AEPG: History, Impact & Future

For nearly a decade, the Artistic Excellence Programming Grants (AEPG) have supported faculty- and staff-developed programming across the College of Humanities & the Arts. What began in 2017 as an investment in artistic programming and student educational enrichment has developed into a College-wide infrastructure connecting experiential learning, faculty scholarship and creative activity, interdisciplinary collaboration, public programming, and community engagement.

In 2019, Katherine D. Harris assumed coordination of AEPG at the invitation of Dean Shannon Miller and began expanding the annual grant program into a year-round system of support for faculty, staff, students, and the projects they create. That work would eventually provide the foundation for the broader H&A in Action initiative.

The history of AEPG is therefore also a history of institutional capacity: how sustained investment in programming became a pipeline for developing people, projects, relationships, and engaged practices across the College.

The Beginning: Fall 2017

AEPG originated in an Instructionally Related Activities proposal submitted by then-Dean Lisa Vollendorf on March 15, 2017. The proposal responded to a moment of opportunity for the College: SJSU had begun operating the Hammer Theatre, creating new possibilities for students to work with professional artists and for the university’s artistic programming to reach broader audiences. Its central premise was educational. Students should have opportunities to work with and alongside artists and other professionals through residencies, master classes, workshops, lectures, performances, and other hands-on experiences.

From the beginning, the proposal envisioned more than support for individual events. It called for an annual funding mechanism for high-quality programming, a recurring call for proposals, broad participation across disciplines, and a review process involving students, faculty, staff, and College leadership. It also called for the development of measures that could assess both the quality of the programming and its impact on students.

The original proposal was especially explicit about experiential learning. Its assessment plan included students’ experiences in master classes, demonstrations, lectures, talk-backs, and other forms of hands-on learning. AEPG was therefore founded on the idea that artistic and intellectual programming could become part of students’ education through direct participation as well as attendance.

That initial investment established the foundation on which AEPG would later grow: sustained resources for ambitious programming, an annual competitive process, an emphasis on student experience, and a commitment to evaluating what the programming made possible. The broader faculty-development pipeline, community-engagement framework, and College-wide infrastructure that now surround AEPG would develop in the years that followed.

Building the AEPG Pipeline: 2019–Present

In 2019, Dean Shannon Miller invited Katherine D. Harris to assume coordination of AEPG. Harris brought to the initiative experience from leading the California Open Educational Resources Council, statewide faculty-development work, and collaborative Digital Humanities projects—work that required building systems, coordinating people across institutions, developing shared resources, and helping faculty translate ideas into sustainable projects.

She applied that experience to AEPG by expanding it from an annual grant competition into a year-round support structure. The aim was to support the full life of an engaged project: helping faculty develop a proposal, move through a competitive review process, manage a funded project, work with College administrative and financial systems, connect programming to students and communities, assess what happened, and communicate the value of the work afterward.

Before submission, faculty can draw on information sessions, department visits, office hours, application guides, rubrics, and individual proposal consultation. These resources give faculty a relatively low-stakes environment in which to practice translating a scholarly, artistic, or pedagogical idea into a fundable project with clearly defined activities, participants, collaborations, outcomes, and resources.

During the funding year, project coordinators gain direct experience administering a grant-funded project. They manage approved budgets, work with College financial and administrative staff, navigate purchasing and contracting processes, coordinate venues and communications, respond to changing circumstances, and assess the programming they have created. AEPG coordinator gatherings extend that support by creating a community of practice in which faculty across disciplines can compare approaches, troubleshoot challenges, exchange resources, and learn from one another’s projects.

After a project concludes, faculty continue to receive support in documenting what the work accomplished. Participant responses, final project documentation, Stories of Engagement, and other evidence can help faculty articulate the relationship among student learning, public engagement, collaboration, research, scholarship, and creative activity. That evidence can be useful in future grant proposals and in professional advancement materials.

Over time, AEPG thus became both a programming initiative and a faculty-development pipeline. The College invests not only in the projects themselves, but also in faculty capacity: the ability to develop competitive proposals, manage grant resources, work across institutional systems, build meaningful collaborations, assess impact, and carry that experience into future scholarly, creative, and externally funded work.

