Mission & Values
Mission
H&A in Action connects the College of Humanities & the Arts’ teaching, scholarship and creative activity, experiential learning, public programming, community engagement, and advocacy. We create opportunities for students to participate actively in the intellectual and creative life of the College while supporting faculty in developing work that crosses courses, disciplines, institutions, and communities.
Our mission is also to make the value of that work visible. Through public programming, community partnerships, assessment, Stories of Engagement, and humanities advocacy, H&A in Action documents what students, faculty, artists, and community collaborators make possible together and carries those stories and evidence into broader public conversations about the humanities and arts.
Principles
- Experiential Learning: Involve students with actively contested questions, empirical observation, cutting-edge technologies, and the sense of excitement that comes from working to answer important questions.
- Innovation & Curiosity: Leverage differences to fuel innovation, solve problems, and demonstrate curiosity, resilience, and tenacity.
- Community Expertise: Build on lived expertise of the surrounding community.
- Global Awareness: Create global awareness and an understanding of culture and context for facilitating interactions between disciplines.
- Community Voices: Model amplifying community voices and histories that might not otherwise be heard.
- Interdisciplinarity: Transform conversations about grand challenges (e.g., environment, privacy concerns, social media, cultural division, social justice) and break down divisions between humanities, arts, social, and natural sciences.
Values
H&A in Action is guided by values that help us connect vision to practice. These values shape how we design programs, build partnerships, support public-facing work, and make decisions during both ordinary planning and difficult moments. They remind us that the humanities and arts are sustained through imagination, care, experimentation, recognition, and responsibility.
Celebration
Celebration is the practice of recognizing the people, projects, partnerships, and creative labor that make the College’s public work possible.
In H&A in Action, celebration means more than marking success after the fact. It means making space to notice what is meaningful as it happens: a student’s first public performance, a faculty member’s sustained community partnership, a conversation that changes how people understand an issue, or an event that brings people together across disciplines, neighborhoods, languages, and lived experiences.
Celebration helps us name what we value and why it matters.
Playfulness
Playfulness is a serious mode of discovery.
The humanities and arts invite experimentation, curiosity, improvisation, humor, surprise, and risk. Playfulness gives students, faculty, and communities room to test ideas, ask unexpected questions, try new forms, and imagine different futures.
In H&A in Action, playfulness supports creative learning and public engagement that feels open, generous, and alive. It reminds us that rigorous work can also be joyful, inventive, and welcoming.
Ethical Imagination
Ethical imagination is the ability to envision possibilities while remaining responsible to people, histories, communities, and consequences.
The humanities and arts help us ask not only what can be made, said, designed, performed, or built, but what should be made, for whom, with whom, and toward what future.
In H&A in Action, ethical imagination guides our work with technology, public memory, cultural representation, storytelling, performance, design, language, and community engagement. It asks us to imagine boldly and act with care.
Operating Principles
Reciprocity
Public engagement should move in more than one direction. H&A in Action values partnerships in which knowledge, labor, benefit, and recognition are shared among faculty, students, artists, community partners, cultural organizations, and public audiences.
Sustainability
Good public work requires conditions that allow it to continue. H&A in Action supports realistic planning, accessible processes, sustainable labor, healthy collaboration, and attention to the time and resources required to make public work successful.
Integrity
Our public story should align with our actual commitments, labor, and impact. H&A in Action depends on clear communication, accurate credit, honest documentation, and care for the trust we build with students, faculty, staff, partners, audiences, donors, and the wider public.
Updated Oct. 18, 9026
Katherine D. Harris
