Strategies for leading academics to rethink humanities and social sciences curricula in the context of discipline standards

Thomas, Theda; Wallace, Joy; Allen, PM; Clark, Jennifer; Jones, Adrian; Lawrence, Jill; Cole, Bronwyn; Burns, Lynette Sheridan

doi:10.1080/1360144x.2017.1285239

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Obviously, many students, upon entering an academic field, have little sense of its perspectives, concepts, and methods, and they may also not have had any experience in problem-setting. If we wish to apply the key notion of IBL that students “learn by doing,” our task as educators, then, is one of helping them master and de-code the discipline also in regard to what constitutes good problems or questions in that academic field (Middendorf and Pace, 2004; Thomas et al., 2017). To do so, we could take as our starting point C. Wright Mills’ (1959) classical exposition of the sociological imagination and help our students develop and expand their “Humanities imagination.” The main concern in Mills’ book clearly is not methods, disciplinary distinctions, or solutions to scientific problems.…”

Section: Opening Up the “Humanities Imagination”mentioning

confidence: 99%

Inquiry-based learning in the Humanities: Moving from topics to problems using the “Humanities imagination”

Feldt

Petersen

2020

Arts and Humanities in Higher Education

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In this article, we present a new perspective on how to combine inquiry-based, problem-oriented learning with practices in the Humanities. Our particular interest is how the initial phase of finding “the problem” can be undertaken in a conjoint way with students, that is in the form of inquiry-based learning where there are no pre-defined questions set by the teacher. Inspired by C. Wright Mills , we argue that “the imagination” is key to opening up inquiries into problems, for students and researchers alike. Through an outline of what we call “the Humanities imagination” we develop a set of heuristics for stimulating a turn from topics to problems in the context of the Humanities. We show how combining inquiry-based learning with the Humanities suggests both new pedagogical practices, new models (the teacher as interlocutor), and a new balancing of the ecology of the Humanities emphasizing its particular imaginary over its disciplines.

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Section: Opening Up the “Humanities Imagination”mentioning

confidence: 99%