![]() ![]() The class culminates in the creation of a public-facing exhibit. The class is committed to the spirit, literature, and activities of Anisfield-Wolf students read the canon, meet the authors, explore the legacy of the founder, and enliven and contemporize the works through the digital humanities. In a Rust Belt city like Cleveland, marred by a history of segregation and uneven decline, these themes are of special significance. The annual ceremony brings renowned authors and scholars to the city to explore globally and locally important themes such as race and identity. Core values of the public humanities are infused throughout the program, and partnerships help us to amplify community voices and histories, inform contemporary debates, and navigate difficult experiences.Īn illustrative example is a newly developed English course (designed with the support of a Modern Language Association's Humanities Innovation Grant to meet the core requirements for a literature class) entitled: “From Rust Belt to Revival: Exploring the legacy of segregation, inequality, and social justice through the lens of the Anisfield-Wolf canon.” It was created with support from Cleveland’s Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the only juried prize in the nation for books that confront racism and celebrate diversity, and is rooted in the idea that literature is a vehicle for social justice. Our pathway focuses on content (the Rust Belt as a cultural laboratory) and concrete skills (digital humanities and community-based story telling). This project allows students to look at the fabric of their region from a myriad of disciplinary perspectives. The Pathway charts a way forward for the Rust Belt as we interrogate how we teach our rooted history so that our students can leverage their voices and activate social change. And, while classrooms at Ursuline are often deeply divided-politically, racially, socio-economically-we have found that conversations that center creative production can bridge divides. In a recent article, Forbes ranked Ursuline number one in the nation for student mobility. As an institution, we are uniquely poised to bridge the gap between our campus and its surrounding urban fabric. ![]() An impressive eighty-five percent of Ursuline’s graduates stay in the northeast Ohio region in the fall of 2019, 31% of our students came from historically under-represented populations and approximately 50% of our undergraduate students are first-generation. These disparities have only been magnified by the COVID-19 crisis, emphasizing the urgency of this work. While our school is located in an affluent, predominantly white suburb, many of our students commute to campus from Cleveland proper or inner-ring suburbs-straddling two different realities on and off college grounds. In 2020, Bloomberg placed Pepper Pike at #43 on its list of the “200 richest cities in America,” recording the average household annual income at $267,268. At Ursuline, a small, women-focused Catholic liberal arts school located in Pepper Pike, Ohio, we are especially aware of a divided Cleveland. Our project recognizes that institutions are rooted in regional ecosystems. ![]() Recognizing the potential of the humanities to unpack and address these regional needs, we created a series of courses that threads its way through our core curriculum, allowing students to earn a certificate by completing the “Rust Belt Pathway.” Through the pathway, whose design was guided and shaped by the voices of community organizations in partnership with faculty and staff expertise, students cultivate the skill sets that allow them to be cultural problem-solvers they are the citizens who will help to write the next chapter of Rust Belt revival. The region is typically characterized as a place of poverty, discrimination, neglect, and population decline. Cleveland-a prototypical Rust Belt city-and its inner-ring suburbs include an array of distinct neighborhoods that are historically divided by ethnicity, race, and socioeconomic status. In the fall of 2020, Ursuline College launched an NEH-funded project focused on the issues of inequity in our specific cultural landscape, the Rust Belt. ![]()
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