Seeing Stars: Knowledge Transfer and Public Practice in the Teaching of the Humanities

Abstract What do students of the humanities know, and how do they come to know it? What can they do with that knowledge and skill? Students struggle to answer such questions because they cannot name what they know or can do in the “real” world. Exploring the teaching of the humanities as a form of public practice, this piece focuses on how knowledge is created and transferred in the humanities as part of an initiative called The Being Human Project . This project helps students “name” what they are learning through a set of humanities threshold concepts called SEAM: Storytelling, Empathy, Ambiguity, and Memory. Defining knowledge transfer in terms of recognition, recurrence, and application, students learn to use SEAM as a recombinant palette of problem-solving tools in the public sphere. If we imagine the humanities as a figurative sky filled with stars, the question is how best to prepare our students to navigate that vaunted space as the humanities “constellate” with public problems and practices. How can we help students recognize the value and instrumentality of what they are learning when such knowledge appears more like far-flung points of light than an array of constellations they might steer by?