Past Features

Humanities Institute Wins Grants for Free Minds Project, Begins Endowment Campaign

Last year, the Humanities Institute invested most of its remaining new program development fund—allocated in 2003 by former Liberal Arts Dean Richard Lariviere—to launch the Free Minds Project, an intensive, humanities-based adult education program that offers Austin-area adults living on low to moderate incomes a chance to fulfill their intellectual potential, "jumpstart" their college education, and increase their confidence and empowerment in every aspect of their lives. Committed to increasing the University’s accessibility and responsiveness to communities traditionally underserved by higher education, the Institute gambled that the Project would be successful enough in its first year to attract sustaining support from foundations and individual donors for year two.

That gamble has paid off, thanks to the exceptional effort and achievement of the first Free Minds graduating class and the generosity of three local charitable foundations. The Webber Family Foundation has awarded the Humanities Institute $15,000 to help defray the instructional, materials, and student support costs of the 2007-8 Free Minds Project. A $25,000 grant from the KDK-Harman Foundation has also been instrumental to the support of the twenty inspired and inspiring adults currently enrolled in the Free Minds class, and has allowed the Project to provide healthier meals and enriched child care services in its second year. Most recently, the Sooch Foundation has awarded the Institute a three-year $24,000 grant to implement comprehensive measurement and evaluation as well as alumni tracking and support.

Filling what the Lumina Foundation for Education has described as the critical gap in the adult education landscape between non-credit remedial education and job-training programs and expensive college degree programs, the Free Minds Project is enabling another class of students to return to learning this year. The project continues to offer participants instruction from distinguished professors, books and materials, tickets to cultural events, academic and career advising services, and a writing consultant at no cost to students. Support services including child care, transportation assistance, and dinner before each class remove some of the barriers adults traditionally face to returning to school.

We are continuing to seek foundation support for the Free Minds Project, but making this program a permanent fixture on the Austin educational scene will likely require a targeted program endowment. Accordingly, the Humanities Institute is making the Free Minds Project a centerpiece of its development campaign, just underway, in which it will be seeking to raise $3 million by 2010 to sustain a range of innovative civic and institutional partnerships and public humanities programs that connect the University more closely with the surrounding community.

Abbie Navarrete, who represented her classmates as the student speaker at the first Free Minds graduation ceremony last May, suggests why it is important that the Institute meet this goal.

"I feel as though I have been taken out of the cave and our class discussions have helped me adjust to the light," she says, invoking Plato. "This intellectual awakening has changed how I view myself, my place in the community and in the world. It is especially exciting to be able to share this new view with my children. Most of my family has never completed high school, much less attended college, and although I have always told my children I expect them to finish school and go on to college, I could not offer them an example in their own family."

Abbie is now in a college degree program at Austin Community College; her philosophy professor reports she is the best student in his class!

Contact the Humanities Institute at information@humanitiesinstitute.utexas.edu or 512-471-9056 for more information about the Free Minds Project or the Institute’s development efforts.

Living Newspaper Project Launched

This summer the HI launches an innovative new program to reinvigorate civic education in Austin-area high schools through the dramatization of current human rights issues. The program is Living Newspapers Across the Disciplines, an interdisciplinary educational initiative for Central Texas high school teachers and students, which aims, like almost all of the Humanities Institute's programs, to expand ideas about what university-community collaboration can mean. At the core of the program are interdisciplinary alliances among various departments and centers on campus and a meaningful relationship between UT and Austin-area secondary schools.

The idea for the Living Newspapers Across the Disciplines program took root at a brainstorming session last July hosted by Karen Engle, professor of Law and director of the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice. In addition to administrators from the Humanities Institute and the Rapoport Center, faculty and graduate students from the Performance as Practice Program (PPP) and English graduate programs also attended. The thought was, if the 1930s Federal Theater Project could use Living Newspapers—literally, newspapers brought to life on stage—as a low-cost, dynamic medium for dramatizing important social issues for diverse audiences, why couldn't contemporary high school teachers do something similar to stimulate civic engagement and the study of human rights?

This June, the program team will sponsor a Summer Teacher Workshop designed to introduce high school teachers to the program and involve them in its future development. An interactive discussion of current human rights issues and pedagogy led by Engle will kick off the workshop, followed by a brief lecture covering the history of the Federal Theater Project and its Living Newspaper division given by Claire Canavan, a Ph.D. student in PPP. Canavan and field specialists Jason Flowers, Michelle Ludwig, and Sarah Myers—all current or former high school teachers themselves—will lead teachers in exercises that can be used to create a Living Newspaper in an English, social studies, or theater arts classroom, modeling some of the lesson plans contained in the Living Newspaper Resource Guide. The Resource Guide, a comprehensive package containing TEKS-aligned model lesson plans, evaluative tools, and research material created by Flowers, Ludwig, and Myers and a team of graduate student content writers, will be the focus of the afternoon session, during which teachers will brainstorm applications to their own classrooms.

In the 2006-7 school year, teachers who attended the workshop will implement their own Living Newspaper unit, with the ongoing support of a program team comprised of Flowers, Ludwig, and Myers, UT Austin graduate and professional students, and UT Austin faculty. To start, students will study the history of Living Newspapers and the Federal Theater Project in the Depression-era U.S., the current debates over human rights on a local and international scale, and research a contemporary human rights issue of interest to them.

In the next phase of the unit, students will craft a Living Newspaper script out of the nonfiction sources discovered through their research, along the way studying key language arts concepts like genre, critical argumentation, tone, imagery, and textual revision. In the final phase, students will take to the stage, designing a group performance of their Living Newspaper script. They will explore established performance techniques, including Augusto Boal's Image theatre, improvisation, scripting through collage, and Viewpoints, a set of movement-based rehearsal strategies. The program team will coordinate public performances of student Living Newspapers upon completion.

