The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Center for Public Humanities
Center for Public Humanities
Learn more about your impact
The Center for Public Humanities fund will directly and specifically impact K–12 teachers who are looking to provide rigorous and engaging content to students in classrooms around the country and world. To date, the center’s robust Poetry in America for High Schools program has served over 3,000 students in 147 unique schools across 24 states, helping them to earn college credit while improving their college readiness. The growth and success of those high-school students will be amplified when the center has “boots on the ground” — a national corps of Poetry in America certified teachers who use our content to help their students grow as readers and interpreters of literature.
Your gift allows the Center for Public Humanities to partner with all of ASU’s existing humanities schools, centers, departments and interdisciplinary humanists to create programming in the form of dual enrollment, credit, noncredit, continuing education and professional education courses. The center will work with Learning Enterprise to enable high school students to take ASU humanities courses for college credit and will deliver content to the public through events, exhibitions, outreach and more.
Dr. New's approach opens poetry up to the world and invites everyone into the conversation. As a teacher using Poetry in America content in my classroom, I saw this happen when my students listened and weighed competing ideas about Langston Hughes' 'Harlem,' from Sonia Sanchez and Bill Clinton, and I see it happen now as a TA, as my students from four high schools in New York wrestle with Melville's 'The Apparition.' They grow more confident with each discussion, because the program's philosophy, its curriculum design and its instructional materials equip students with the tools to read closely and think critically and creatively about the poems, their historical place and time, and about language: its power and beauty. To borrow from Seamus Heaney, perhaps Poetry in America doesn't change the whole world, but it does have the power to change how everyone involved understands the world and themselves."