1
30
8
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Dublin Core
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Title
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Antietam
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Jeff Vande Sande
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antietam
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Educators
Description
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This collection features contributions by teachers, education administrators and others involved in teaching at levels K-16.
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educators-humanities-moments
Text
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Professional Development
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Jeff Vande Sande, 32, High School History Teacher
Date
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1998
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
Antietam National Battlefield
Description
An account of the resource
When I was ten years old my family took a day trip to visit the Antietam National Battlefield in Sharpsburg, Maryland. This family activity was the idea of my father, a Civil War enthusiast with a lifelong passion for history. As a ten-year-old, I was excited to just go somewhere different and see something new, but I lacked a genuine appreciation for the significance of the battlefield and the importance of this place to American history. Towards the back of line, at the beginning of the tour, I walked with my dad and by chance happened to kick up a small section of dirt in which I noticed a small dark grey object amidst the footpath. It was an actual Civil War bullet from the battle that I stumbled upon by pure luck and good fortune. I was pumped, but my dad was thrilled beyond belief, if not a little jealous. Sharing in his excitement, this was a moment when history truly came alive for me. I was immediately hooked. Here I was at a real Civil War battlefield, with a real Civil War bullet, and participating in a real historical discovery with my dad! Even at a young age I was interested in history, and enjoyed reading, but this Humanities Moment intensified that connection and inspired a lifelong passion for history and learning. I left Antietam with a new understanding of how the importance of past, place, and shared experience can truly be a powerful force to bring people together, and I still have the bullet too.
Title
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A Trip to Antietam National Battlefield
Creator
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U.S. National Park Service
Identifier
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trip-antietam-national-battlefield
Antietam National Battlefield
Discovery
History
Learning
Museum
-
http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/4/523/Claude_Monet-Madame_Monet_en_costume_japonais.jpg
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Dublin Core
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Camille Monet in Japanese Costume
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camille-monet-japanese-costume
Source
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Sarah Bartosiak
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Educators
Description
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This collection features contributions by teachers, education administrators and others involved in teaching at levels K-16.
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educators-humanities-moments
Text
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High School Social Studies Curriculum Specialist
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Sarah Bartosiak, High School Social Studies Teacher
Date
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June 18, 2021
Source
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<em>Black Histories, Black Futures</em>
Description
An account of the resource
I have vague recollections of eating my packed lunch on the stone steps of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art after completing a scavenger hunt for facts about particular paintings deemed important by my elementary school teacher. <br /><br />I more distinctly remember returning to that art museum with my mom a few years later to view the <em>Monet’s Water Lilies: An Artist’s Obsession</em> exhibition. I had already developed a partiality for impressionism, and Monet specifically, probably from that early field trip, and we discussed the similarities and subtle differences in each iteration of the painting. Alongside the paintings were photographs of the gardens from Monet’s time as well as modern images that immediately put this French commune on our travel bucket list. <br /><br />My mom and I haven’t made it to Giverny yet, but this summer we traveled to see the <em>Monet and Boston: Legacy Illuminated</em> exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts. This collection featured Monet’s paintings alongside works from his predecessor Millet and contemporary Rodin, but it was the comparison to the Japanese artist Hokusai that I found most surprising - until I learned that the forced reopening of Japan to foreign trade in the nineteenth century exposed Western Europeans to Japanese style and culture which inspired many artists of the time, including Monet. <br /><br />This art exhibition displayed the interconnectedness of political and economic power plays, expanding global trade networks, and cultural diffusion. And it has been by teaching my students how to analyze the content and context of paintings, maps, and other images that they have been able to put together the pieces that make up the puzzle that is world history. But I was doing to my students what my elementary school teacher did to me twenty years earlier. <br /><br />I selected all of the visual sources used in my classroom and explained how students should analyze them in order to understand the past - I was making them all complete my version of the world history puzzle. But then I came across the <em>Black Histories, Black Futures</em> exhibition curated by local high school students who developed a theme to explore, selected the works of art to display, and wrote the labels to provide context for three galleries throughout the MFA. These students actively researched and interpreted historical information to reach their own understandings about a past that was important to them. Next year, I look forward to seeing how my students put the pieces of world history together to create their own unique puzzles … and maybe even to curate their own museum galleries!
Title
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World History Puzzles
Creator
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Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Identifier
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world-history-puzzles
Art Exhibitions
Art Museums
Learning
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Teachers & Teaching
World History
-
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Title
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The Green Light
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Pixabay
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green-light
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Educators
Description
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This collection features contributions by teachers, education administrators and others involved in teaching at levels K-16.
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educators-humanities-moments
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
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Maggie Jones, 28, Social Studies Teacher
Date
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Summer 2021
Source
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<em>The Great Gatsby</em>
Description
An account of the resource
When asked what my favorite book is, I often quickly answer with <em>The Great Gatsby</em>. I first read <em>The Great Gatsby</em> in 2009 in my 10th Grade English class and fell in love. I loved the description of the clothing and parties of the 1920s. I loved the characters, I thought the (spoiler alert!) unrequited love between Daisy and Gatsby was so romantic, and I felt heartbroken by the tragic ending nearly every character received.<br /><br />Throughout the years, I have defended this novel from students who claim it is boring and adults who describe the characters as self-centered. They were, in my opinion, misunderstood. Recently, I realized I had not re-read <em>The Great Gatsby</em> in a long time and decided it was the perfect time to re-read. Wow, was I wrong.<br /><br />Perhaps it is because I am now looking through the lens of someone who lived through a pandemic or the lens of being nearly 30- I am not sure what changed but something has and wow are these characters insufferable! Everyone is privileged, entitled, and whiny. What I once saw as romantic (buying a house with a view of Daisy's dock) now seems creepy and manipulative. The characters who I once loved now seem like absolute trash people. <br /><br />As I reflected on the way my thoughts on this book have changed, I thought about the importance of perspective and lived experiences. It gave me more insight into how my high school students might interpret things differently than I do and how important it is to bring multiple perspectives in as often as possible.
Title
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<em>The Great Gatsby</em>, Revisited
Creator
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F. Scott Fitzgerald
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great-gatsby-revisited
Change
Fitzgerald, F. Scott
Learning
Literature
-
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Title
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School Bus
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Pixabay
Identifier
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school-bus
Dublin Core
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Title
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Educators
Description
An account of the resource
This collection features contributions by teachers, education administrators and others involved in teaching at levels K-16.
Identifier
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educators-humanities-moments
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
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Craig Perrier
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Samantha, 27, Teacher
Date
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2010
Source
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<em>Waiting for Superman</em>
Description
An account of the resource
When I was in high school, there was an incredible amount of buzz around a new documentary, <em>Waiting for Superman</em>. The documentary focused on the struggle some students faced to get a quality education in major U.S. cities, like Washington, D.C. For many the film was enlightening, but for some the idea of "lottery schools" were controversial. <br /><br />My teacher encouraged our entire AP English class to watch this documentary, as we were all attending a nationally ranked "lottery school" just a few miles outside of Washington, D.C in Arlington, Virginia. She encouraged us to look for the similarities and differences in the two education systems that were separated by only a few miles. To set the stage, I lived in Arlington with my family, and our home was situated 3.5 miles from the Washington Monument. My neighborhood school was a nationally ranked Top 10 High School as calculated by the U.S. News and World Report, while the lottery school I was attending was a nationally ranked Top 3 High School as determined by the U.S. News and World Report. No matter which school I went to, I would have had a great education by any standard. <br /><br />Before watching this film, I had never thought of the privilege that my zip code brought me. I never knew how vastly different the education system was 10 minutes from my home. It had never occurred to me that some students worry about whether their school is able to provide what they need to have the life they want for themselves. This film showed me that the education system was not "fair", nor equal. I didn't "earn" my zip code, I was simply born into it. Thus, I didn't "earn" my education; I didn't do anything special to obtain my education. <br /><br />Every student is entitled to a quality education, no matter their zip code. After seeing this film, I was convinced that something needed to be changed in our education system. Every student deserves to have access to the same education that I was able to experience. It is a basic right for students to be safe, supported, and challenged to their greatest ability in school. All children should have access to a top tier educational experience. No child should have to worry about having access to a quality education. The lasting impact this film had on me, ultimately led me to choose a career in education as a teacher.
Title
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Perspective from <em>Waiting for Superman</em>
Creator
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Davis Guggenheim
Identifier
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perspective-waiting-superman
Access
Documentary Films
Education
Equality
Guggenheim, Davis
Learning
-
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Title
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Ogi
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ogi
Source
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Jim Wagner
Dublin Core
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Educators
Description
An account of the resource
This collection features contributions by teachers, education administrators and others involved in teaching at levels K-16.
Identifier
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educators-humanities-moments
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
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Professional Development course
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Jim Wagner, 64, History Teacher
Date
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1975
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
Exchange Student Program
Description
An account of the resource
I grew up in suburban Ohio and I knew from an early age that I wanted to experience more of the world than the mall. In high school, I applied for a student exchange program and desperately wanted to go to Argentina. Surprise -- I was accepted into the program, but selected for Japan. Not just Japan, but a very (very) small town in rural southern Japan. I was the first foreigner that most of the residents of Ogi (the name of the town) had ever seen and I literally could stop traffic while bicycling to school each morning. I certainly wasn't in Ohio anymore.
