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A Vision for Future Humanities Graduate Education
Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies
Wilfrid Laurier University
Introduction
The starting point for envisioning the future of graduate studies in the humanities is the
evolving societal role of graduate education in general. This includes a demographic shift
toward the "applied" in all facets of education; the transformation of university faculties
comprising siloed disciplines to inter- and multi-disciplinary programs that often bridge
not only faculties but the university and the private sector; the move toward more
contractual and fewer tenure-track and tenured faculty (along with the change in graduate
student aspirations this entails); the rise of the alt-ac career stream; and a broader public
debate around the role of graduate degrees and of universities in general. Graduate
education in the humanities—a discipline that is seen, in its most stereotypical aspect, as
imparting more abstract and less economically quantifiable skills—has become lightning
rod for the discussions centered on these developments.
Even in light of such debates, many of Laurier's graduate programs in the
humanities continue to demonstrate a longstanding consistency in terms of recruitment,
retention and degree completion. Markers of such consistency include meeting negotiated
program targets, showing a healthy offer/acceptance ratio, keeping times to completion
within a normative range, scoring high on the CGPSS, maintaining a viable domestic
applicant pool, and being able to support international students on a discreet basis.
Programs such as the MA in Theology, and History, as well as the PhD in English and
Film Studies continue to attract high quality candidates, who have gone on to post-degree
success in a number of contexts including tenure-track jobs, as well as careers in the
private, governmental and non-profit sectors. In 2014, Wilfrid Laurier University's
"Strategic Mandate Agreement" with the province of Ontario identified four key areas for
future growth (at both the undergraduate and graduate level): 1) Business and
Management; 2) Community Engaged Health: Individual and Community Well-Being,
and Lifespan Sciences; 3) Cold Regions Water Science and Policy; 4) Communications
and Digital Media Studies. The SMA thus poses an invitation to humanities programs at
Laurier to rethink the ways in which traditional disciplinary objectives and priorities
might be adapted to previously unaligned (or at least obviously unaligned) areas of study.
The Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies at Laurier, as well as individual
graduate programs, have begun responding to this invitation by shifting curricula, adding
and altering program requirements, and seeking ways of directly engaging their students
with institutional priorities geared to the SMA. What follows is a framework for
envisioning graduate education in the humanities within the specific context in which
Laurier finds itself now and in the foreseeable future.
This framework involves a threefold envisioning: 1) Professionalization; 2)
Application; 3) and Integration. Each of these factors will guide not only future program
development in graduate studies at Laurier, but also the transformation of existing
programs as changes in both societal and institutional priorities necessitate.
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Professionalization
In 2012, The Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies embarked on an ambitious
proposal to create a suite of in-house professionalization opportunities for all graduate
students. Named ASPIRE, this program brings together professionalization workshops,
lectures, symposia, and online offerings conducted by university partners, including the
Laurier Library, Career Development Centre, The Centre for Teaching Innovation and
Excellence, Laurier International, and the Office of Research, among others. While
ASPIRE remains a resource for graduate education at Laurier as a whole, recent
developments have occurred in which it has become a core component in a number of
Arts and Humanities programs in particular. This past year, two programs, Religion and
Culture and Sociology, have augmented their core graduate professionalization courses
with ASPIRE offerings, requiring students to devote a certain number of credit hours to
participating in ASPIRE, as part of their degree requirements. Other programs (Political
Science, English) have enquired about following suit. The shift toward including ASPIRE
as part of core degree requirements signals a broader acceptance of the need for graduate
educators, particularly in the humanities, to dissolve traditional disciplinary boundaries in
order to engage students with the widest possible field of application for skills gained in
the pursuit of graduate degrees. The "future of the humanities," in this sense, then,
involves a rethinking of disciplinary skills building as a foundation upon which to mount
a number of careers, rather than as an end-goal or final stage in the passing of graduate
students into the professoriate. One of the most critical developments in humanities
education will be the notion of "translatability of skills," that is to say an ability to speak
to the transference of core skills and competencies with potential employers. Doing so
will naturally have an effect on the disciplines themselves, turning them from a focus on
strict disciplinary parameters to an engagement with a more diverse set of applications for
the specialized competencies they impart. This should not only help students but also
begin to address the concerns and attitudes of the wider public itself. Professionalization
thus bears a number of implications for graduate programs in general, but the humanities
in particular, calling upon disciplines to re-negotiate their place in the social fabric.
