UNCG RESEARCH MAGAZINE

Opportunities for research with a faculty mentor strongly correlate to undergraduate academic achievement and positive post-graduate outcomes, such as advancing to graduate school or entering a satisfying career, says Dr. Joanne Murphy.

The associate professor of classical studies and Undergraduate Research, Scholarship, and Creativity faculty fellow serves as principal investigator for the Mellon grant, and she has seen for herself how research experience transforms students.

“There are so many impacts of undergraduate research,” she says, “but what I love the most is the confidence. Students become an authority on a thing, and they are more confident when they speak to you, and more articulate in the way they speak. They also have the confidence to know where they can find answers – they can pull arguments together and present their material.”

Since 2009, she has guided UNCG students through six-week professional internships at an archaeological field school on the Greek island of Kea. She also scaffolds research skill development into her classes on the ancient world at UNCG.

She finds that students who have opportunities to engage in research develop the confidence not only to share what they know but also to ask questions about what they don’t know – and to seek knowledge on their own.

“That’s what employers want,” she says. “People who are self-motivated and look for their own answers.”

Dr. Lee Phillips, the director of the Undergraduate Research, Scholarship, and Creativity Office, or URSCO, agrees.

“Collect information. Synthesize information. Communicate information. If a student can do those things,” says Phillips, “they will be successful in college, after college, and in their professional life.”

He says the opportunity to develop a research process – to know how to conduct research and discover knowledge – leads a student to success.

“We begin to see information and knowledge differently. We realize that knowledge is not stagnant, but an ever-changing state, and something we all contribute to.”

Phillips understands undergraduate research as a high-impact practice that not only enriches the path of individual students, but also enriches communities, both non-academic and academic.

“When a student feels they contribute to a discipline, they have a greater affinity for it and tend to stick with it longer. Expanding access to undergraduate scholarship in a field will expand the demographics of that field.”

The engagement of traditionally underrepresented students in research not only improves their academic and professional paths but also ensures those fields of study – and the ways we understand our world – are driven by a diverse set of scholars.

“Diversity,” says Murphy, “keeps disciplines relevant.”

One of the major challenges humanities graduates face is articulating how the skills they learned in their coursework make them desirable employees. It is that realization that led Nicole Hall in UNCG’s Career and Professional Development office and former Associate Professor Emily Levine to develop the Liberal Arts Advantage.

Imagine a student who has examined the major causes of the Holocaust in a history course, or traced the rise of capitalism across the globe for a political science course.

“Those students are presented with information. They have to analyze it, understand its origins – the why and the how,” says Hall. “If you translate those skills to the corporate or nonprofit sector, they really work well.”

The Liberal Arts Advantage provides training for faculty and students on the translatable value of the skills learned in humanities courses.

Participants can access online modules focused on skill articulation or attend professional development days. So far, more than 500 students have used the modules, while more than 300 students have taken advantage of the in-person opportunities.

The program also connects students with senior professionals who can speak about how their education in the liberal arts propelled them toward career success. Critical thinking and skills in collaboration and communication, says Hall, allow humanities graduates to move fairly easily across careers.

“We’ve had recruiters come, and these are the types of candidates they want,” she says. “They can easily size up a circumstance, a problem, a challenge. They can collaborate with others and communicate an outcome.”

“There is a long history of productive tension between two goals in education – learning for learning’s sake versus the imperative we have to prepare students for professional success and responsibility and leadership,” says Levine.

“In times of economic downturn or when pressures for students to find jobs are the greatest, you often see humanists on the defensive,” she observes. “They may feel resistant to learning for its own sake being encroached on by more vocational institutional goals.”

But Hall and Levine say the University doesn’t have to choose. “We believe it’s the mission of the institution – historically, and as well as today – to bring these two sides together.”

Public resource allocation, infrastructure – these are humanities questions, says Associate Professor of English Jen Feather.

“The humanities offer us the tools to think critically about where we put resources and how we make decisions about the communities we live in,” adds Women’s and Gender Studies Program Director and Associate Professor of History Lisa Levenstein. “Those are questions that determine what happens in our universities, in all disciplines, and in our world.”

Together, Dr. Feather and Dr. Levenstein are the co-founders of UNCG’s Humanities Network and Consortium, or HNAC, which they launched to connect humanities scholars, students, and the public. It’s about starting conversations that bridge gaps, they say, between individual fields of scholarship and between scholarship and public life.

Last year, HNAC worked with the New York-based Humanities Action Lab, to bring the “States of Incarceration” exhibition to Greensboro. UNCG scholars from multiple departments contributed to the exhibition, which focused on the United States prison system and its flaws and even included letters from 1920s chain-gang inmates in North Carolina.

UNCG students not only generated material for the exhibition – which took place at the International Civil Rights Center and Museum – but also organized public programs for the community about mass incarceration.

In the fall of 2020, HNAC will focus on issues of civic engagement, democracy, and voting rights, in honor of the 100th anniversary of the 19^th Amendment.

The consortium’s slogan is “humanities for everyone.”

“We are countering the idea that the humanities are the province of the elite,” Levenstein explains. “We believe that everyone deserves and benefits from a strong engagement with the humanities. Those conversations are vital to our students, the public, and a flourishing democracy.”

HNAC sponsors and takes part in many events on campus and in the community, such as the Greensboro Bound literary festival and FrameWorks, which provides scholarly programming around UNCG theater productions. For each event, HNAC facilitators emphasize connecting the public with scholars and providing a forum where students can participate – and lead.

“Our students are thought leaders and changemakers, and as the next generation, they need to know how to have those conversations, how to participate in those conversations,” says Feather.

“We want to nurture the change-making skills of a broad range of students. And we’ll see them changing the world.”