Mercy University is about to update its curriculum and offer more opportunities for students who are avid history lovers with the help of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Mercy University’s School of Liberal Arts became a recipient of a $147,610 Humanities Initiatives grant from the NEH. This grant was awarded to associate professor, Dr. Maureen MacLeod and associate professor, Dr. Caitlin Wiesner with the hopes of reshaping general education History survey classes.
Wiesner is more than happy to put this grant to use.
“I am thrilled to partner with Dr. MacLeod in directing ‘Global Horizons: Reimagining and Reinvigorating the History Survey,” Wiesner said.
The NEH is a federal agency that funds humanities programs in the United States to explore, interpret, and preserve the diversity of human cultures, ideas, practices and experiences, past and present.
According to the NEH, the humanities are the languages, religions, laws, philosophies, and customs that make people distinct. They are the history and our cultures, the ideas and movements that have shaped societies throughout time.
Since its founding in 1965, the agency has awarded over $6 billion in grants to museums, historic sites, colleges, universities, K–12 teaching, libraries, public television and radio stations, research institutions, independent scholars, and its humanities council affiliates in each of the nation’s 56 states and jurisdictions, according to its website.
This grant will help Mercy’s full-time and part-time faculty create new courses that support their expertise in historical methodology for first- and second-year students by implementing a three-year curricular and faculty development program to reconfigure the general-education history survey classes, creating twenty new thematic global history courses.
MacLeod said, “This grant is a step in the right direction for adopting more equity-minded pedagogical practices.”
When applying for this grant from NEH, the two professors aimed to continue finding ways to better engage students through a more diverse range of topics that would inspire them to become more active learners.
In the past, MacLeod and the School of Liberal Arts had also secured the Humanities Connections grant from NEH alongside the Humanities Initiatives. The Humanities Connections grant served as a pathway for the staff within General Education through the Humanities to enhance the experience of science and health majors.
As a matter of fact, Mercy’s General Education History program was one of 219 projects nationwide selected by the NEH to receive a grant.
With this grant, MacLeod and Wiesner hope to rewrite the traditional history survey by developing courses that integrate the constantly advancing technology and enhance students’ written communication skills, while exploring a larger range of diverse perspectives such as history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities.
