Maryville College faculty developing new minor titled Citizenship and Sense of Place

Sept. 20, 2023

Courtesy of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Maryville College is developing a new minor titled Citizenship and Sense of Place.

The proposed curriculum centers around questions of community and civic identity, responsibility and duty, said Dr. Phillip Sherman, associate professor of religion at Maryville College and chair of the Division of Humanities.

“‘How do I live constructively as a member of a specific community? What does it even mean to be a citizen?’ Those are the kinds of questions we want students to be able to explore — both in theory and in practice — while completing this minor,” Sherman said.

Maryville College’s location in southern Appalachia provides an ideal setting for students to connect ideas of civic engagement with a specific place, Sherman added. In taking courses associated with the minor, students will examine the histories, peoples, and natural environments that have defined Appalachia.

“You are not just a citizen in the abstract,” Sherman said. “You engage specific people, in particular places, and their unique histories. As the poet Wendell Berry has stated, ‘No matter how much one may love the world as a whole, one can live fully in it only by living responsibly in some small part of it.’” 

An entry-level course is being planned to introduce students to the concepts of belonging and citizenship in East Tennessee. The course will focus on diverse regional identities while also addressing persistent social challenges.  

“It is our hope that students will learn to translate what they learn about engaging as citizens in this place to their future lives and careers in any place they may go,” Sherman said.

This minor is intentionally interdisciplinary and will provide opportunities for students to take higher-level courses in the MC divisions of Social, Natural and Behavioral Sciences. Such courses may examine the effects of migration and displacement on citizenship, or focus on understanding the natural environment and its effects on people. Students can expect to gain a fuller understanding of how cultures are the product of multiple overlapping experiences, appropriations, and conflicts among and between supposedly separate, contained groups, according to Sherman.

 The planning grant is funded by the NEH Connections program. Founded in 1965 as an independent federal organization, the NEH awards grant money to institutions and individuals for excellence and progress in the humanities. Some of their more recognizable projects include The Library of America reprints of classic American literature and The United States Newspaper Project.

In 2016, the NEH announced the Humanities Connections program, an expansion of the department’s initiative, The Common Good: The Humanities in the Public Square. Connections is a grant-based program offering up to $100,000 in curriculum development aid for two- and four-year post-secondary institutions. Grant recipients are required to create an interdisciplinary course selection focused primarily in the humanities and including practical learning elements in addition to the theoretical ones. Funds may also be used to invite speakers or experts to enrich students’ understanding.

“We received a $35,000 Planning Grant, which will allow us to pull together a cohort of faculty members to create a couple of new courses and revise some upper-level courses to include citizenship and sense of place content,” said Dr. Dan Klingensmith, vice president and dean of the College.

This interdisciplinary minor, offered as part of the curriculum of the Division of Humanities, follows on the heels of rollouts of the Fermentation Sciences minor in June and the Humanities minor over the summer. The NEH grant gives faculty a chance for some professional development as they design the new minor.

“President Coker often speaks of Maryville College as a College that is ‘of and for the region,” Sherman said. “The potential new minor in Citizenship and Sense of Place is just one more way in which the College — its students, faculty, and staff — can continue to live out the mission statement’s call to ‘prepare students for lives of citizenship and leadership as we challenge each one to search for truth, grow in wisdom, work for justice and dedicate a life of creativity and service to the peoples of the world.’” 

Maryville College is a nationally-ranked institution of higher learning and one of America’s oldest colleges. For more than 200 years we’ve educated students to be giving citizens and gifted leaders, to study everything, so that they are prepared for anything — to address any problem, engage with any audience and launch successful careers right away. Located in Maryville, Tennessee, between the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the city of Knoxville, Maryville College offers nearly 1,200  students from around the world both the beauty of a rural setting and the advantages of an urban center, as well as more than 60 majors, seven pre-professional programs and career preparation from their first day on campus to their last. Today, our 10,000 alumni are living life strong of mind and brave of heart and are prepared, in the words of our Presbyterian founder, to “do good on the largest possible scale.”