practice, and mission at colleges and universities across the United States. As a result, humanities programs have come to occupy a diminished status, while their counterparts in STEM and other programs that are thought of as more career-oriented have become institutional priorities. While the academy’s response to this sea change has focused almost exclusively on circumstances at four-year colleges and universities, the simple and disquieting truth is that whatever hardships or existential threats these institutions face in terms of the vitality of their humanities programs and departments, the problem is exponentially thornier in US community colleges. Put plainly, the humanities can seem at odds with the collective priorities of public two-year institutions, which have become ever more concerned with accelerated pathways to bankable careers—especially those in health care, business, criminal justice, and STEM. Moreover, this development is amplified by the academy’s historically half-sighted conception of program-to-career mapping, which often precludes a shared understanding of how, say, a philosophy major could find a career in tech or business.

Community college humanities educators understand that the methods, practices, and traditions of their disciplines are central to the equity-minded, access-oriented mission of the community college, which seeks not only to support students’ goals for upward socioeconomic mobility but also to help them become engaged and well-informed citizens equipped with the critical and creative habits of mind necessary to effect positive change in their communities. The problem, however, is that community college educators have been unsuccessful in communicating as much with real efficacy. This book aims to resolve this disconnect by highlighting the innovative practices and achievements of community college faculty members and administrators working purposefully to align the humanities with the principle objectives of their institutions.

The Humanities at Work in US Community Colleges will focus on instructors who are laboring to communicate the value of their fields to a growing population of students and on administrators who are engaged in the practice of connecting humanities curricula to workforce outcomes. Moreover, it will explore the endeavors of faculty members to cultivate and retain scholarly identities in concert with a five-five teaching load as well as the efforts of chairs and deans as they attempt to weave a common thread between humanistic inquiry and career readiness. Most important, this collection will underscore the trials and successes of innovative educators charged with aligning humanities education and the community college mission. We therefore invite essays that explore inventive practices among community college humanists who are striving to advance the tenets of access, equity, workforce outcomes, lifelong learning, and community enrichment in and beyond the classroom.

The Humanities at Work in US Community Colleges will investigate these innovations through three fundamental and intertwined facets of academic life: teaching and learning (including curriculum development, course design and delivery, pedagogy, and assessment), scholarship (both traditional and reconceived), and service (to students, the institution, and the community). In addition to these three areas, the book will include a section on academic and scholarly organizations working to support community college humanities educators through an array of programs and initiatives. These include the Modern Language Association, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Community College Humanities Association, the Community College Research Center, and others.

Above all else, the book aims to provide its readers with models that they can implement at their own institutions, thus bolstering humanities education locally and nationally. To this end, we seek abstracts on any of the following topics (or those related to them) and their intersections with humanistic disciplines and methods, specifically in the context of community colleges:

community college reform movements (e.g., guided pathways) and their myriad priorities, including first-year experience courses, gateway course acceleration, and workforce outcomes
high-impact practices, including (and especially) applied and experiential learning
cross-disciplinary collaboration (especially in curriculum development) between humanities and nonhumanities faculty members
general education frameworks
progressive program-to-career mapping
humanities program enrollment efforts
cross-institutional collaboration, particularly between two- and four-year institutions
aligning scholarship with the academic and noncognitive needs of post-traditional student populations
expanding the boundaries of viable scholarship and creating new modes of knowledge discovery and production in service to community colleges and their stakeholders
creating locally relevant curricula
community engagement, particularly in the form of public humanities programming
diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice initiatives

Proposals should be submitted to the volume editor, Michael Jacobs, at mjacobs20@monroecc.edu, by 26 January 2024. Please include the following:

a 300-word abstract
a 1-page CV or 100-word bio