Supporting Innovations in Teaching in the Humanities, Social Sciences

Undergraduates creating interactive translations of literary classics. Analyzing space, time, and motion as philosophical, as well as physical, phenomena. Discovering new ways of seeing the world by recording and analyzing endangered languages.

Grinnell College students and faculty will gain advanced opportunities to collaborate, create, and use new technologies in their pursuit of a greater understanding of humanity, thanks to a $1 million pledge from Karen Van Dusen ’77 and Joel Spiegel ’78. Their commitment will support the College’s new humanities and social studies complex.

Van Dusen and Spiegel, a Grinnell College trustee, have made the largest pledge to date to a long-term plan to improve the College’s academic spaces. The College expects to launch a public campaign next year to raise $20 million for the project, which includes a major renovation of Alumni Recitation Hall (ARH) and Carnegie Hall.

Classrooms that accommodate the continuing transformation in modes of teaching and technology are essential for introducing students to the full range of human ideas, says Erik Simpson, professor of English and Grinnell’s principal investigator for the collaborative Digital Bridges project with the University of Iowa (Summer 2015, Page 12).

“More and more often,” he says, “my students will talk about a novel around a table one hour and move to their computers to collaborate on a digital project the next. Bigger and more flexible classrooms will enable groups and individuals to switch between them seamlessly. Plus, well-designed informal spaces will encourage conversations to extend beyond class time.”

The couple’s new gift demonstrates their commitment to providing students with connected and relevant experiences, complementing great classroom teaching with direct exposure to different ways of looking at the world.

Van Dusen, who majored in political science, describes how Grinnell’s broad-ranging approach expanded her own horizons. “I grew up in a rural area in the mountains of Wyoming,” she says. “I would sit and watch the license plates of cars passing through on their way to Yellowstone and wonder where those places were. Grinnell was my entry point into that larger world. I want to give other students with the same aspirations a chance to encounter the incredible range of human experience.”

Spiegel agrees. “As a biology major, the humanities and social sciences opened my eyes to the world,” he says. “These new learning spaces are important to us not just as bricks and mortar, but as a way of helping Grinnell pursue its original mission in a new time and context. This is about empowering faculty to help students see the world in new ways, so they can do great things for their own futures and for the common good.”