PART VI
Part VI discusses how the arts and humanities can be integrated into public life and policy and considers the effects of this integration on human flourishing. The public humanities can benefit from greater humanistic engagement in public programs, such as adult education and museums. Art museums can embrace the role of advancing public flourishing by connecting people to aesthetic experiences and to each other. A historical analysis of how policies in the United States have sought to promote engagement with the humanities found that they focused on bringing citizens together through a common understanding of the American experience, even though the demographics and the understanding of what the American experience is have shifted significantly over the years. More recent policy proposals on the arts and humanities center on the work of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Arts, Health and Wellbeing in the UK, which was tasked to examine the health and well-being impact of attending cultural events and participating in creative activities. This culminated in the Creative Health: The Arts for Health and Wellbeing report presented to the UK Parliament in 2017.
CHAPTER 35
David Kidd
Abstract
The public humanities provide opportunities for members of the general public to engage with the humanities in a wide range of contexts. This chapter outlines recent advances in empirical investigations of the value of humanistic engagement in public programs, with a focus on illustrating theoretical models of humanistic development using studies of specific programs. Research on museum experiences and adult humanities education programs is reviewed in order to explore the psychological processes activated in the humanities and the forms of human development they cultivate. The chapter concludes with reflection on ways in which future research can benefit from unique features of the public humanities while contributing to both psychological theory and public debates about the value of the humanities.
Key Words: public humanities, human development, museum, adult education, applied research
In the first lines of its 1964 report recommending the establishment of what would become the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Committee on the Humanities asserts,The humanities are the study of that which is most human. Throughout [humanity’s] conscious past they have played an essential role in forming, preserving, and transforming the social, moral and aesthetic values of every [person] in every age. One cannot speak of history or culture apart from the humanities. (The Committee on the Humanities,1965, p. 1)Now, over half a century after the report’s publication, the National Endowment for the Humanities finds itself at risk of losing funding in the budget proposed by the executive branch for the third year in a row (Schuessler, 2019). Although previous attempts to defund the endowment have met with summary rejection by legislators, the efforts suggest that the ACLS’s confidence in the value of the humanities is not universally shared. Many people, it seems, think we could all do just fine without them. The era-defining educational acronym, STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics), lacks an “H,” and the humanities have even been neglected in the acronym’s more recent arts-inclusive permutation, STEAM. It is critical, then, to revisit assumptions about the impacts of the humanities and investigate empirically the extent to which they truly play essential roles in shaping individuals and their communities. This task is beyond the scope of this chapter. Instead, the goal here is to orient researchers in extant research using theoretical frameworks of humanistic development, and to outline ways in which future research can help us learn more about what the humanities can and cannot do to improve ourselves and our communities.
What Are the Public Humanities?
Some scholars define public humanities work as any form of engagement by humanists with others outside formal academic study, though there is disagreement regarding what constitutes truly public engagement (Wickman, 2016) and what separates the humanities from the arts (Ellison, 2012; for an example of this tension in practice, see Groen & Hyland-Russell, 2012). A recent large-scale study (Fisher, 2018) of over 1,500 programs provides a more pragmatic definition of the domain. Fisher (2018) found that five general types of programs could be identified: those promoting outreach by scholars to a general audience; programs encouraging engagement and the mutually beneficial transfer of knowledge between facilitators and participants; research projects that involve substantial collaboration of academics and community members; teaching projects that encourage student engagement with the broader community; and infrastructure projects. For this chapter, the first three forms of public humanities activity are most relevant, as they help focus attention on what it means for a member of the general public to engage with the humanities.
Yet, while Fisher’s (2018) analysis helps clarify what sorts of activities might characterize the public humanities, it does little to help distinguish the humanities from the arts. Here, a definition offered by Carol Amour, a community outreach coordinator for the Lac du Flambeau Tribe, illustrates a helpful rule of thumb:
The beautiful wigwassi jiiman (birchbark canoe) that Ojibwe artist Wayne Valliere created with ENVISION students from Lac du Flambeau represents art. The lessons we learn from looking at and talking about the through-line of centuries of Ojibwe culture that the canoe represents and how tradition can carry culture, represents [sic] the humanities.
(Wisconsin Humanities, n.d.)
As Amour’s depiction of the distinction between the arts and humanities makes clear, many public art programs invoke the humanities, and many public humanities programs encourage engagement with the arts. This complicates discussion of the effects of engaging with the public humanities, in part because many studies of engaging with art might be easily understood as investigations of the public humanities. Arts engagement, particularly when the definition includes aesthetic appreciation as well as creation of art, has received increasing attention from psychologists and other empirical researchers (e.g., Winner, 2018; Starr, 2013), but there is relatively little work focused specifically on the humanities.
