Bridging Cultures to Form a Nation: The Humanities and Democratic Learning

This chapter describes a diversity and democracy curriculum and faculty development collaboration among the Association of American Colleges and Universities, The Democracy Commitment, and 10 community colleges.

As I grew up, there’s change in the neighborhood

From respectable citizens to “Boys in the Hood”

Adult or thug were the choices for me

What has happened to my Community?

I have grown up, I’m an adult now

I’ll strive to give voice somewhere, some how

I am in college, this semester I have learnt a lot

With my Community and Civic Engagement so I’ll give it a shot

The act of a citizen is to be involved in affairs

An active citizen is one who cares

He is concerned about problems of the neighborhood

And tries to go about encouraging others to do good.

These lines are part of a longer poem by Shamar Brooks, a Kingsborough Community College student in New York City (Kingsborough Community College, [ 4] , p. 1). They demonstrate that students are yearning for ways that colleges can help them make sense of their lives and empower them with knowledge and skills so that they can create a better world. Fortunately for Shamar, he went to a college that believes its civic mission is integral—not ancillary—to its educational one. Kingsborough was 1 of 10 community colleges selected to be part of a 3‐year project called Bridging Cultures to Form a Nation: Difference, Community, and Democratic Thinking. This project, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and organized jointly by the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) and The Democracy Commitment (TDC), involved 10 community colleges from across the nation: Chandler‐Gilbert Community College (AZ), County College of Morris (NJ), Georgia Perimeter College (GA), Kapi’olani Community College (HI), Kingsborough Community College (NY), Lone Star College‐Kingwood (TX), Miami Dade College (FL), Middlesex Community College (MA), Mount Wachusett Community College (MA), and Santa Fe College (FL). As the key author and initial project director of the grant, I have had the pleasure of working with the community college teams over the 3 years of the project and witnessing their innovative, creative, and committed work.

Bridging Cultures to Form a Nation represents an emphatic statement from AAC&U and TDC that community colleges are important sites for educating students for engaged participation and leadership in a diverse democracy, as well as for the global citizenship necessary in our deeply contentious, interdependent world. Furthermore, Bridging Cultures served as a catalyst for supporting a critical mass of faculty and staff—despite limited resources and time and, for some, adjunct status—in creating more opportunities for students to deepen their civic skills, knowledge, and commitment. The project aimed to put more students in classrooms that intentionally fostered democratic dispositions and knowledge as part of the academic rigor of the course.

The Civic Origins of the Project

Bridging Cultures to Form a Nation was conceived in 2011 in a climate (which still persists) where some leaders are trying to shrink the purposes of all colleges to narrowly focused and simplistically conceived vocational ends. Using the language of workforce development, many advocate simply matching the curriculum to a given state’s current job openings. Yet doing so ignores what business leaders say about preparation for a fluid, technology‐laden, knowledge‐driven, fast‐paced work world. Employers from for‐profits and nonprofits alike tell researchers that it is more important for students to have a broad grounding in liberal arts and sciences than specialized training (Hart Research Associates, [ 3] ). Further, a one‐note understanding of the purposes of higher education is dangerous and pushes any education for democratic life entirely off the table.

Despite a pervasive, single‐minded focus on community colleges solely as sites of industry training—which both marginalizes the humanities as disciplines and the historic public purpose of community college—TDC’s goal is that “every graduate of an American community college shall have had an education in democracy. This includes all of our students, whether they aim to transfer to university, achieve an associate degree or obtain a certificate” (The Democracy Commitment, [ 7] , n.p.). Similarly, AAC&U argues that students’ education must be anchored through active involvement with diverse communities as they tackle together issues of public concern.

The Purpose and Design of Bridging Cultures to Form a Nation

In light of the public mission of higher education, community colleges and other institutions must grapple with how to define the capabilities students need to be effective citizens in their communities or at work. As institutions began to embed opportunities for civic learning into their curricula and pedagogy, Bridging Cultures sought to address these challenging questions head on through three principal goals: (a) to infuse questions about difference, community, and democratic thinking into high‐enrollment transfer humanities courses; (b) to promote greater adoption of proven high‐impact practices linked to retention and academic achievement; and (c) to create over a 3‐year period a series of humanities‐enriched professional development opportunities for community college faculty, including adjuncts. The key to the Bridging Cultures project is its support for faculty professional development in order to transform high‐enrollment humanities transfer courses. External support was available for travel, meetings, a 5‐day summer institute, campus‐based forums, and faculty minigrants. Through these and other strategies, colleges were able to refine, initiate, or invest in education for democracy projects on their campuses. Most of the institutions also collaborated with student affairs professionals to complement and reinforce what was being learned in the classroom.

