Abstract

This paper describes an approach to teaching the humanities to underprepared college students at Calumet College of St. Joseph in Northwest Indiana. Our emphasis on guiding students to encounter and respond to great humanistic works as the foundation of general education holds great promise for our students. We are promoting reception and response through administrative structures: an integrated and sequenced general education program and a structure of learning communities that deliver content and promote skills while allowing students the time necessary to think about the issues of human life and society in depth from several perspectives. This structure reflects and implements interdisciplinary theory and some basic assumptions: that so-called high culture has something to say to all students, not only the elites that have been associated with the Western tradition in the past; that some works of the human imagination are indeed great because they speak to people across time and space, even under different critical paradigms and cultural assumptions; and that considering these great works can give all students both academic skills and, perhaps more importantly, insights into their own lives. Our approach seems to offer one answer to how to present the humanities in a meaningful way to students living in the shadows of industry–and in other college settings as well.