What do students of the humanities know, and how do they come to know it? What can they do with that knowledge and skill in the so-called “real” world? As early cartographers used sea monsters to signify uncharted waters where what was reliably known came to an end, so too, as teachers and practitioners of the humanities, we might inscribe, hic sunt dracones – here be dragons – over these questions. As a teacher of the public humanities, I begin each course with these questions, and in each course, my students struggle to answer. Despite the many wonderful experiences their coursework has given them, they cannot name what they know and can do with that knowledge. The question for us, as their teachers, is why? Why do our students find it so difficult to articulate what they have learned and to recontextualize its value in the world beyond the classroom? If our students cannot answer such questions, can we?

As professors of the humanities, in the root sense of the word, professus, “avowed,” or “having declared publicly,” it seems fitting that we try. It seems fitting, too, that we do so in as publicly declarative a fashion as we can, since questions of value and instrumentality are raised more often in public discourse than in the humanities classroom. In such discourse, eloquent defenses of the humanities are not wanting, appearing recently, for example, in response to articles like “The End of the English Major” or “I Teach the Humanities, and I Still Don’t Know What Their Value Is.”Footnote ¹ Such defenses are always welcome in their impulse to wrest acknowledgment of the humanities’ value from a resistant reader. Yet, for all their stirring justifications, these may seem like “preaching to the choir.” They may also be focused more on abstract ideas than concrete strategies. Though far from new in the history of the humanities, this conundrum seems to sound like a tolling bell, not, as some would have it, as a death knell, but as a call to action. In what follows, I will share something of my response to that call in two scenes (a bit dramatic perhaps, though not Shakespearean) drawn from my own experience.

The first scene opens with the question of knowledge per se. As Chris Haufe suggests, “As humanists, we owe it to our discipline and to the broader human culture to explain how the humanities produce knowledge.”Footnote ² My own sense is that we owe such an explanation to our students most of all. The question of what counts as knowledge in the humanities is one that most courses are not designed to consider, but as Joseph Jaworski reminds us: “We do not describe the world we see. We see the world we can describe.”Footnote ³ What our students can and cannot describe is necessarily shaped by the conceptual frameworks and pedagogical practices through which they experience knowledge. David Foster-Wallace puts it another way in a simple story of three fish. When the elder fish asks: “How’s the water boys?” one young fish says to the other: “What the hell is water?” The moral, of course, is that the young fish are unaware of the element in which they swim and through which their lives are made possible.Footnote ⁴

Echoing Foster-Wallace, some might ask, “What the hell are the humanities?” unaware that they too constitute an element in which we swim and through which our lives are experienced and understood. Immersive, yet too often invisible in their effects, the humanities’ power to make and unmake, to name and define, to interpret and understand shapes our experience as surely in the twenty-first century as in the fifteenth when the studia humanitas appeared as a course of study designed to develop “more fully realized” human beings. Yet, we still struggle to discern what is enabled and enacted by the humanities. To do so, like wise old fish, we must make the invisible visible in hopes of wresting from a skeptical populace an awareness of the humanities’ immersive presence and a recognition of the vital knowledge vested in them.

Perhaps through metaphor, we might envision this epistemic mise en scene. To illustrate, let us consider a pair of images. The first is that of the humanities as a painted garden, like the one found in the famous frescoes of the Villa Livia at Pompeii, a hortus conclusis of knowledge exquisitely rendered, cordoned off from the public sphere. The second is that of a Roman road, that imminently instrumental infrastructure designed to facilitate movement across the empire. As metaphors for knowledge, we might ask: How can what grows in the painted garden flourish beyond its walls? How can we, like the Romans, construct modes of transport connecting what our students learn to the public sphere? Or, to add another metaphor into the mix, if we imagine the humanities as a figurative sky filled with stars, how can we prepare our students to navigate that vaunted space so that such knowledge “constellates” with public concerns? How can we help them recognize the instrumentality of what they are learning when it appears more like far-flung points of light than an array of constellations they might steer by?