Because a Living Newspaper combines research on current events, critical and creative writing, and public performance, students gain important academic and real-life skills. Moreover, when students have a say in what they research, write, and perform about, they become more invested in their own educations. They will gain a greater awareness of the impact they can have on the world around them by connecting their immediate experiences with larger historical and social contexts. They will also experience the benefits of an interdisciplinary, hands-on, collaborative project and how seemingly discrete subjects can significantly influence one another.

In addition to the academic skills emphasized by the program, students will also benefit from visits from graduate and professional student guest teachers, made available through the Living Newspaper Consultant Team. Through these relationships, students will gain exposure to an unprecedented array of post-secondary school opportunities and careers in the humanities, higher education, law, public affairs, and the arts.

A second component, the Summer Youth Performance Company, is projected for Summer 2007. A rigorous four-week session during which high school students will research, write, stage, and perform their own Living Newspaper, the summer program will give young people the chance to research human rights topics of interest to them and to receive personalized training and guidance from experienced theater professionals in scripting and designing their show. Theatre Action Project, a nonprofit organization providing young people in Central Texas with the chance to make socially-relevant, educational theatre, will head up the youth program, with the support of the program team.

Only in its pilot year, the Living Newspapers Across the Disciplines program is already garnering high praise from high school teachers, graduate students, and UT faculty alike. Participant in the Summer Teacher Workshop and Austin ISD teacher Jenifer-Ashley Robinson says, "The hands-on aspect [of the program] will help my students take greater ownership of their education." Likewise, Jim Furgeson, a teacher in Austin ISD and a workshop participant states, "A Living Newspaper unit would help students understand that there is a continuity between what they read and study and how they live." Perhaps the most evocative statement about the future of the Living Newspapers Across the Disciplines program comes from Round Rock ISD teacher Gwen Watson: "The possibilities are endless."

First Living Newspaper Performances Take to the Stage

This fall, five high school students brought to life the stories of more than twenty individuals from around the globe, victims of some of the most horrendous human rights violations. Got Rights?: The Chronicles of Stolen Youth, created by students at St. Stephen’s Academy, was the first performance in the brand-new Living Newspapers Across the Disciplines program, a collaboration of the Humanities Institute, the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, and the Performance as Public Practice program at UT Austin. At two performances in October on the St. Stephen’s campus and one performance at UT in December, Troupe St. Stephens dramatized the complicated scenarios of children’s rights abuses around the world, including the U.S.

The most recent performance was held in the Eidman Courtroom at the UT School of Law on Saturday, December 2, a moving close to the Rapoport Center’s Lister Conference on Human Rights. A discussion with the cast and representatives from Austin-area children’s rights organizations—including Gena VanOsselaer, Executive Director of Austin Children Shelter, Teresa Troxel, Volunteer Coordinator at CASA of Travis County, and Susan McDowell, Executive Director of LifeWorks—followed the show.

The process for creating Got Rights? was very similar to the production of the original Living Newspapers in the U.S. during the Great Depression, and has had similar results – to raise awareness and spark dialogue about significant social issues in the news today. The five student actors (Zach Hailey, Lindsay Kuo, Delaney Ozmun, Mary Beth Reed, and Trey Townsend), one student stage manager (Marjorie Maxwell), one faculty adviser (Michelle Ludwig), and one UT Austin graduate student consultant (Ann David), researched global children’s rights issues like child labor, children soldiers, the foster care system, and child prostitution for several weeks before creating a script from non-fiction sources.

Throughout the 2006-7 school year, teachers at five different high schools and two colleges in Austin and Round Rock are leading their students in researching, writing, and staging similar documentary plays about significant human rights issues of interest to young people. Got Rights? was the first opportunity for Austinites to see and respond to this innovative approach to teaching human rights history and citizenship through performance, but others quickly followed.

In November and December, Mallhaz Jibladze, a teacher at the Liberal Arts and Sciences Academy (LASA) at LBJ High School in Austin, guided his twenty-seven seniors through the Living Newspaper process for their final projects. Adapting the program for his AP Economics classroom, Mr. Jibladze and his two graduate consultants, Meg Sullivan and Brian Gatten, encouraged students to explore the real-life stories born of economic philosophies. Working in small groups, students wrote scripts, which they then captured on film to screen for their peers and teachers at the end of the semester.

In her Humanities 1301 course at Austin Community College, teacher and Comparative Literature grad student, Margaret Woodruff-Wieding, spent the entire semester introducing Living Newspapers to her students. By the end of the fall, the thirty students of all ages, races, and educational backgrounds had crafted three scripts detailing the complexities of current immigration issues. They performed these scripts in a Readers’ Theater format (actors reading from scripts with slides as a backdrop), for their peers and program staff the second week of December.

The New Year sees the creation of four more Living Newspaper projects. Patricia Smith at Connolly High School in Round Rock will lead off in January with her Public Speaking class. In April, Ashley Robinson (English, LBJ High School), Patrick Schmidt (English, Round Rock High School), and Jason Flowers (History, LASA) will begin the process with their students. The Living Newspaper curriculum—in the use of which more than twenty Central Texas secondary school teachers were trained at a Humanities Institute-sponsored workshop last summer—can be adapted in as many different ways as there are teachers, classes, and groups of students to make it their own. We’re excited to see what the new semester brings!

You can find out more about this program by contacting the Institute office at (512) 471-2654 or community@humanitiesinstitute.utexas.edu.