NEH Innovations Grant-A Shared Intellectual Experience Through Humanities Literature Courses: Building a New Liberal Arts Certificate Program for Justice-Involved Individuals

In 2021 Dini Metro-Roland and Dale Brown applied for a NEH Innovations Grant that proposes a three-year NEH Initiatives Grant to form a permanent interdisciplinary project learning committee on the topic of higher education for justice-involved people which will, create a credit-bearing, humanities-based Academic Experience Seminar, as well as a two-course, co-taught Transformative Humanities Literature sequence. The seminar and the humanities literature courses will serve as a shared intellectual experience for all students embarking on the WMU Prison Education Outreach Program’s new 18-credit liberal arts certificate program at the Lakeland facility, the planning of which will begin in the Summer of 2022. The proposed grant would provide the means by which we could anchor the certificate program in the humanities as deeply as possible.