What Do the Public Humanities Do?
Even a cursory look through some of the more than 1,500 public humanities programs identified by the National Humanities Alliance (NHA) as part of its Humanities for All project (Fisher, 2018) reveals that they can be found in settings ranging from places of incarceration to canoes on a river, involve participants of all ages, reach people in urban centers and rural counties, and touch on an apparently limitless range of topics. What connects these programs is their common reliance on humanistic methods in the pursuit of humanistic goals.
In an analysis of the 1,800+ programs it identified, the Humanities for All project (Fisher, n.d.) found five general goals: “Informing contemporary debates; amplifying community voices and histories; helping individuals and communities navigate difficult experiences; expanding educational access; and preserving culture in times of crisis and change.” These findings point primarily to civic concerns, with an emphasis on addressing the needs of underserved (“expanding educational access”), marginalized (“amplifying community voices and histories”), or at-risk communities (“difficult experiences”, “times of crisis and change”). The civic focus identified in the Humanities for All project appears also in a qualitative analysis of 89 projects funded by Illinois Humanities between 1981 and 2012, which found 80 (90 percent) of them to prioritize civic development (Pupik Dean, Schein, Kidd, Webb, Kang, Walton Doyle, &Allen, 2020).
That public humanities programs would be oriented toward civic, or public, development is consistent with a long history of advocacy for the key role of the humanities in preparing people for democratic life (e.g., Allen, 2016a; Dewey, 1923 Nussbaum, 2006). The creation of the National Endowment for the Humanities and, subsequently, state humanities councils in the United States was driven by the conviction that the humanities would enrich civic discourse and empower thoughtful civic actors, though definitions of these outcomes have changed over time (Lynn, 2013).
Models of Development through the Humanities
Despite an overwhelming emphasis on cultivating civic life in characterizations of the public humanities, this is just one domain in which they can affect their participants. Allen (2016b) proposes that the humanities can be understood as promoting the development of skills and capacities (e.g., critical thinking, deep understanding of a subject) by engaging sensory inputs (e.g., verbal, visual) and a wide range of forms of psychological processing (e.g., analytic cognitive processes, affective processes). Any single humanities program is likely to activate, though not necessarily simultaneously, multiple forms of engagement, and consequently promote the development of different intellectual and personality factors.
These desired learning outcomes can in turn be viewed as short-term goals that contribute to broader forms of human development. Allen (2016a; Pupik Dean et al., 2020) argues that development in three domains is necessary for flourishing: the existential domain, which concerns personal identity, one’s subjective experiences, and intimate relationships; the vocational domain, which encompasses one’s ability to engage in meaningful and productive work to support oneself; and the civic domain, which covers engagement in community life at all levels. The extent to which learning addresses these different domains is expected to relate to the nature of the specific developmental goals pursued.
Working from a perspective rooted in empirical psychology, Tay, Pawelski, and Keith (2018) propose a model for understanding engagement with the arts and humanities that makes similar arguments regarding the importance of recognizing multiple pathways to development. Tay et al. (2018) note that the “what,” the actual disciplines and subjects involved, of the arts and humanities is astonishingly diverse, but that the mechanisms (i.e., embeddedness, immersion, socialization, and reflectiveness) underlying their impacts are widely shared. Moreover, these mechanisms support specific physiological, psychological (including competencies and well-being), and normative outcomes. Although physiological outcomes have no overt representation in Allen’s (2016b) model, the psychological outcomes noted by Tay et al. (2018) can be understood as similar to the sorts of short-term learning goals in Allen’s model, and the normative outcomes (e.g., moral judgment, character, civic engagement) can be understood as ways of describing existential, vocational, and civic development.
Where these two models converge most clearly is a recognition that accounting for the impact of the public humanities on human development will be facilitated by attending to how programs prompt participants to engage psychologically with materials, ideas, and people. The two models also illuminate the complexity of the humanities, and each provides a framework for understanding why different individuals may experience and benefit from a single program in distinct but coherent ways. However, little empirical research evaluating the impacts of the humanities fully accounts for this complexity, though it can be at least partially glimpsed in an aggregate view of different lines of research.
To illustrate the partial application of these models, the mechanisms will be discussed in terms of the psychologically well-developed model proposed by Tay et al. (2018), and the long-term development goals will be characterized using Allen’s philosophical framework for understanding human development (2016b; Pupik Dean et al., 2020). However, each of these models has psychological and philosophical underpinnings, and each can be applied fully and productively to the studies examined. As these and other models develop, researchers may find different elements of them useful for illuminating different aspects of humanities engagement.
