Community Colleges and the Future of the Humanities

This session will focus on integrative graduate student professional development, drawing from lessons learned through Reimagining the Humanities PhD and Reaching New Publics, a Mellon-funded initiative at the University of Washington that centrally addresses the need to prepare the next generation of educators with the pedagogical and professional knowledge they will need to pursue a community college career. The session will frame an interactive activity with a discussion of the Reaching New Publics program, a core component of the Mellon initiative that pairs doctoral student fellows with community college faculty mentors over an academic year, during which fellows pursue activities that range from class observations to faculty meetings. Through these activities, our fellows have been prompted to recognize their core values -- educational access, inclusive classrooms, and so forth -- and further have noted that specific institutional contexts better "fit" these values. In other words, the Mellon fellows have consistently reported greater professional clarity and motivation as significant gains, prompting us to realize that career preparation centrally entails the work of discernment, and that a thoughtful identification and integration of interests, talents, and commitments is essential to the success of professional development for a wider range of careers beyond the research university.