AEPG and the Scholarship of Engagement

AEPG’s faculty-development model also began to intersect with a broader change in how San José State recognized engaged scholarly and creative work. In 2021, the SJSU Academic Senate amended the University’s Retention, Tenure, and Promotion policy to include Scholarship of Engagement within Scholarly/Artistic/Professional Achievement.

The policy recognizes work in which disciplinary or interdisciplinary expertise is brought into meaningful relationship with professional, academic, local, and broader communities. It explicitly includes forms of activity such as university-community collaboration, socially engaged art, public scholarship, and public humanities.

That framework gave formal professional-advancement language to practices already taking shape through AEPG. Faculty projects could combine research, creative activity, teaching, public programming, and community collaboration within the same undertaking. AEPG’s developing infrastructure helped make that work more legible by asking faculty to articulate the purpose of a project, document how it engaged students and communities, assess what happened, and describe its significance afterward.

This alignment matters because engaged work is often difficult to represent within conventional academic categories. AEPG gives faculty a structure for developing and documenting that work in ways that can support future grants, professional advancement, and continued scholarly or creative activity.

The convergence of sustained AEPG infrastructure and formal recognition of the Scholarship of Engagement helped set the stage for the College’s next step: connecting individual projects to a broader framework of teaching, scholarship, creative practice, and public engagement.

See SJSU Scholarship of Engagement RTP Policy [pdf]

From AEPG to H&A in Action

As AEPG developed, recurring patterns across projects became increasingly visible. Strong projects connected public programming to student learning, brought disciplines into conversation, drew on community knowledge, created opportunities for experimentation, and extended faculty scholarship and creative activity beyond a single classroom or event.

In 2021, Katherine D. Harris developed H&A in Action as a broader framework for connecting those forms of work across the College. She created the H&A in Action website in June 2021 and developed a mission and shared set of principles that could give common language to activity that had previously been distributed across individual projects, departments, and programs.

The original framework identified six principles: Experiential Learning, Innovation & Curiosity, Community Expertise, Global Awareness, Community Voices, and Interdisciplinarity. Together, they described a College in which students learn through active participation, faculty scholarship and creative practice circulate beyond disciplinary boundaries, and community knowledge contributes to the intellectual and cultural life of the university.

AEPG became one of the principal engines of that framework. Its projects provided a sustained environment for testing how public programming could connect to curriculum, how students could participate as makers and collaborators, how interdisciplinary partnerships could deepen a project, and how community expertise could shape the work itself. What was learned through those projects informed the broader H&A in Action infrastructure, including its approach to public engagement, assessment, faculty resources, and Stories of Engagement.

The H&A in Action framework has continued to evolve. Its current values of Celebration, Playfulness, and Ethical Imagination, together with the operating principles of Reciprocity, Sustainability, and Integrity, build on the earlier emphasis on experiential learning, curiosity, community expertise and voices, global awareness, and interdisciplinarity.

The development of H&A in Action marked an important shift in scale. Individual AEPG projects could now be understood as part of a larger College-wide ecosystem connecting teaching, scholarship, creative practice, public programming, and community relationships. 

AEPG in Practice: Stories of Engagement

Some of the practices that would later become central to H&A in Action were visible in AEPG’s earliest years. In 2018, Katherine D. Harris led It’s Alive! Frankenstein Turns 200, a bicentennial project that brought the humanities into conversation with science, technology, performance, and public culture. The project involved collaborators from SJSU and other Bay Area universities and drew on AEPG alongside external grant support. Rather than centering a single event, Frankenstein at 200 used Mary Shelley’s novel as the basis for a series of interconnected programs, demonstrating how a shared cultural work could generate interdisciplinary teaching, public programming, and collaboration across institutions.

As AEPG developed, projects across the College created increasingly varied opportunities for students to participate in the production and interpretation of knowledge. The Stories of Engagement archive preserves many of these projects and shows how public programming could connect curriculum, faculty scholarship and creative activity, experiential learning, and community expertise.

In The Meaning of Linguistic Diversity, students in Linguistics and TESOL conducted interviews exploring language, dialect, accent, equity, inclusion, and the work of community organizations. Student inquiry became part of the public programming itself, positioning students as researchers and contributors rather than only as audience members.