Public Encounters with the Humanities
In the following sections, studies of public humanities programs will be analyzed to illustrate how common mechanisms appear across programs in ways that contribute to existential, vocational, and civic development. The first section will focus on encounters with the humanities in museums; the second will describe research into adult humanities education programs. It should be noted, though, that much research focused on public humanities is made difficult not just by the complexity of the mechanisms and outcomes, but also by methodological challenges. With few exceptions, randomization to control and treatment groups is impossible, lengthy psychometric assessments cannot be deployed, sample sizes are often small, and researchers often have little control over the program or the broader context. In short, the public humanities are a hostile environment for conducting rigorously controlled research. The extant empirical work, therefore, does more to spotlight likely mechanisms and to guide future work than to prove or refute claims about the impacts of the humanities.
Going to the Museum
For many, their earliest and perhaps most common contact with the public humanities is via museums, and there is a substantial body of research addressing museum-goers’ experiences from a curatorial perspective. Much of this work deals with science and natural history museums and is concerned with the acquisition of content knowledge and development of interest. However, museums and similar institutions more clearly focused on the humanities, such as history and folklife museums, have received relatively little attention from empirical researchers.
Some findings from general studies of museum experiences are nonetheless valuable. Drawing on theories of psychological flow and intrinsically motivated learning, Packer (2006) examined the importance of active learning to visitors’ enjoyment of museums. The results point to a broad conclusion about why people visit museums: they find them to be places where they can enjoy learning. Most of the nearly 500 survey respondents did not see having fun and learning as conflicting aspects of their museum experiences. Instead, they reported finding joy in their self-directed, curiosity-driven learning. Packer’s (2006) analysis of interview responses suggested that attendees’ learning was supported by a sense of discovery or fascination, multimodal appeal, minimal demands for overt effort, and availability of choice.
This last point may be most critical. Museums and similar settings can allow visitors to learn on their own terms: they can focus their attention on those subjects that are most personally relevant or stimulating, engage via favored modalities, and move at their own pace. This degree of autonomy likely supports the experience of flow states (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997) as learners find an appropriate level of engagement. Young people and adults may find that the exercise of autonomy, itself a fundamental need (Deci & Ryan, 2000), in museum settings allows them to satisfy their curiosity and enjoy learning. This may be especially valuable to individuals who struggle with motivation in more restrictive educational environments, or, more generally, find few opportunities for self-directed learning.
One study using qualitative methods (Harker & Badger, 2015) focused on the educational impact on middle school students of a visit to a traveling exhibit on the Holocaust, finding that the presence of age-appropriate pedagogical prompts and discussion questions were helpful in promoting critical analysis and reflection (e.g., recognizing ambiguities, connecting the past with the present) on the museum materials. Consistent with the importance of self-direction noted by Packer (2006), Harker and Badger (2015) note that the least favored aspect of the program was that the museum visit was highly scripted and limited opportunities for free exploration.
Bowen and Kisida (2019) conducted a randomized, delayed-treatment experiment that included 42 schools (and over 10,500 students) that received an intervention in the form of a partnership with a local arts organization during the study period. Over the two-year study, students in schools receiving the intervention reported significantly higher levels of compassion, had fewer disciplinary problems, and performed better on the state writing assessment than their counterparts in control group schools. Although not explicitly a humanities program, the arts intervention involved students in reading (most were in theatre programs), critical thinking, discussion, and reflection, as well as active artistic expression. Indeed, Bowen and Kisida (2019) speculate that humanistic inquiry into works of art was an important driver of the effects of the program, particularly on writing achievement. In a similar experiment, third–twelfth-grade students randomly assigned to participate in an art museum outreach program that included pre- and post-visit curricular materials and guided study of four or five works of art demonstrated greater critical thinking skills assessed via brief art criticism responses to a novel painting (Bowen, Greene, & Kisida, 2014; for an extension of this work, see Kisida, Bowen, & Greene, 2016).
There is also limited evidence that less structured engagement with the humanities at museums can have positive effects on adults. For example, Koebner et al. (2019) report effects from a pilot study of a docent-led tour of an art museum on pain intensity and unpleasantness, as well as feelings of social disconnection among adults diagnosed with chronic pain. As with arts-based interventions, this program also strongly encouraged humanistic engagement with the works of art, with a focus on dialogue and interpretation rather than isolated aesthetic appreciation. Analyses of interviews appear to confirm the importance of discussion, with many participants registering the importance of hearing other perspectives, sharing their own views, and learning new ways of understanding art. For many, engaging with the works of art provided a foundation for rich social interactions and so reduced the feelings of disconnection often associated with chronic pain.