The Humanities and Civic Capacities

Because NEH was the funder, Bridging Cultures was able to underscore how critical the humanities disciplines are in our diverse democracy and how they can provide a space of engagement in the midst of a wrangling and divisive world. The project asserts that when humanities courses are structured around difference, community, and democratic thinking, they can illuminate how it has been and can be possible to bridge the divides apparent in the nation and to realize the democratic ideal of E Pluribus Unum. Through civically enriched courses, students can begin to acquire a set of critical democratic capacities to navigate the complexities they routinely confront. We believe such courses also encourage them to engage across differences. A democracy cannot flourish and, in the extreme, cannot function, if its people lack either the will or the ability to engage thoughtfully and responsibly with others in the public sphere. Steeped in the practice of entering imaginatively into other people’s lives and worldviews, the humanities serve as “sources of national memory and civic vigor, cultural understanding and communication, individual fulfilment and the ideals we hold in common” (Commission on the Humanities and Higher Education, [ 1] , p. 9).

Indeed, rather than being an abstraction or a luxury, the humanities plunge students into the very midst of the world’s dilemmas and crises over time. They immerse students in the lives of total strangers through literature and history, anthropology and foreign languages, and through that immersion turn what is unfamiliar into a shared stage of human activity. Nussbaum ([ 6] ) elucidates the process of connecting one’s imagination with real‐world democratic decision making, thus underscoring the civic mission of humanities within community colleges:

We need the imaginative ability to put ourselves in the position of people different from ourselves, whether by class or race or religion or gender. Democratic politics involves making decisions that affect other people and groups. We can only do this well if we try to imagine what their lives are like and how changes of various sorts affect them. The imagination is an innate gift, but it needs refinement and cultivation: this is what the humanities provide. (para. 6)

The Bridging Cultures Summer Institute

The Bridging Cultures project was launched in 2012 with a 5‐day residential summer institute at the University of Vermont at which some 60 faculty members and administrators from the 10 community colleges could explore more deeply the project’s themes of difference, community, and democratic thinking. At the intellectual heart of the summer institute were its four topical seminars where groups of 12–15 people from different schools met each day for 2½ hours to discuss the readings and their implications for course redesigns. The first seminar, E Pluribus Unum: Democracy’s Tensions and Higher Education’s Civic Mission, explored foundational values that animate democratic nations around the globe (including the United States) and the persistent question of which people get to claim those values. The second seminar, Bridging Cultures: Immigration, Nationalism, and E Pluribus Unum, explored the understanding of citizenship and belonging, and the relationship between national and cultural identity for immigrant groups over time. In the third seminar, Religious Pluralism in a Democratic Global Age, readings investigated how religious freedom, a hallmark of liberal democracy, is undermined by religious intolerance, discrimination, and violence. Finally, the fourth seminar, Movement for Public Voice and Democratic Engagement, went to the heart of democratic struggles for social justice as diverse communities sought fuller inclusion, voice, and rights in the American experiment.

No one was an expert in all the readings nor did people agree in their interpretations or responses. So we all quickly became students—uncertain, tentative, inquiring, vulnerable, and sometimes emotional in our exchanges. We had to stretch ourselves to create spaces of democratic engagement together just as we hoped to do in Bridging Cultures humanities courses. We understood in the seminars that a classroom is a treasured space both to study about democracy and to practice doing democracy. The institute also included colloquia with humanities scholars, poster sessions led by the 10 teams, time for institutional planning, consultancies with a national advisory group, and practical workshops on all sorts of topics from democratic pedagogies, to navigating differences, to incorporating community‐based experiences into teaching, to assessing student learning.

Teams returned home from the summer institute to initiate professional development opportunities so that they could expand the number of professors ready to rethink their courses. Some immediately began to infuse Bridging Cultures themes across humanities courses or in some cases invent entirely new courses. As their work progressed, many members presented their Bridging Cultures work at AAC&U conferences, disciplinary conferences, and to colleagues on their home campuses. A number published articles on their progress. Many were part of ongoing faculty study groups. Almost all colleges worked with their teaching and learning center or their center for civic engagement (if they had one), and most could point to resource banks they had developed during the course of the project. All invested in creating dynamic classroom experiences for their students.

It must be noted that the 10 community colleges did not enter the project as civic novices. They were in it because they had already achieved national recognition for their leadership in advancing civic learning and democratic engagement. Nine of the 10 schools were inaugural members of The Democracy Commitment. Some of the most eloquent voices championing the civic mission of community colleges were presidents and top academic administrators from Bridging Cultures schools, who were backed by faculty with similar commitments. In part because of their existing commitments to education for citizenship, what these 10 colleges were able to accomplish in 3 years is inspiring.