Music offered another way of creating sustained encounters with difficult histories and contemporary questions. In The Making of “Considering Matthew Shepard”, the SJSU Choraliers learned the history of Matthew Shepard while preparing and interpreting the choral work. The project brought historical inquiry and artistic practice together, asking students to study, embody, interpret, and communicate questions involving violence, identity, memory, and social responsibility.

Students have also been the makers of the work AEPG brings into public view. The Making of “Nisei” documents Radio-Television-Film students creating a short film while exploring the history and experiences of Japanese American soldiers during World War II. Historical inquiry became part of the collaborative process of filmmaking, with students responsible for turning research and interpretation into a finished creative work.

Other projects have used the humanities and arts to engage questions being contested in contemporary public life. Laughing My Activism Off, developed through the AEPG-supported Picturing Freedom Dreams: Poetry & Comics in Conversation/Community project, brought comics artists and students together to explore representation, racism, identity, community, and the possibilities of imagining different futures through visual storytelling.

Dance and music have similarly provided ways of investigating histories that can be difficult to represent through conventional academic forms. “Ghostly Labor” is a Labor of Love documented La Mezcla’s combination of dance and music to tell histories of labor in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands, bringing embodied artistic practice into conversation with migration, work, gender, memory, and place.

The 2024 production of 1984 demonstrates how a single AEPG project could generate connections across courses and disciplines. The production became the focus of a Language/Power Curricular Community, while Creative Advertising students developed a branded-content experience around the Hammer Theatre production. A theatrical performance consequently became a shared site for teaching, creative practice, communication, and interdisciplinary inquiry.

AEPG has also helped move artistic and intellectual work from campus into the civic spaces surrounding SJSU. In the San José Rotunda Concert, School of Music faculty Christopher Luna-Mega and Pablo Furman developed original compositions for San José City Hall, using acoustics, sound, architecture, and the sounds of downtown itself to invite audiences to listen differently to the city. The project situated artistic experimentation within a public civic space and created another form of connection between the university and downtown San José.

The San Antonio Festival extended that model further by making the Paseo de San Antonio a site of student learning and community collaboration. Advertising students worked with faculty, downtown organizations, local businesses, artists, and the City of San José to develop programming, communications, workshops, and public experiences. Work originating in the classroom became directly connected to questions of place, belonging, economic life, and the relationship between the university and its downtown neighbors.

Taken together, these Stories of Engagement show the increasingly interconnected ecosystem that developed around AEPG. A project might begin with a novel, a choral work, a film, a play, a dance performance, a comics workshop, an original composition, or a community festival, but its educational life can extend far beyond the event itself. Students become artists, researchers, performers, filmmakers, designers, writers, and collaborators; faculty connect programming with curriculum and creative or scholarly inquiry; and community partners contribute knowledge, experience, and perspectives that shape the work being produced.

The Stories of Engagement archive preserves this developing record of H&A students, faculty, artists, and community partners working together and provides a public history of how those relationships have expanded over time.

Explore the Stories of Engagement archive

Impact: Rethinking What Success Looks Like

Over the past decade, AEPG has grown substantially in scale. At the same time, the way we understand its success has become more sophisticated. Attendance tells us how far a program reaches. It cannot tell us everything that happens when people participate: whether they encounter a new idea, contribute their own knowledge, make something, form a connection, or leave seeing a question differently.

That distinction matters because AEPG projects create different kinds of experiences. A major performance may reach hundreds or thousands of people, while a small workshop may give students sustained access to an artist or scholar. A community collaboration may be transformed by the expertise of local participants. A performance or exhibition may continue into a course through research, discussion, writing, design, or creative work. Scale and depth therefore tell us different things about a project’s value.

As AEPG became part of H&A in Action, Harris developed additional ways to understand those experiences. The H&A in Action engagement survey asks participants why they attended, what they experienced, whether they would encourage others to participate, and what “big idea” they are taking away. Participants can also reflect on how their own backgrounds or experiences shaped what the programming meant to them. These questions make participant experience part of the evidence through which the College understands impact.

The responses have made forms of impact visible that attendance numbers alone cannot capture. Between 2022–2023 and 2023–2024, the proportion of survey respondents reporting that they had been exposed to new ideas or programs rose from 40% to 62.4%. The survey also reached substantially more participants from beyond SJSU: 185 respondents identified themselves as non-SJSU community members in 2023–2024, compared with 58 the previous year.