The capacity of the humanities to develop social bonds is also apparent in Krmpotich, Howard, and Knight’s (2016) report of a program at the Native Canadian Centre of Toronto that involved senior community members in the curation of a collection of Indigenous artifacts. A group of senior Indigenous women worked closely with affiliated university researchers to put the artifacts, long out of Indigenous control, in an appropriate cultural and historical context. Krmpotich et al. (2016) describe how the participants used their cultural knowledge related to the objects to explore their own and others’ identities, and how they used items in the collection to create “careful public displays that taught as much about the objects as they emphasized that Indigenous peoples were indeed citizens of Canada, and citizens on their own terms” (p. 360). The program described by Krmpotich et al. (2016) highlights the potential role of the public humanities in empowering communities marginalized in mainstream culture.Participatory humanities research can also bridge generations and divides within communities. Halim (2018) presents an account, though not a systematic empirical investigation, of a community archive project in a township adjacent to Johannesburg, South Africa, that, in addition to establishing an important scholarly resource, helped develop “a sense of collective ownership of the history” (p. 19), encouraged young people to become civically active, and promoted intergenerational understanding.
These studies illustrate many of the features of the humanities prominent in Allen’s (2016b) and Tay et al.’s (2018) frameworks. First, the programs engage participants across multiple perceptual domains, including verbal and textual, visual (e.g., Bowen et al., 2014), and tactile (e.g., Krmpotich, 2016) activities. Second, key mechanisms appear repeatedly. Immersion, a feeling of flow or emotional involvement, is apparent in reports of joyful learning in museums (Packer, 2006). Embeddedness, which can involve feelings of mastery or direct or indirect forms of positive reinforcement, seems to be operating when participants exercise autonomy (e.g., Packer, 2006), demonstrate skills and knowledge (e.g., Krmpotich et al., 2016), or are guided through new ways of thinking (e.g., Bowen et al., 2014). Socialization, which entails the adoption of new social roles and the formation of new relationships, is an especially critical mechanism that is at least implicit in all of the programs described here. Most people attend museums with other people, and humanities programs often encourage discussion. In some cases, socialization may primarily reinforce solidarity in a fairly homogeneous group (e.g., Koebner et al., 2019), while other programs may work to explore and bridge social identities (e.g., Halim, 2018; Krmpotich et al., 2016; Krmpotich, 2016). Finally, reflectiveness is such a prevalent mechanism across humanities programs that it might be considered a hallmark. The positive outcomes of most programs were directly or implicitly tied to the extent to which they facilitated reflection, which was most often supported through discussions or questions (e.g., Harker & Badger, 2015).
These programs also illustrate the reach of the humanities across the three domains of human development identified by Allen (2016b). Several appear oriented primarily toward existential development, such as the general museum programs studied by Packer (2006) and the therapeutic program described by Koebner et al. (2019). Others have implications for vocational development, such as those focused on developing academic skills (e.g., Kisida et al., 2016), and some place special emphasis on civic development (e.g., Halim, 2018; Krmpotich et al., 2016). While none of the programs can be thought of as supporting development in only one of the three domains, attending to the emphasis placed on each can help clarify the nature of their likely effects on individuals and communities.
Humanities for All
Developed by Earl Shorris in his work with underserved and undereducated people at the Roberto Clemente Family Guidance Center in New York City (Shorris, 2000, the Clemente Course and programs inspired by it provide structured adult humanities education to people who would normally have no access to higher education. These programs focus on canonical works in the humanities (though not exclusively by Western, white, male, and long dead authors), and are based on a belief that engaging with them through close reading, rigorous discussion and debate, and careful writing is empowering for all, particularly those ordinarily marginalized in mainstream society. The Clemente Course is especially relevant to understanding the public humanities because it engages participants in a full range of humanistic inquiry, including philosophy, literature, and history.
Clemente Courses and their variants have proliferated in recent years, but scholars have noted the difficulty of systematically evaluating their effects on participants (e.g., Connell, 2006; Hyland-Russell & Groen, 2011). Katzev, Allen, and Peters (2009) undertook to address this gap in a pre-post study of participants in two humanities courses for underserved and incarcerated adult learners based on the Clemente model. Using a combination of forced-choice self-report scales and free response items, Katzev et al. (2009) found that program participants made significant gains in their abilities to demonstrate conceptual understandings of several key themes of the course (e.g., defining the relations between power and justice). For self-reported outcomes, results were different for the two groups and not universally positive. Both groups, however, reported increased civic behavior (or intended civic behavior). As Katzev et al. (2009) note, however, their conclusions are limited by a host of methodological constraints, including small sample sizes (15 participants per group).
