Last weekend, two members of the MOL team spoke about the project’s pedagogical vision, classroom implementation, and extra-collegiate engagement with members of the Medieval Academy of America’s (MAA) Committee for Centers and Regional Associations (CARA). CARA is the leading forum for American and Canadian medieval studies organizations, ranging from departments to centers to disciplinary and interdisciplinary consortia.
Sean and Allyssa gave the third of three presentations at Sunday morning’s annual CARA meeting. Collectively, the participants discussed various responses by medievalists to the challenges and opportunities posed by increased attention on the STEM disciplines by university and college administrators, legislators, and the public at large, as well as the criticism of the humanities and liberal arts that often accompanies the valorization of STEM. The session, organized by Anne Lester, current chair of CARA, was designed to put forward different strategies and ideas to help programs and associations respond to the pressures on humanities departments, including enrollments and curricular emphases, while simultaneously creating more space for medieval studies.
First, Cecilia Gaposchkin passionately defended the importance of all of the liberal arts (meaning humanities and STEM disciplines combined), but especially their complementarity. Specifically, she argued that the conflation in popular media (most of it conservative) of “liberal arts” with “humanities”– as well as the tendency to pit “liberal arts” against STEM– is both historically inaccurate and intellectually dangerous. Her opinions can be found here, here, and here; supporting and complementary arguments can be found here, here, and here.
After the flurry of enthusiastic head-nodding and live-tweeting of Cecilia’s talk subsided, Thomas Burman expounded on the important concept that extra-collegiate engagement can move beyond traditional outreach models by more actively working with communities to determine how academics can organize effective programs and participate meaningfully in their surrounding communities. By means of illustration, he presented the ongoing work of the University of Tennessee Knoxville’s Marco Institute to engage local high school faculty and students, especially through its new “Marco Madness” spring program. Tom’s nuanced observations and wealth of experience left many listeners clearly contemplating how they might implement similar programs at their home institutions.
Sean and Allyssa’s “unveiling” of MOL’s Proof of Concept Collection rounded out this conversation. They first argued that recent curricular and policy attention to digital literacy (represented in our neck of the woods by the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s Digital Literacy and Computer Science Standards, a draft of which was released in December 2015 to replace the 2008 Technology Literacy Standards and Expectations) implicitly and inaccurately assumes that digital training belongs in the domain of STEM. They then discussed MOL’s value for the collegiate classroom (most notably in Harvard’s General Education course CB 51, “Making the Middle Ages”), and outlined its potential role in K-12 education more broadly. We will be discussing these themes at greater length in upcoming posts, so stay tuned!