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Humanities need convincing data to demonstrate their value, says expert

Humanities scholars have always been good at conveying the importance of their work through stories, writes Paula Krebs for Inside Higher Ed, but they have been less successful at using data to do so. This need not be the case, adds Krebs, who recounts a meeting with faculty members, local employers, and public humanities representatives to discuss how to better measure the impact of a humanities education on graduates. Krebs offers a list of recommendations and concrete program changes, such as interviewing employers about their experiences with hiring graduates, that might help humanities programs better prepare students for postgraduate life.

Academica Group <today@academica.ca>

Adding Good Data to Good Stories

https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2016/04/22/importance-developing-hard-data-about-value-humanities-essay

a list of the skills that we think graduates have cultivated in their humanities education:

• Critical thinking
• Communications skills
• Writing skills, with style
• Organizational skills
• Listening skills
• Flexibility
• Creativity
• Cultural competencies, intercultural sensitivity and an understanding of cultural and historical context, including on global topics
• Empathy/emotional intelligence
• Qualitative analysis
• People skills
• Ethical reasoning
• Intellectual curiosity

As part of our list, we also agreed that graduates should have the ability to:

• Meet deadlines
• Construct complex arguments
• Provide attention to detail and nuance (close reading)
• Ask the big questions about meaning, purpose, the human condition
• Communicate in more than one language
• Understand differences in genre (mode of communication)
• Identify and communicate appropriate to each audience
• Be comfortable dealing with gray areas
• Think abstractly beyond an immediate case
• Appreciate differences and conflicting perspectives
• Identify problems as well as solving them
• Read between the lines
• Receive and respond to feedback

Then we asked what we think our graduates should be able to do but perhaps can’t — or not as a result of anything we’ve taught them, anyway. The employers were especially valuable here, highlighting the ability to:

• Use new media, technologies and social media
• Work with the aesthetics of communication, such as design
• Perform a visual presentation and analysis
• Identify, translate and apply skills from course work
• Perform data analysis and quantitative research
• Be comfortable with numbers
• Work well in groups, as leader and as collaborator
• Take risks
• Identify processes and structures
• Write and speak from a variety of rhetorical positions or voices
• Support an argument
• Identify an audience, research it and know how to address it
• Know how to locate one’s own values in relation to a task one has been asked to perform
• Reflect