Global Humanities Institute and the Communication Studies Program
"Global Humanities: Many Voices, One College"

Montgomery College has been awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to support a "Global Humanities: Many Voices, One College" (MVOC) initiative. The grant is part of the NEH Humanities Initiatives at Community Colleges program. The aim of MVOC is to improve intercultural competencies in Communication Studies and non-humanities (professional) fields through global humanities approaches. It was inspired, in part, by a new exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History titled Many Voices, One Nation. The project enables non-humanities faculty from professional fields (business, law, engineering, and nursing, among others) and faculty from the Communication Studies, ELAP, and Linguistics disciplines to join together in a professional development opportunity with the ultimate goal of increasing students' critical thinking and intercultural competencies. MVOC will expand on the highly successful work of Montgomery College's Global Humanities Institute (GHI), created by an NEH "Bridging Cultures" Challenge Grant, by helping faculty infuse global learning into professional training fields, and by adding humanistic content to Foundations of Human Communication (COMM 108), the highest enrolled General Education course in the Humanities distribution area, reaching over 4,000 students annually.

To accomplish its objectives, the project includes a semester-length "Many Voices, One College" Faculty Fellows Professional Development Cohort with two associated workgroups in partnership with the Global Humanities Institute (GHI). The fellowship began in spring 2018 with the first cohort of interdisciplinary participants. It will be repeated for two additional semesters (fall 2018 and spring 2019), running a total of three times with a total of 33 participants. Using the MVOC thematic focus, fellows will discover how global humanities can enhance disciplinary thinking and how intercultural competencies can transform instruction. Participants will visit the Many Voices, One Nation museum exhibition and brainstorm ways to bring greater humanities content into their courses.

MVOC will create opportunities for faculty to study together and improve their capacity to teach the humanities, while engaging students in their own learning through material that speaks to their diverse and international backgrounds. It will support a new partnership between the college and the Montgomery County Historical Society. The project will have a lasting and significant impact at MC by engendering a broader institutional vision of the humanities that embraces non-humanities fields and engages our highly diverse and international student body in learning centered on topics of interest to them as global citizens.

We are pleased to issue a call for applications for Fall 2018 MVOC Faculty Fellowships.

MVOC Faculty Fellowships applications are accepted on a rolling basis, and priority consideration will be given to applications submitted by 5:00pm on Friday, April 27, 2018. The application form and Call for Applications letter are attached.