From the painted garden’s cloistered grounds to the Roman road, and from thence to a sea of stars, the shifting scenes of humanities knowledge underscore the need for navigational schema. The question of what knowledge looks like in the humanities is inextricable from how such knowledge moves across contexts, weaving together the myriad elements of human experience and expression. The variegated nature of the resulting tapestry makes it difficult to tease out a single thread as a kind of epistemic model. In addition, whatever knowledge may look like in the humanities, it will always be difficult to distinguish from the experience of “being human” itself. To paraphrase Shakespeare, such knowledge appears “subd’ud/To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand.”Footnote ⁵ Yet, we know such threads exist; they aid us in our work every day, and thus it seems we should be able to name them.

Such naming is vital in my work on The Being Human Project, which couples curricular design in the public humanities with an approach that prepares students to name what they are learning in real time. Since most humanities curricula are not designed as a developmental progression, students may not recognize how their courses relate to and build upon one another, seeing them instead as a series of self-contained experiences. Thus, they drift from course to course, traversing the humanities’ figurative sea of stars without the navigational tools they need. To counter this concern, Being Human centers knowledge transfer through a recombinant palette of threshold concepts called SEAM: Storytelling, Empathy, Ambiguity, and Memory. To bind such strands, SEAM’s “needle” as it were, we practice what I call “interpretive agency,” a term derived from Alberto Manguel’s suggestion that “knowledge lies not in the accumulation of texts or information … but in the experience rescued from the page and transformed again into experience.”Footnote ⁶

Our second scene presents knowledge transfer and interpretive agency in action. At my institution, we have a saying that “everyone majors in changing the world,” and the humanities have always been about doing just that. The question, of course, is how? How can our students be prepared to use their knowledge and skill in the twenty-first century’s public sphere? What would a pedagogy that centers such learning outcomes look like? My own education included no such training, though time, and no small measure of good fortune, has answered the question of “what are you going to do with that?” for me. When I thought of what I know of storytelling, of empathy and ambiguity, of memory, though, I found traces of SEAM in everything I know about the humanities. Then I realized that, like me, my students can (and should) take these epistemes with them, if (and herein lies the plot twist) I teach for transfer.

Teaching for transfer serves as a fulcrum for creating knowledge, fostering the ability to identify emerging patterns, marshal relevant resources, and take meaningful action. To maximize opportunities for transfer, I have designed and taught courses in public writing, humanities advocacy, digital humanities, and medical humanities all of which utilize SEAM. Students in these courses name what they are learning in real time, fitting epistemes onto conceptual frameworks, like threads on a loom. They create action plans for applying their knowledge to problems in the public sphere through directed practice, asking: What stories do I want to tell, and how can I use my training to tell them? Where is empathy needed now, and how can I work to engender it? What ambiguities can my training help me navigate? What is being remembered and forgotten, and how can I advocate for marginalized or disavowed memories? SEAM thus serves as a heuristic framework through which students rehearse their role as humanities practitioners by grappling with present-day problems impacting their own lives and the lives of others.

One key point that emerges from such practice is a recognition that in the humanities, knowledge appears to be created, rather than acquired, by students as well as scholars. An array of epistemes always under construction, always subject to scrutiny and revision, such knowledge is both particularized and holistic, a real-time composition woven together from an ever-widening gyre of texts and contexts, ideas and insights, impressions and skills. Such knowledge is in contrast with what is more passively acquired, with the latter appearing almost transactional, a giving back of what was given that creates little if anything new. A contrast that turns on the distinction between knowledge as citation versus creation. While citation is necessarily part of knowledge production, in the humanities it cannot be all. The creation of knowledge entails synthesis, integration, and contextualization, all of which necessitate a more active relationship to the topic. In this way, students deploy their own interpretive agency, enacting Manguel’s sense of knowledge as “experience rescued” and “transformed again into experience.”Footnote ⁷

The transferability of such knowledge is a necessary pre-condition for public practice in the humanities. My courses combining the public humanities with public writing now enter our scene with their thoughtful, deeply engaged students in tow, to illustrate. Aligning the public humanities with writing for public audiences gives my students’ work a destination beyond the classroom. Those in Public Writing and the Digital Humanities, for example, complete a semester-long “Real-Time Writing Project” using Substack that gives them a footprint in the real world as they develop their skill in writing for public audiences. Practicing knowledge transfer “in real time,” they transpose what they are learning about the digital humanities into the public sphere each week, producing some of their most compelling writing along the way.

