Humanities Initiatives for Faculty: Hispanic-Serving Colleges and Universities

A Hispanic-serving university in the Southwest, in partnership with a local historical society, will offer a series of Saturday workshops for local school teachers focusing on missions of the Southwest including Antonio de Valero (now known as the Alamo), San José, Concepción, San Juan, and Espada. The workshop will include lectures, site visits, and curriculum development sessions led by humanities scholars whose fields include colonial and architectural history, colonial Hispanic culture, and curriculum and instruction. In the morning, participants will attend lecture/discussion sessions on topics such as the conversion to Christianity, Spanish assimilation and acculturation of native populations, and the effects of annexation and statehood on missions. Afternoon sessions will consist of site visits and additional curriculum development instruction. Interpretive works, such as From Indians to Chicanos: The Dynamics of Mexican-American Culture by James Diego Vigil, along with archaeological field reports and edited volumes of primary materials, including The Papers of the Texas Revolution, The Writings of Sam Houston, 1813-1863, and José Enrique de la Peña's With Santa Anna in Texas: A Personal Narrative of the Revolution, will serve as points of departure for critical inquiry. The workshop will conclude with the dissemination of curriculum materials that participants and scholars have produced.

Faculty from a wide range of humanities disciplines, such as world history, Middle Eastern studies, English, foreign languages, Asian studies, art history, and music, will hold a series of twelve seminar meetings over the course of the academic year to examine the nature of epic literature. Participants will read major epic works in their entirety, or, as appropriate, selections from them. In the seminars, participants might read texts such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Vergil's Aeneid, the Niebelungenlied, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, Firdausi's Shanahmah, the Chanson de Roland, El Cid, Dante's Divine Comedy, Milton's Paradise Lost, Joyce's Ulysses, and Derek Walcott's Omeros. Topics of special focus will include critical approaches to understanding oral and written epic, the nature of the epic hero, techniques of epic narrative, and the enduring impact of epic on culture and national consciousness. As appropriate, participants will report on classic critical works, such as Alfred Lord's Singer of Tales and C. S. Lewis's preface to Paradise Lost. Visiting scholars from other colleges and universities will enhance the faculty seminars, and participants will discuss ways in which they might incorporate their studies into their ongoing teaching and research. The budget will include funds to acquire a core collection of epic literature for the college library.

Faculty at a Hispanic-Serving Institution propose to broaden student interest in a new sequence of instruction in the Arabic language, to expand the study of world languages, and to highlight the role of the Spanish language in cultural exchange. They will study the heritage of Arabic language and Islamic culture in Spanish history and literature. The Spanish language faculty will work with colleagues to develop a Spanish culture unit that incorporates primary sources and scholarship on the promotion of learning by Alfonso the Wise, including Arabic science and literature, and on the legacy of Arabic art and architecture at the Alhambra in Grenada. The teachers of Arabic language and culture will arrange for lectures by experts on the history of the caliphate of Córdoba and on the evolution of Islamic traditions in the Iberian peninsula and North Africa. They will discuss relevant texts in Arabic, English, and Spanish.

Faculty members from a Hispanic Serving Institution's Division of Medical Science will revise "Introduction to Clinical Medicine," a required core course, so that it integrates humanities texts and methods of narrative analysis. Over the course of an academic year, faculty will read primary texts, such as Aristotle's The Nicomachaean Ethics, Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Resident Patient," Roddy Doyle's The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, and John Cheever's "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill," coupled with secondary works, including Sheila Rothman's Living in the Shadow of Death: Tuberculosis and the Social Experience of Illness in American History, Kathryn Montgomery-Hunter's Doctors' Stories: The Narrative Structure of Medical Knowledge, Anne Hunsaker Hawkins and M.C. McEntyre's Teaching Literature and Medicine; and Rita Charon and Martha Montello's Stories Matter: The Role of Narrative in Medical Ethics. Toward the end of the year, faculty will develop learning modules that use literary stories to teach communication skills required for interviewing people from various walks of life in clinical settings. A guest scholar, who teaches literature and medicine at another university, will meet periodically with the working group to review the development of the modules.