Wally Englert, Professor of Classics and Humanities
David Silverman, Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics and Humanities
Description: Humanities 110, which was first taught at Reed in 1943, has always been conceived of as an interdisciplinary course. The 20 faculty who teach in the course are drawn from many disciplines (Art History, Classics, English, German, History, Philosophy, Political Science, Religion, and Spanish), and the cultures studied are examined from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Humanities 110 is required of every first year student at Reed, roughly 350 per year, and is taught in a lecture/conference section format.
All students in Humanities 110 are required to become independent thinkers and learners and to develop a range of critical skills. Extensive reading of primary sources, scholarly research, and writing are all heavily stressed. Students prepare up to eight papers a semester and meet individually with their instructors on a regular basis to discuss their papers. Responsibility is placed on students to discuss course readings critically in their weekly conference sections.
This grant proposal seeks to enable Humanities 110 students to study the cultures examined in the course in more efficient, independent, and sophisticated ways with the help of newly developed technology. Although Humanities 110 students have long been encouraged to be independent thinkers and learners, they are forced to rely heavily on faculty for suggestions about which ancient and modern texts to read, which images of ancient art and architecture to view, and how to find and integrate the wide range of resources available on the ancient world.
Recently developed databases on Greek, Roman, and biblical materials available on the Internet, as well as Perseus, a multimedia database on ancient Greek civilization, can enable students to explore the ancient world in ways that have not been previously possible. In addition to reading required ancient and modern texts, listening to lectures, discussing materials in conference, and writing papers, students could use the materials in these electronic databases to deepen their knowledge and work more independently and interdisciplinarily than ever before.
The purpose of this proposal is to obtain support to prepare a methodological guide, a set of exercises, and a set of assignments to help students learn how to navigate their way through the mass of textual, graphic, and other materials available over the Internet and in the Perseus database. In essence, we intend to provide students with an introduction to the research skills used by the scholars who create and tap these electronic resources for their own research.
Implementation: Several steps will be needed to implement the project successfully. First, a group of four faculty will identify and work with the appropriate technology and databases. This group of faculty, aided by a student research assistant, would study ways to introduce their students to the technology, develop a guide to researching electronic databases, devise a series of exercises to familiarize the students with the range and depth of the databases, and create a series of assignments which would allow students to become increasingly independent in their research.
This development phase would be followed by a two-semester trial in which four Humanities conferences (out of 22) would be designated as pilot conferences. Students in those conferences would make use of the materials developed by the faculty and would be required to make use of electronic tools such as Perseus in their research and paper writing, as well as for special projects (such as multimedia presentations). These conferences would be closely monitored, and faculty involved would make regular reports to the whole Humanities 110 staff. At the end of the trial phase, the Humanities teaching staff would compare the work of students in the pilot conferences with those in traditional conferences, and conduct an evaluation of the approach. Modifications to the materials would be made as necessary. If successful, the materials would be made available to all Humanities students in the second year of the project.
Impact: While the initial impact of the project would be on Humanities 110, the skills acquired in accessing and integrating electronic information sources will eventually be used by students in a number of upper division classes in Art History, Classics, English, History, Linguistics, Philosophy, Political Science, and Religion, as well as in the year-long individual senior thesis which all Reed students are required to write.