Perhaps the most striking example of knowledge transfer facilitating public practice in this course, however, came quite by accident. A colleague in the Engineering school heard of my module on AI and the “human” in human communication, which culminates in a project called “I Am Not a Robot.” As she was developing a university-wide survey on AI, she asked to speak with my students. Our discussions were highly topical, so much so that I often added readings on emerging developments at the last minute, so these were very well-informed undergraduates. Our focus on what it means to be human in the digital age led us to subject the industry’s claims about artificial “intelligence” to sustained scrutiny, which was in contrast with my colleague’s more enthusiastic embrace of the technology. As the conversation unfolded, the elements of knowledge as creation were clearly on display, as my students synthesized and contextualized what they had learned, responding in real time to an interlocutor with professional expertise they had never seen before (and who was both surprised and impressed by their critique of large language models). Though this took place in a classroom, it was in all other respects a demonstration of knowledge creation in service of public practice, as my students’ articulate, informed advocacy for the humanities’ essential role in responding to artificial “intelligence” unfolded in real time.

The accrual of such knowledge depends on transfer, which I define in terms of recognition, repetition, and application. If, as the singer-songwriter, Prince, suggests, “there’s joy in repetition,” there is also learning.Footnote ⁸ Students cannot use what they cannot recognize as knowledge and skill per se, and recognition is dependent on recurrence. As Milan Kundera reminds us, “Einmal ist keinmal … What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all.”Footnote ⁹ Once introduced to SEAM’s array of threshold concepts, students begin to recognize their recurrence, building a curated collection to draw upon, “constellations” to steer by as they confront a given public problem and try to bring their knowledge to bear upon it. What is at stake in such moments of transfer is the realization that there is something that they know and can use, a problem or a perspective they recognize because they have seen it and grappled with it in their course of study.

From their inception, the humanities have been about acting in and on behalf of the world, as expressed in the Ciceronian idea of humanitas, a political and educational ideal aligned with the Greek concept of philanthrôpía (love of what makes us human). Seen in this light, they constitute an array of public practices deemed essential to the creation of a better world, though with the passing of the centuries, they have tended to “lose the name of action.”Footnote ¹⁰ My hope is that our students will reclaim that name by engaging with two defining aspects of the humanities as a domain of knowledge: attention and interpretive agency. Sustained attention is crucial for knowledge transfer; without it, the recognition of recurrent threshold concepts cannot serve as points of orientation in the creation of new knowledge. Susan Sontag cites this principle when she suggests that “a writer is, I think, someone who pays attention to the world.”Footnote ¹¹ The same might be said of the humanist, for the humanities are a framework that teaches us to pay attention to the world.

Yet, there is a limit to what attention alone can do. Eavan Boland illustrates such limits when, pausing over her grandmother’s eviction notice in an Irish archive, she notes: “I linger over the page of the Drogheda/Knowing as I do that my attention has/No agency, none at all. Nor my rage.”Footnote ¹² While Mary Oliver argues that “attention without feeling is just a report,” Boland raises the specter of an attention without agency lurking at the heart of the humanities.Footnote ¹³ What becomes of all the attention paid to the study and practice of the humanities? Where does it go and what, if anything, does it do? The study and practice of the public humanities offer a model for confronting such questions. As Elif Batuman argues: “To describe the world more fully is to change it.”Footnote ¹⁴ My hope is that our students will aspire to do just that. Batuman also reminds us: “To let the world go undescribed is, in some way, not to know it, at one’s peril.”Footnote ¹⁵ We must take that peril seriously, setting the stage again and again to help our students recognize the humanities’ far-flung points of light for what they are: constellations of knowledge the world stands in need of now, more than ever, and that together, we might steer by.