Teaching Beyond the Curriculum

Abstract

In his book Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, Dr. Joseph E. Aoun, President of Northeastern University, laid out a new vision of higher education, which unites three key literacies—“data literacy,” “technological literacy,” and “human literacy”—under a single theory of education he calls “humanics.” As an educator at Northeastern University, I am called to bring my courses in alignment with this vision, though I have struggled with this as a humanities scholar. Sure, my courses reflect the goals of “human literacy,” yet I wonder how I can bring my courses in greater alignment with the tripartite structure of humanics. Is humanics merely a rehashing of the concept of “digital humanities”? If not, why not? Would shifting my focus more in line with humanics drastically change the questions and methods I teach in my classrooms? To what effect? For the Teaching Beyond the Curriculum conference, I propose an exploratory presentation in which I analyze the vision of “humanics” for higher education and translate its lessons into practical applications for a traditional humanities classroom. Tentatively, I argue that humanics, as Aoun presents it, is a call for STEM scholars to invite their students to ask human-oriented questions related to psychology, society and ethics when engaged in technical and scientific inquiry. But the inverse, the practical application of technology and data in a humanities classroom focused on the formal or theoretical analysis of culture is less clearly defined. Of course, I am bracketing the abundance of quantitative and qualitative research in humanities and humanities-adjacent disciplines, where data analysis and digital technologies are already centralized. But with this presentation I wonder: what would it mean, in practical terms, to bring information and technology into greater focus in my course design and lesson planning as a scholar focused on formal and theoretical methods of analysis?