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Dustin Luca
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SALEM, MASS. – This fall, Salem State University will launch “The Humanities Brigade,” a three-year project drawing upon humanities programs at Salem State to prepare students to address social justice issues around the North Shore.
Over the course of the next three years, cohorts of 20 first-year students per year will complete a set of dynamic humanities courses together and collectively focus on tools to combat and resolve social justice issues of the day in their backyards. They’ll then complete a paid civic humanities-related internship with a North Shore-based non-profit organization where they’ll apply their “humanities toolbox” to help the organization achieve its goals.
Powered by a $480,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Humanities Brigade is a project with a sizable list of impacts forecasted for students and the community, according to project creator and director Elizabeth Duclos-Orsello, chairperson of the interdisciplinary studies department and professor of American and Ethnic studies.
“This project is going to put a spotlight on our faculty and show not only our students but the broader community and region that this is what the humanities is and does,” Duclos-Orsello said. “They’ll go out with their humanities toolbox, complete internships where they’re helping an area social service organization and achieve a broader goal explored and solved by the tools acquired within the humanities courses.”
“The students are ‘The Humanities Brigade,’” Duclos-Orsello said.
The project bridges Duclos-Orsello’s longstanding work in public humanities, equity, general education, and civic engagement initiatives at Salem State and across the Commonwealth.
“I designed this project to offer students a humanities-based opportunity to engage with pressing social justice concerns while participating in a program built around high-impact practices that have shown to be effective in higher education – especially for those who have previously not seen the humanities as a practical pathway for professional and personal success,” Duclos-Orsello said. “Twenty students each year will together take the same four humanities courses – two in the fall, two in the spring. They’ll do this with a set of faculty members who themselves, along with community partners, have thought about how their different courses can align across and through a particular social justice theme.”
The program is open to all first-year students, and the required courses will fulfill university Gen Ed QUEST requirements no matter the student’s intended major.
But for Duclos-Orsello, The Humanities Brigade is more than a humanities-driven opportunity to support Salem State’s status as the Commonwealth’s civic engagement university. It’s also an opportunity to establish the kind of program she experienced in her own college years and has long sought to establish.
“The core of The Humanities Brigade is based on a program I had the good fortune to be part of as a first-year low income, Pell-Grant student at a private liberal arts school,” Duclos-Orsello said. “To this day, it remains a profoundly important and transformative intellectual experience. It shaped how I think about the world, the choices I’ve made regarding the work I have done in my community and my career, and how I think about what social justice is about. The real-world power of the humanities came alive to me.”
Coincidentally enough, “in the process of writing this grant, I did a deep dive and discovered that the project I discovered as a first-year student was built on a Mellon Foundation grant in the late 1980s,” Duclos-Orsello said.
Founded in 1969, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is a New York-based philanthropic organization committed to supporting ideas and organizations that contribute to a more connected, creative, and just society.
The Humanities Brigade was intentionally designed to align with Salem State’s strategic initiatives around equity, its status as a developing Hispanic Serving Institution and its position as the Commonwealth’s civic engagement university. For Duclos-Orsello, building in paid experiential learning and the support of a cohort model was critical to ensuring that all students could imagine themselves as part of The Humanities Brigade, she explained.
University President John Keenan said The Humanities Brigade is “so thoughtfully aligned with our university’s goals and status in the realm of civic engagement, it’s difficult not to get excited about the possibilities.”
“This project celebrates the work of our humanities faculty, but it truly serves the work of our students in the real world. It’s incredible to add a feather of this magnitude to our caps,” Keenan said. “I want to thank the Mellon Foundation, Dr. Elizabeth Duclos-Orsello and the rest of the humanities faculty for their united efforts to build for our students such a transformative opportunity to explore and address social justice issues on a societal scale.”