Democratic Education in Action: Curricular Innovations

The most remarkable accomplishments of the Bridging Cultures project were in curriculum transformation and faculty development. By the numbers alone, the scope of the project’s curricular reach was stunning. Kingsborough estimates that 130 sections were offered under the Bridging Cultures grant, exposing 3,250 students to themes of diversity, community‐building, and democratic thinking. County College of Morris believes they reached 1,450 students through revised curricula and an impressive 400 faculty attended faculty professional development events. The latter, of course, is a predictor that even more courses are likely to be revised in the coming years. In 2 years Miami Dade revised 84 class sections and reached over 3,200 students, and Mount Wachusett revised 54 courses reaching 939 students. Middlesex reported that 21 courses (some 60 sections) had been redesigned, reaching 1,700 students. At Lone Star‐Kingwood, the project grew from an initial team of 6 to 50 faculty, thus reaching thousands of students each semester.

Cumulatively, every humanities discipline was involved and because of the excitement about the project, faculty from courses beyond the humanities began to transform their courses too. According to Lone Star‐Kingwood’s final report ([ 5] ), “by the end of the first year, faculty from every academic division on this campus of 12,000 students were represented in the work” (p. 3). The most common way courses were transformed was by introducing rich and sometimes unsettling themes into regular course content. Additional learning was derived through the civic‐oriented pedagogies that professors adopted or refined. The following sections illustrate specific changes made in various disciplines.

English

In both his writing and literature courses, an English professor at Kingsborough introduced themes of inequality, identity, and ethics. His students investigated how one’s ethics influences how one acts. The professor also designed assignments for hands‐on work at multiple sites. Students volunteered at the New York Asian Women’s Center to address the consequences of human trafficking, organized events about modern forms of slavery, held debates at Kingsborough’s Eco‐festival, or worked at the Urban Farm. Another Kingsborough English professor examined themes of gender identity, racism, and religious tolerance in Shakespeare’s plays by asking students to produce a play that had modern resonance. One student changed the setting of The Merchant of Venice to the 1940s when Pakistan was created out of India, leading to massive violence by Hindus against Muslims. Another student opted to set Twelfth Night in 1980s New York City at the start of the AIDS epidemic. At Santa Fe College, an American Humanities course was redesigned to include assignments in which students explored their own immigration story and compared it with those of other groups.

History

In a Twentieth Century American History class at County College of Morris, a history professor invited analysis of civic duties and democratic practices during the Great Depression. For their capstone assignment in the course, students conducted group research highlighting democracy in action as it was recorded in local newspapers. One of Kingsborough’s modern history classes lifted up themes of social movements for equality such as the civil rights movement, United Farm Workers Union, and the women’s movement. Documentary films became integral to the class, including the Japanese “The Cats of Mirikitani,” which touched on the bombing of Hiroshima, Japanese Internment camps, and 9/11. Santa Fe College remapped its U.S. history course to 1877 to highlight the interconnectedness of the Atlantic world. Professors asked students to research the experience of Africans as forced immigrants and Europeans as voluntary immigrants. Students could opt to write a first‐person narrative about either one of the two, or they could examine their own position on the current debate over immigrants and immigration.

Similarly, history classes at Lone Star‐Kingwood are deemphasizing the nation–state as the best way to organize history and instead exploring transnational perspectives that underscore global interconnections. They are also emphasizing how history is constructed, revealing how power influences what versions of history are disseminated. By highlighting history from below and including the study of ordinary people, the Bridging Cultures historians at Lone Star‐Kingwood are seeking to “empower our students to perceive themselves as the makers of their own history” (2015, p. 3). Their History 2301 course includes content on immigrant experiences matched with hands‐on experiences with border cultures, enhanced through oral histories, service learning, and research projects. Although not a history course, County College of Morris’ Spanish I class also drew upon the richness of the institution’s immigrant communities and challenged students to think more inclusively about local Hispanic residents and recognize the rich diversity within Spanish‐speaking countries.

Communication

The County College of Morris infused themes of diversity, community, and democracy into its Introduction to Film class, using documentaries as mechanisms to foster awareness of social issues and to encourage democratic participation. At Lone Star‐Kingwood, students in an Intro to Communications class were paired with students in English as a Second Language (ESOL) classes to deepen intercultural understanding through collaborative projects. ESOL students introduced communication students to new countries and cultures, and communication students helped ESOL students with their oral and written communication skills.

Philosophy

Two philosophy courses at Mount Wachusett, one of which is the required capstone for all liberal arts and science majors, were revamped to include issues of race and class in the Philosophy of Self and Ethics Modules, along with questioning how definitions of democracy, freedom, and justice are constructed. An ethics course at Santa Fe incorporated an experiential learning component through which students engaged in a community‐based experience and then wrote a reflective paper tying their experience to an ethical concept in the course.