What participants choose to say about their experiences adds another dimension. Responses to the “big idea” question have included reflections on artistic practice, history, identity, language, technology, social questions, and personal experience. By 2024–2025, community appeared much more prominently in these responses than it had during the previous two years, suggesting that participants were increasingly describing the value of programming through relationships—with ideas, with other people, and with the communities surrounding SJSU.

The Stories of Engagement provide another form of evidence. Together, participant responses, project documentation, and the stories preserve what sits behind the numbers: students taking substantive roles in the work, faculty connecting programming to teaching and scholarly or creative inquiry, and community partners contributing knowledge that affects how projects develop.

These forms of assessment have led AEPG toward a broader understanding of artistic excellence and program success. Quality remains essential, and reach remains important. Success also includes the experience created around the work: the questions it opens, the participation it makes possible, the perspectives it brings into relationship, and the connections that continue after a particular event has ended.

For AEPG, impact is both reach and depth: who we bring together, what becomes possible while they are together, and what they carry forward afterward.

From Programs to an Ecosystem

Over time, these projects have created relationships that extend beyond individual events. Courses connect to performances; faculty collaborate across disciplines; students move between classrooms and public programming; community partners bring expertise into projects; and one collaboration can generate another. Viewed together, AEPG is less a collection of separate events than a network of people, ideas, practices, and relationships.

Where AEPG Is Going: Sustaining Experiential Learning

Ten years of AEPG represent more than the longevity of a grant program. Since Fall 2017, the College has sustained a shared pool of resources and a College-wide infrastructure dedicated to creating significant educational experiences through the humanities and arts. From the beginning, AEPG funding was intended to enrich students’ classroom and educational experiences, with student impact, curricular connection, and educational value built into the program’s purpose.

A decade of sustained support has allowed that idea to develop. Students encounter the humanities and arts as living practices: something performed, made, researched, designed, translated, debated, interpreted, questioned, and shared. They work with professional artists and scholars, create films and exhibitions, perform new and established works, conduct research, develop public-facing projects, contribute to community collaborations, and bring what they learn in their courses into settings where that knowledge has consequences.

One of AEPG’s most important contributions to experiential learning is that the experience can extend far beyond the public event itself. It may begin in a classroom, rehearsal room, studio, archive, or conversation with a community partner. Students may help create the work that eventually becomes public, encounter it through coursework, contribute their own knowledge and perspectives, or carry questions generated by the experience back into another course, creative practice, or community setting.

AEPG’s history has also shown how porous the boundaries are between the university and the communities surrounding it. SJSU students themselves come from those communities, while artists, cultural organizations, local experts, alumni, and community partners regularly contribute knowledge to the educational experiences AEPG supports. Public programming creates opportunities for those forms of knowledge to meet. Faculty scholarship and creative practice enter public life, community expertise enters student learning, and students participate in producing and interpreting knowledge.

The next phase of AEPG will build deliberately on what the past decade has taught us. The application and review process will ask applicants to think more carefully about what participants will experience, how students will participate in the work, what collaborators and communities contribute, and how learning develops before, during, and after a public event. Assessment will continue to look beyond attendance alone to understand the depth as well as the reach of those experiences.

The goal for AEPG’s next decade is therefore not simply to produce more programming. It is to use ten years of accumulated relationships, practices, experimentation, and institutional knowledge to create deeper forms of experiential learning: projects in which students make, interpret, collaborate, investigate, and participate meaningfully in the intellectual, creative, and public life of the College and the communities around it.

Reports & Data

AEPG’s development has been documented through annual reports, award records, event tracking, participant surveys, final project reports, and the Stories of Engagement archive. Together, these materials provide a record of how the initiative has grown, how participation has changed, how faculty and students have used the program, and how the College’s understanding of impact has evolved over time.

These records also make it possible to see AEPG as more than a sequence of funded projects. They document the development of a sustained infrastructure for experiential learning, faculty development, public programming, and community engagement across the College.

Explore AEPG and H&A in Action reports and publications

Katherine D. Harris, Ph.D.
Executive Director of Strategic Initiatives
Updated: Oct. 18, 2026