Humanities Lab

The Humanities Lab offers problem-focused, humanities-based but interdisciplinary courses designed to produce a collaborative, exploratory learning experience. To achieve this, Lab courses are organized around questions and sub-questions—Why are there immigrants? How has the automobile shaped American society? What is the best way to feed the world’s population?–rather than around topics or historical periods. Labs are team-taught by faculty from different disciplines and include students of varying ages and disciplinary backgrounds. Students and faculty collaborate to connect the dots between ideas, events, beliefs, images, and data to address grand social challenges in a holistic way from diverse perspectives. At the semester’s end, student teams share their research outcomes and approaches to their Lab’s challenge with varying publics. Students in the Humanities Lab will experience:

• Challenge-centric courses are team-taught using interdisciplinary, inquiry-based learning strategies.
• Labs are open to students at diverse levels and from varying disciplinary backgrounds, so Labs span age groups and intellectual interests.
• University librarians and art faculty usually serve as consultants to Lab courses.
• Lab teams often work with community organizations and field experts during their inquiry process.
• Students conduct original research and identify resources that help them address their Lab’s challenge.
• Students work in teams and address challenges collaboratively.
• Student teams develop projects and products (videos, presentations, op-ed pieces, art objects, performances, proposals) that enable them to share their learning with appropriate publics.

For a list of upcoming lab topics please visit the Humanities Lab webpage.

Labs (or laboratories) are typically spaces designed for scientific inquiry through collaborative analysis and experimentation to assess and address problems. The Humanities Lab borrows from that design by coordinating research goals and taking shared responsibility for learning outcomes while also developing and utilizing arts and humanities content and methodologies that reveal deeper themes and questions underlying problems. Humanities inquiry moves the investigation from “what?” to “why?” and takes solutions from “what could be done?” to “what should be done?”