In the course of the school year that I spent in Japan, I attended school in an unheated, uninsulated school building in which students learned by listening and repeating what the teacher told them; no room for creative thought. I witnessed a student who had dozed off in classics class (learning 1,000 year old poetry written in archaic Japanese) get hit by the teacher with a book to the head -- and no one said anything. I lived in the home of a local sake producer who grew the rice and made the barrels used to age the sake. I attended a Shinto wedding and a Buddhist funeral. I learned how to participate in a tea ceremony, how to create ink paintings, and how to avoid getting hit too hard in kendo class.
It was all strange and difficult and hard to understand until that one day that I came face-to-face with a lesson in stereotyping and sweeping generalizations. Coming back from the movies with my friends, one of them asked me casually how I was able to differentiate amongst my friends in the United States. I was taken aback and, at first, thought I misunderstood the question, but no, my Japanese friends thought "we" all looked alike -- tall, blond, and blue-eyed! (I am tall, but not blond and my eyes are hazel colored.) And, there, on the other side of the world at the young age of 17, I learned that we are all very much alike in our prejudices and that to truly know another person means to get beyond the physical characteristics and meet the person on the inside.
Title
A name given to the resource
Learning to Differentiate
Identifier
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learning-differentiate
Cultural Exchange
Japan
Learning
Prejudice
-
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Dublin Core
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Title
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Rare Books
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Pixabay
Identifier
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rare-books
Dublin Core
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Title
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Educators
Description
An account of the resource
This collection features contributions by teachers, education administrators and others involved in teaching at levels K-16.
Identifier
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educators-humanities-moments
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
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From the FCPS Inquiry Curriculum Development Project I am doing this summer
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Natalie Hanson, 36, History Teacher
Date
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July 2021
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<em>People of the Book</em>
Description
An account of the resource
I read <em>People of the Book</em> by Geraldine Brooks a few days ago and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. This book combined many of my loves: reading, historical fiction, and stories of survival and humanity.<br /><br />As a history teacher, with two young kids, I don't get much time to read for pleasure during the year. And this past year of the pandemic was the hardest of my career and I had even less time for reading. I have been so happy to slow down and relax this summer and to escape into the world of this book that was so captivating. <br /><br />This book had been sitting on my nightstand for months and once I picked it up, I couldn't put it down. It was such a powerful novel about imagined and embellished stories about a real live artifact, the Sarajevo Haggadah. The stories that the author created felt so real and I grew so attached to the people who helped protect this book. I learned so much about history and religion that I didn't know before. I also learned so much about the human condition. <br /><br />This is why I love my job. You can always learn more. I was so inspired by this book to keep reading others and keep learning more. I can't wait to travel and eventually see the real Haggadah. I want to share its story and hope others will get the opportunity to read this book!
Title
A name given to the resource
<em>People of the Book </em>Reminds Me Why I Love the Humanities
Creator
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Geraldine Brooks
Identifier
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people-book-reminds-love-humanities
Books & Reading
Brooks, Geraldine
Fiction
History
Learning
-
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Dublin Core
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Title
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Virtual meeting
Identifier
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virtual-meeting
Dublin Core
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Graduate Student Residents 2021
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graduate-student-residents-2021
Text
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I first heard of Humanities Moments as a participant in the GSSR in the National Humanities Center.
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Joanna, 30s, Ph.D. Candidate
Date
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Summer 2021
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<em>GROUP</em>
Description
An account of the resource
In preparation for teaching online during the 2021 summer semester, I have been thinking about how much group discussions are transformed by digital platforms. In reflecting on the vulnerabilities that are required for students to discuss challenging topics (particularly feminist activist work) I was wondering how students will respond when they find themselves isolated in different physical spaces, but working together to create a community online. I often discuss these questions with my fellow teachers, and I received a recommendation to watch a short web-series titled <em>GROUP</em>. <br /><br /><em>GROUP</em> is a fictionalized portrayal of a group therapy session, in which the audience gets to witness how communication and relationships develop between the different group members. The show’s dialog is largely improvised and its premise is based on an adaptation of <em>The Schopenhauer Cure</em> by Irvin D. Yalom. The topics of discussion between the group members vary, but many sessions circle back to larger questions about the human condition and the value of free expression of emotion that “can’t be expressed in polite company.” What does it take to really communicate about and self-monitor emotions rather than speaking in terms of assessment or observation to one’s own reactions (meaning, already moving on to the next step of analysis)? <br /><br />Despite the show’s therapy setting, it sparked my thinking about the level of intimacy involved in all small group discussion. I connected the moments of hesitancies that many of the show’s characters experienced to what I have witnessed students reveal in individual self-reflections regarding their classroom discussion experiences. I also wondered about how different emotions drive student responses to the topics that they are learning about, and how students can better respond to intellectual challenges (both from the classroom materials and from their fellow classmates). <br /><br />This reflection is guided by the following core question: what is the potential for students’ opening of their minds to theory, to alternate forms of knowledge about how the world world, if they are able to first process their own emotional responses? The web series tackles both in-person and Zoom therapy settings, and it really helps to drive home the vulnerabilities of communicating in a shared physical space. Furthermore it elucidates how connections are built based on physical presence. On further reflection about the evocative nature of <em>GROUP</em>, it seems to me that developing a culture of trust and vulnerability in the classroom is dependent also on de-centering the authority of the teacher and understanding how the exploratory potential of learning is built on the foundation of community relationships. <br /><br />I think this Humanities Moment relates back to my own experiences as facilitator of learning in the classroom, in that I think folks experience the most meaningful forms of learning or self-exploration when there is enough space to balance self-expression with group accountability.
