National Humanities Alliance Highlights Literacy Outreach by Brown Chair

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David Jolliffe, Brown Chair in English Literacy

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — The National Humanities Alliance Foundation has recognized the community outreach work of the Brown Chair in English Literacy at the University of Arkansas as a national model for fostering successful humanities communities.

The Brown Chair is an endowed position in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences supported by the Brown Foundation and the Walton Family Charitable Support Foundation.

David Jolliffe, professor of English, has held the chair since 2005. He directs programs to increase literacy in Arkansas, such as community-based tutoring, professional development workshops for teachers, summer workshops and reading programs.

The National Humanities Alliance’s Working Groups for Community Impact Initiative is a “national effort to identify, disseminate, and foment best practices for the cultivation of resilient local humanities communities – communities where the humanities have a central place in public life, and where members of the local community actively support humanities organizations' work.” 

“From a very early moment, we have viewed the Brown Chair as a powerful example of public impact through the humanities, deserving of national attention,” said Matthew Van Hoose, project director and Whiting Fellow for the Humanities at the National Humanities Alliance Foundation. “The Brown Chair’s presence on our website’s story map will ensure that it continues to reach a national audience, and as our Working Groups Initiative convenes new partners in selected locations around the country, we will continue to cite the Brown Chair work as a model for forging new partnerships and achieving profound local impact through the humanities.”

The Brown Chair is one of the first institutions in the United States to be profiled on “Engaged Humanities: Model Programs for Cultivating Vibrant Local Humanities Communities,” a national map recognizing a small number of exemplary programs.

“The initiative is focused particularly on encouraging institutions of higher education to foment these types of communities by partnering more closely with local organizations – from libraries and museums to school systems and social service agencies – so as to involve broader publics in humanities scholarship and programming,” Van Hoose, said.

The Brown Chair has launched a series of programs that draw on the humanities to improve the reading and writing of children and adults in the Arkansas Delta. Between 2007 and 2011, the Brown Chair ran the Arkansas Delta Oral History Project, in which University of Arkansas students served as mentors — both face-to-face and online — to students from several small rural high schools as they conducted oral history-based inquiries into aspects of local legend and lore in the Arkansas Delta.

Another project, “Team Shakespeare,” engaged students from four rural high schools in an in-depth investigation of William Shakespeare's “The Tempest,” via textual study, imaginative writing and creative dramatics, culminating with live performances on the banks of the White River in Augusta.

Programs developed for the general citizenry have included the Augusta Veterans’ Stories project, in which residents wrote about military service; and ‘Pillars of the Church,” which facilitated collaborative story writing between young people and senior citizens to capture church and community histories.

The Brown Chair’s most recent literacy outreach initiative is “SISTA:  Students Involved in Sustaining Their Arkansas,” in which high school juniors from rural Arkansas communities collaborate with a University of Arkansas mentor to develop proposals for projects that will revitalize and sustain their hometowns and regions.

For more, visit the Humanities Working Groups for Community Impact Initiative.