Photography and Art

Several Miami Dade art professors sought to open deliberations across campuses by bringing student art out of the classroom into more public spaces. They also incorporated notions of civic action into their subject matter. One professor stressed what he called Creating Artivists, that is, artist citizen activists. In an art appreciation course, students were asked to create art around a social issue to generate awareness. This led one student to create an art piece on sex trafficking and another to use recycled materials to create a piece on saving the environment. In a somewhat similar mode of using art to engage in public issues, a photography class at Mount Wachusett required students to visually represent their interpretation of democracy—and they were forbidden to use monuments or flags. Student work was then showcased in campus galleries and display cases to prompt a wider dialogue.

Learning Communities

Several campuses constructed Bridging Cultures learning communities, high‐impact practices connected to improved learning, retention, and expanding intercultural skills and knowledge about diversity. Chandler Gilbert created a new first‐year experience learning community with Bridging Cultures as the organizing theme and an interdisciplinary focus on history, composition, philosophy, environmental ethics, and women’s studies. Similarly, Kapi’olani created a learning community called “Ho’I ou I ke Po’owai: A Return to the Water Source” that involved courses in Hawaiian art, environmental philosophy, and public speaking.

The Professoriate as Citizen Activists

One of the most intriguing revelations evident in the Bridging Cultures project final reports was how faculty were actually functioning as engaged citizens on their own campuses. They understood the deep democratic power of community colleges and therefore almost all of the teams organized strategically, creatively, and collectively to persuade others to tap this resource more intentionally. Their campus became their public square. They organized, reached out to a broad range of faculty, and made sure they included adjuncts, even if they were the lowest paid, most transient, and most vulnerable colleagues. They invested in educating others about the themes of democracy they found most compelling, offered workshops, created public symposiums and forums, and designed citywide or regional conferences to bring new people to the table. Faculty reached for allies first outside of their disciplinary domain and then through student affairs colleagues, students themselves, public intellectuals and artists, and community‐based organizations with whom they established stronger partnerships. They took time to create mechanisms for more intimate dialogues and study, told personal stories, and listened while others told theirs.

They also assessed their current institutional structures and sought to make them more functional, inclusive, and effective. Some redesigned their general education courses, introduced more democratic pedagogies, established a new two‐part civic engagement requirement for every student (Kingsborough), or worked to advance a new statewide civic learning outcome (Middlesex). Mount Wachusett created an Endowed Chair of Civic Engagement, a new full‐time faculty position that will help anchor and expand future civic work. Like all good democratic cultures, the Bridging Cultures teams relied on dispersed leadership that shared a common commitment to deploying community colleges as sites for democratic learning and action.

This chapter began with a poem by Kingsborough student Shamar Brooks who discovered at college the power he possessed as a citizen who is responsible for and committed to improving his community. Over the 3 years of the Bridging Cultures project, the ever‐expanding numbers of faculty involved affirmed a similar power to be citizens at their community colleges, making the institution more responsive to the needs of their students, their local communities, the nation, and the globe. As John Dethloff ([ 2] ) from Lone Star‐Kingwood put it so eloquently, “Classrooms should serve not only as meeting places for students or training grounds for future employees; they should provide a space for the birth of citizens” (p. 18).

References

1 Commission on the Humanities and Higher Education. ( 2013 ). The heart of the matter: The humanities and social sciences for a vibrant, competitive, and secure nation. Cambridge, MA : American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

2 Dethloff, J. ( 2014 ). Bridging cultures to form a nation: A project for democracy. Diversity & Democracy, 17 ( 3 ), 18 – 19.

3 Hart Research Associates. ( 2013 ). It takes more than a major: Employer priorities for college learning and student success. Liberal Education, 99 ( 2 ), 22 – 29.

4 Kingsborough Community College. ( 2015 ). Bridging cultures to form a nation final report. Washington, DC : Association of American Colleges and Universities.

5 Lone Star College‐Kingwood. ( 2015 ). Bridging cultures to form a nation final report. Washington, DC : Association of American Colleges and Universities.

6 Nussbaum, M. ( 2010, October 17). Cultivating the imagination. New York Times (online ed.). Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2010/10/17/do‐colleges‐need‐french‐departments/cultivating‐the‐imagination.

7 The Democracy Commitment. ( 2015 ). About us. Washington, DC : Author. Retrieved rom http://thedemocracycommitment.org/.

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By Caryn McTighe Musil

Caryn McTighe Musil is senior scholar and director of civic learning and democracy initiatives at the Association of American Colleges and Universities.

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