Despite the limitations of Katzev et al. (2009), the findings are broadly consistent with a small qualitative study conducted with at-risk adults in Clemente programs in Australia (Howard, Marchant, Hampshire, Butcher, Egan, & Bredhauer, 2008). Howard et al. identified six primary types of outcomes in participants’ responses: increased self-esteem and well-being; positive social engagement; feelings of being valued by others; identifying as a learner and enjoying learning; greater interest in community involvement; and more interest in shaping their own future. Another mixed methods study of participants in a Canadian Clemente program (Groen & Hyland-Russell, 2010) also found evidence of increased self-esteem, academic efficacy, and greater hope for the future.
Findings from Clemente programs, though based on inconsistent methods and very small samples, provide an initial sketch of the mechanisms at work and their likely effects. The qualitative data in particular draw attention to feelings of immersion, developing mastery and receiving reinforcement (embeddedness), opportunities to take on new roles and engage positively with peers (socialization), and reflection on personal and social values and relations (reflectiveness). The findings also illustrate how adult courses in the humanities outside of traditional academic settings can activate mechanisms that appear to promote development in existential, vocational, and civic domains.
Directions for Future Research
The studies presented here demonstrate how a wide array of public humanities programs can be understood in terms of their underlying mechanisms and the forms of human development they support. The studies do not, however, constitute a strong body of empirical evidence regarding specific or general effects of engaging with the public humanities. They should be used to guide future studies utilizing adequate sample sizes, perhaps requiring inter-institutional collaboration, psychometrically validated measures, and clear, pre-registered hypotheses.
Involve Stakeholders
Models of humanities engagement should be developed and refined with close attention to how humanists describe their work and how students report their learning. Humanists are often expert educators who utilize methods that are learned in ways similar to crafts, such as modeling, and that are refined through practice. As a consequence, humanists develop and deploy theories of learning that, though often implicit, stem from a deep understanding of how different students learn (Pupik Dean et al., 2020). Psychological researchers should work to elicit and test these learning theories alongside those derived from the psychological literature. Practicing humanists must also be key collaborators because they are well situated to help build the research networks that will be necessary to acquire the data needed for rigorous quantitative inquiry.
Researchers should also attend to what participants in public humanities programs say about their experiences. Self-reports are well-suited to assessing the subjective experiences that are central to the humanities, and there is evidence that self-reports are valid indicators of learning (Douglass, Thomson, & Zhao, 2012). Self-reports are also more efficient and less vulnerable to threats to validity posed by uncontrolled environments than behavioral measures, making them compatible with the time constraints and uncertainties of assessment in public programs. Self-report measures, in addition to receiving psychometric scrutiny, should be calibrated to ensure that the language of their items is appropriate for the diverse populations targeted by public humanities programs. Extant and future qualitative research promises to be a useful resource for scale developers intending to help participants express themselves in authentic, or at least comprehensible, language.
Community Matters
The public humanities exist only in social contexts, and participating in them is given very different levels of support in different communities. This is true of any human activity, but it may be especially consequential for the public humanities. Blessi, Grossi, Sacco, Pieretti, and Ferilli (2016) examined the relation of cultural participation to subjective well-being in two distinct environments, one more supportive of cultural engagement (e.g., by maintaining museums and theatres) than the other. In the more supportive city, individuals’ subjective well-being was more strongly predicted by cultural participation than in the other. This finding illustrates one way in which researchers interested in individual-level effects should attend to the broader social contexts in which individuals participate in public humanities. Personal growth through the public humanities may be most likely when there are opportunities for sustained engagement and when the experiences they provide are intelligible and valued by fellow community members. The public humanities are themselves part of this broader context, and future research should also examine how public humanities programs contribute to a sense of community commitment to the attitudes and ways of thinking they support.
Conclusion
One of the challenges of defining the public humanities is that they touch on such a wide variety of subjects and seem to do so in endless ways. The application of psychologically and philosophically based models to accounts of very different programs can help identify common humanistic processes or mechanisms at work in the service of human flourishing and development. However, the existing body of research is limited, particularly when studies that focus primarily on arts engagement are excluded from the literature. This presents an opportunity for researchers to develop participatory research programs that involve direct collaboration with developers of and participants in public humanities programs. Further collaboration of practicing humanists and psychologists may also lead to better theories in both disciplines of how people learn, develop, and flourish.
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