Program Values

Community Engagement

  • Through the Humanities Program, the University of Alberta is able to learn from communities that would not typically have access to post-secondary education. As a result, the university begins to build reciprocal relationships of learning with communities who have historically been kept out of university classrooms.
  • The Humanities Program aims to promote student engagement with the broader political public realm via critical thinking, reflection, and dialogue in a respectful environment.
  • The Humanities Program recognizes that we work, learn, and play on Treaty 6 territory and are committed to an unending, thoughtful, and conscious negotiation about our relationships and responsibilities to the land and the community both past and present.

Urban & Civic Engagement

  • Offering free university-level courses in the humanities to individuals who wouldn't otherwise have access to critical learning spaces in an accessible setting is a prime example of the urban and civic engagement.
  • The Humanities Program currently depends on a strong partnership with The Learning Centre and Wings of Providence; we will continue to foster reciprocal relationships between the University and the broader community.

Enriching Graduate Student Experience

  • Over half of our volunteer instructors have been graduate students. Teaching in an unconventional classroom setting, encourages graduate students to think about pedagogy. HUM challenges graduate students to think outside of their emerging expertise and to value other kinds of knowledge, positioning themselves as learners.

Enriching the University Community and Community Engagement within the University

  • Humanities instructors have consistently remarked that teaching in the Humanities Program has challenged them to reflect on and refine the ways they teach in their conventional university classrooms.
  • Volunteer instructors come from many faculties and departments, including English and Film Studies, Comparative Literature, Native Studies, Philosophy, Education, Library and Information Studies, Sociology, Rural Economy, Anthropology, Women's and Gender Studies, History and Classics, Fine Arts, and Native Studies.