Humanities Out There

HOT Writing Prompts

Humanities Out There is an educational partnership between UCI's School of Humanities and the Santa Ana Unified School District, in cooperation with UCI's Center for Educational Partnerships and UCI's California History-Social Science Project. Founded in 1997, HOT now reaches over five hundred intermediate and high school students and their teachers each year through its workshops on humanities topics. Workshop readings, discussion questions, and writing exercises engage issues of historical significance and contemporary urgency. HOT brings faculty, graduate students, undergraduates, and staff into direct dialogue with our counterparts in the public schools in order to create a new community of scholar-citizens united by shared values of intellectual inquiry, action through creativity, and civic inclusiveness.

HOT workshops and publications are united by the following principles:

Basic skills/future scholars
To forge links between literacy skills and higher-order humanistic inquiry for students at risk
Content matters
To boost reading, writing, and critical thinking skills through content-rich materials of historical, artistic, and scholarly significance
Standards in motion
To bring state and national content standards into dynamyzing contact with the correlative knowledges and skills at work in the university
The university next door
To build academic, professional, and civic ties among universities and school districts through collaborative teaching and research

Kenneth Pomeranz
Faculty Director and Professor of History