”The humanities are hurting and there is no indication that they will experience a renaissance anytime soon,” writes Professor Jeffrey Anderson of SUNY — Cobleskill in today’s Pope Center piece.
He is not content to let that trend continue.
At his school, with a focus on agriculture and technology, most of the students accept that they have to take a few humanities courses to graduate, but think they should be easy. Anderson has devised a course that is not easy, but nevertheless appeals to most of the students because it makes the humanities “hands on.”
Therefore, he has devised a course called “Founding Farmers,” and it blends agriculture with a great deal of reading about our early history and culture. Focusing on food in colonial America, “the course exposes students to appropriate historical content and challenges them to develop skills in close reading of texts, thinking critically, and writing.” The students also had to prepare food that would have been eaten in colonial times and explain why it was important.
Evidently, most of the students really “got into” Founding Farmers. Anderson suggests that professors think about devising other such courses that make the humanities more hands on. I think he’s on to something.