Application
Broadly speaking, application relates to the bridging of disciplinary skills with social
needs in the wider community, whether local, provincial, national, or international. Since
ASPIRE aims for the translatability of skills gained in the course of obtaining a graduate
degree, the next logical step would be to base curricula, at least in part, on practical
manifestation of those skills in workplace settings of one kind or another, whether
through curricula involving practicums, community service learning, or co-op
placements. This is particularly relevant for the humanities, which is frequently seen as
promoting specialized skills (close reading, archival research, analysis and
argumentation, critical writing) at some distance from everyday use. Recent
developments at Laurier, such as "EN692: Special Topics: Professional Skills Credit”
gives graduate students in English and Film Studies "an opportunity to apply the skills
and knowledge acquired through coursework in literary and filmic studies [in] concrete
situations and professional working environments." This development grows organically
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out of recent developments such as ASPIRE, and its focus on applying skills gained in
the course of a graduate degree to specific workplace environments. Such placements
serve to bridge the classroom and supervisory experience and the broad range of contexts
in which this learning might be applied. The competencies developed during the course
of the practicum include: creative and responsible problem solving; collaborative work,
team management; public speaking and presentation skills; communicating
professionalization effectively in various media; interpersonal skills (ability to work with
others); time management and organizational skills; ability to adapt to various workplace
environments; self-reflection and lifelong learning; technical skills such as digital
archiving, data collection and management, and editing. As well, because the various
extra-university partners involved in the practicum interview all candidates, the program
provides for students an opportunity to master the art (no pun intended) of making skills
attained in the completion of a graduate degree appealing to potential employers. Partners
include literary journals, book publishers, cultural venues, libraries, and recruitment and
marketing offices. In a sense, this "future" of graduate education is also its "past," since
what programs such as this do is formalize and structure objectives and competencies in a
way that visibly recognizes that these kinds of occupations are what graduates in the
humanities have always undertaken in their post-degree lives, and serves the dual
function of preparing students for such roles while also highlighting the contribution of
the humanities to larger society historically, with the hope off-setting the view of the
humanities as a career dead end. Thus the future of the humanities depends on a
successful communication of and greater visibility for its past.
Other areas, beyond the practicum, that serve similar purposes include
community-service learning and co-op. Both of these work to break down the walls
between institution and surrounding community, in the first case by bringing elements
attained in the classroom into direct practice for social betterment. One example of such
teaching at Laurier occurs in the Social Justice and Community Engagement MA, which
requires students to undertake "community placement" as part of their degree
requirements. The aim here is "to engage in the active promotion of social and
environmental justice principles and the resolution of community-level injustices." While
not a humanities program exclusively, incorporating aspects of both the sciences and
social sciences as well as the humanities, SJCE offers one model of integrating various
disciplines in the interest of applying skills gained in the classroom directly to matters of
"class, poverty, racism, gender discrimination and lack of due process that marginalize
people and communities." Here, student engagement is more than simply a matter of
fulfilling a particular occupational role, but one that requires a negotiated, imaginative,
and even visionary interaction with a particular community. Such curricula both
recognize and depart from accepted practice. SJ621, the "Social Justice Community
Placement" requirement thus aims to integrate theoretical learning with community
practice:
The community placement is an opportunity for students to apply
theoretical ideas about social and environmental justice and engaged
scholarship in a community setting. The course is founded on the
dual pillars of providing a community service learning opportunity
for the students while ensuring that the community organization
benefits from the placement. The 160 hour community placement is
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expected to either inform the major research project or be directly
tied to the project. (SJ621)
Mutual benefit is key here, bringing together a student's learning with a direct
contribution to community service. In fact, an understanding of "service" is itself one of
the learning outcomes of this graduate course, fusing theory with practice.
In a similar vein, TH530C: "Introduction to the Spirit and the Community" in the
Master of Arts in Theology (Christian Studies, and Spiritual Care and Psychotherapy)
program has a community service learning component that involves groups of students
working with various community partners for four weeks. The idea, as in SJ621, is to
bring theory into contact with practice. The focus is on community formation itself in a
spiritual context, emphasizing partnership, team formation, and networking.
Here, then, the future is directly being imagined and created in line with theories,
readings, disciplinary practices that are in whole or in part derived from the humanities.
The success of such programs suggests an appetite, on the part of students and
communities, for the engagement of disciplinary methods with immediate and pragmatic
concerns, as well as for curricula that foster this aspect of graduate education, all while
not losing sight of the intellectual traditions out of which these disciplines emerged.
The future of humanities graduate studies is thus one that recognizes and plays to
its well-established past at the same time as it recognizes the need for demonstrating its
practical application in and visionary contribution to a wide variety of social contexts.
Integration
The final pillar of the vision for graduate education in the humanities at Laurier involves
recognizing changes in disciplinary boundaries. These changes are, of course, related to
the previous two pillars, professionalization and application, since the driver of graduate
studies has always been a negotiation between institutional and social priorities.
Integration, however, refers not only to disciplinary boundaries, but also to pedagogical
context and methods of course delivery. The burgeoning interest in digital humanities
provides a further model for linking graduate education in the humanities with
developments in community (in this case virtual), communications, and technology.
Integration thus suggests a multi-layered approach to the future of humanities graduate
education—cognizant of and responsive to the way that social practices and needs are
embodied in structures of learning and content delivery. This will require not only
changing the way that graduate students learn, but also the skills with which they emerge
from their disciplines, and this second point is perhaps the most critical in terms of a
future for graduate students, since technological competencies are perhaps the most
viable course for continued relevance. In this sense, the past again revisits the future,
since the humanities has always imparted skills in "form" as much as in "content," where
students at the graduate level honed expertise in means of written and oral argumentation,
research discovery and presentation, manipulation of various critical methodologies, all
of which were applicable far beyond the disciplinary boundaries of the humanities, and,
when imparted to undergraduate students via teaching, served as one of the main
contributions and justifications of humanities education itself. The focus on integration is
thus a recognition of the contribution humanities has always made to an educated and
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skilled citizenry while also acknowledging and being open to transformation in the
mediums in which such skills are put on display.
Professionalization, Application, and Integration—this is the vision of the future of
humanities at Laurier. This future is one that is simultaneously being worked toward and
made, as incremental changes to existing programs currently underway prepare for the
continued relevance of graduate studies in the humanities in the near and distant future.