Mission & Values

Mission

Our goal is to make a seamless connection between rich programming provided in H&A and our students across and beyond humanities and the arts to invigorate learning through all disciplines. The work we will activate through H&A in Action will further the intersection among the humanities, arts, and STEM fields, the development of technology within our region, and the importance of public programming to expand the attention to the values within the humanities and arts throughout the university and the entire community. 

This kind of faculty-led, research-infused curriculum and programming, and specifically their connection, are the type of experiential learning opportunities that makes SJSU more appealing to our first generation and underrepresented minority students. Engaged public programming, engaged research, engaged teaching, and outreach all offer an opportunity for first generation college students in this minority-serving institution to participate in hands-on activities that will increase rates of student retention and student engagement through collaborative assignments and projects, learning communities and common intellectual experiences, and experiential learning augmented by intercultural learning in the community. 

H&A in Action is animated by three values: celebration, playfulness, and ethical imagination. These values are supported by three operating principles: reciprocity, sustainability, and integrity.

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 9/5/26 by Katherine D. Harris