Title
A name given to the resource
<em>GROUP</em> and Individual: Cultivating Spaces of Expression
Identifier
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group-and-individual
Group Discussion
Learning
Self-Realization
Teachers & Teaching
Therapy
-
http://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/18/473/classroom-2787754_640.jpg
20ac0376fc5dc3ac0974c179b4f9b518
Dublin Core
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Title
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Classroom
Source
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Pixabay
Identifier
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classroom
Dublin Core
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Title
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Graduate Student Residents 2021
Identifier
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graduate-student-residents-2021
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
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For internal use only, for tracking and metrics.
National Humanities Center
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Sólveig Ásta Sigurðardóttir, 31, Ph.D. candidate
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During my hours of online teaching this year, I have repeatedly tried to bring myself back to my first encounters with the Humanities classroom. As an enthusiastic first-year student in comparative literature, I was excited to learn about art and culture from authors and specialists in cultural history and to be trained in the study of specific authors, styles, and genres. <br /><br />I had always been drawn to folklore and been curious about how narratives helped to make sense of the world. My learning had at least always been aided by narrative, the more vivid the details the better. For example, it was much easier to remember geographical information, say the name of the farm, Miklibær, if you knew the 19th-century story of the ghost, Sólveig who haunted the local priest, Oddur. Or the name of the region Ódáðahraun if you knew the lullaby "Sofðu unga ástin mín" about the mother who had fled poverty into the dangerous highlands and was singing to her child in hiding. <br /><br />When I made it to the humanities classroom it took me by surprise how it was not simply a place where meaning was mediated but a place in which I was trained to investigate how “meaning” takes place. I was both exhausted and thrilled by invitations to investigate how meaning is grounded in culture, relations, histories, and language in all its shapes and forms. In one of my first assignments in a class on Icelandic poetry, I received a comment from a teacher encouraging me to go “deeper” with my interpretation. She encouraged me to follow my own analysis, to try out what felt like a radical idea at the risk of being “incorrect”. Her comments were probably standard advice she gave to all her students, something she wrote on the endless papers that needed grading but for me, it was a formative moment of recognition of my voice and ideas. <br /><br />While the content of the poem escapes me (I think it was about feminism and potatoes) I can recall the feeling of that instructive moment and its effect on my journey as a reader and thinker lingers. Still to this day I remember the thrill of literary analysis, how we followed the teacher as she dissected poems, plays, and novels and somehow she made the students feel like they were necessary contributors to the study. Students brought different insights to the discussion and the teacher showed us how to see surprising connections between cultural texts. It felt like the possibility of meaning was both grounded in the teacher’s scholarship but also the exchange between the people gathered in the room. Through this process, the authority of knowledge started to feel slippery, which was a powerful exchange, especially in a university setting. It felt to me that the collective search for the answer to our questions required vulnerability from the teacher but also every student willing to participate in the conversation. It felt like we were not only discussing literary materials but also always debating how we should discuss them. What do we see on the page? What is missing? Where do we begin in our interpretation? With the author? Her environment? Essentially, how do we see? But also, how did the text even make it to us, the readers? Who preserved it? Why does that matter? <br /><br />I specifically remember how powerful it was to encounter feminist analysis, postcolonial and critical race theory, and to have access to new vocabularies to talk about power relations across time and space. The vocabulary of their insight even brought me closer to my original fascination with folklore, and I began to see the stories of my childhood not just as entertainment but as markers of power. Why were there so many ghost stories of young poor women that were haunting men of a higher class and stature? Could these stories tell us something about how colonialism conditioned gender and class relations in 19th century Iceland? <br /><br />In these encounters with the approaches of the humanities, or "humanities moments" it felt like we in the class were not just discussing an individual poem or story but our relations to, well everything. These memories of deep learning in the classroom continue to inspire my own practice of teaching. And while "thrill" is not necessarily an apt description for every one of my own classes the possibility of these humanities moments is something that continues to inspire me.
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Humanities Moment(s)
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humanities-moments
Comparative Literature
Discovery
Feminism
Folklore
Humanities Education
Icelandic Literature
Learning
Relationality
Teachers & Teaching