These images provide an overview of the Strengthening MiHumanities Initiative.
For the full text of the recommendations for each discipline, please see the PDF roadmaps below.
January 2021-December 2022
The Humanities play a critical role in higher education, holding up a mirror to human experience and illuminating the complexity of our world and relationships. The Humanities are essential to the development of the power skills required for effectively navigating today’s world. In the Strengthening MiHumanities initiative, researchers from The Community College Research Center partnered with the Michigan Community College Association for a two-year project to explore the landscape of the humanities in Michigan’s community colleges and develop "roadmaps" to build or strengthen pathways in each of the four selected disciplines of English, Communication, History, and Theater. The initiative leveraged significant state investments to improve transfer in Michigan, including the Michigan Transfer Agreement, the MiTransfer Pathways and the Michigan Transfer Network portal. The Strengthening MiHumanities project team has outlined crucial next steps for state leadership and institutions, not only in building new pathways for students who begin their postsecondary education at one of Michigan’s community and tribal colleges, but in ensuring equitable access to the benefits of a humanities education for all Michigan students. The recommendations in this paper, and those in the individual roadmaps for each discipline, are drawn from data analysis by CCRC and insights from over 100 faculty and administrators from Michigan’s public and private two and four-year institutions.
The focal disciplines Strengthening MiHumanities for were selected in consultation with funders at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and include one of the MiTransfer Pathways programs (Communication), and two Humanities areas with relatively high enrollments (English and History). A fourth discipline,Theater, was selected to include a focus on performance.
View and download the Strengthening MiHumanities Discipline Roadmaps:
Read more about CCRC's Research on Guided Pathways in the Humanities.
Learn more about our partnership with CCRC on the CCRC Mixed Methods blog.
Please contact Jenny Schanker (jschanker@mcca.org) with questions.