Departmental Retreats to Re-Imagine the Doctoral Curriculum

"reorienting doctoral education to a student-centered educational environment ... requires rethinking the core doctoral curriculum" – AAU PhD Education Initiative

Humanities Engage supports Ph.D. programs in preparing tomorrow’s versatile Humanists. Substantial curricular reform grounded in broad faculty support is challenging yet essential to re-imagining doctoral training that serves students and society better. As an integral part of their broader re-imagining of doctoral training, DSAS departments with Humanities Ph.D. programs are eligible to apply for funds in support of program retreats that will allow for sustained faculty discussion of concrete strategies to implement recommendations made by our NEH Planning Grant curriculum committee (2018/19) and the core tenets of Humanities Engage. The transformation of disciplinary training should

  • be student-centered, inclusive, outcomes-focused, and career diverse
  • focus on the articulation of the profile, behaviors, and capacities of the contemporary Humanistic intellectual, scholar-teacher, and leader
  • pursue integral and transformative, not additive, change, grounded in program mission and building curricula, seminars, milestones, etc. around the cultivation of competencies relevant to success within and outside the academy

The committee is particularly interested in proposals that

  • draw on integrative approaches piloted by national programs such as AHA Career Diversity, NEH Next Gen PhD, and CGS initiatives
  • explore and implement strategies for embedding the objectives of a re-envisioned doctoral education in existing curricula
  • align academic milestones with broad professional development
  • optimally combine rigorous scholarly training with strategies to enhance students’ ability to articulate and demonstrate the relevance of their skills for diverse professional settings, and develop strategic competencies currently underdeveloped in doctoral training but relevant in professional settings both within and beyond the academy
  • develop portfolio-based comprehensive exams
  • broaden options for the media and formats of Ph.D. capstone projects; empower students to explore the spectrum of possibilities for capstones in their areas of research, considering in addition to the proto- research-monograph the kinds of projects that are already being pursued both locally and nationally, e.g. hybrid theory/practice dissertations; curation; documentary films; video essays as chapters in multi-media dissertations; translation with critical introduction; projects incorporating digital humanities; public-facing scholarship with a metacritique of the experience of community engagement; pedagogical research; program-development components
  • create curricular spaces – and possibly requirements – for public-facing humanistic scholarship, public engagement, and the communication of research to audiences beyond the home discipline and the academy, e.g.: public components of milestones; required seminar on practicing public scholarship; presentation of research/creative activity to general audiences as a graduation requirement
  • integrate experiential learning on/off campus
  • relate curricular innovation to broader changes in Humanities scholars’ environment and integrate experimentation and engagement with new media and modes of scholarly production
  • support graduate faculty in designing and nuancing training for diverse humanities careers and mentoring students toward a broad spectrum of careers

Department chairs are eligible to apply for funds to support necessary expenses related to a proposed retreat. The application should include, in this order, in a single .pdf sent to HENGAGE@pitt.edu, the following materials:

  • proposal narrative (3 pages max.): describe retreat objectives and means for achieving those objectives; delineate need for project and how it would lead to significant and sustainable change in graduate training; consider steps preparatory to the retreat geared to maximizing the retreat’s effectiveness
  • draft retreat agenda, with names of key facilitators and any external participants; list of core participants committed to participating in the retreat (faculty; grad representatives; others, e.g. UCTL experts)
  • budget (to be reviewed by fiscal administrator prior to submission); maximum request: $2,500. Eligible items: travel and accommodation of external expert consultants; light refreshment and lunch; materials and supplies; funds cannot be used to pay undergraduate student workers, graduate research assistants, or faculty stipends)
  • plan and timeline for implementation of retreat outcomes; evaluation plan

Applicants might find the following resources helpful: