The purpose of this conference is to highlight and enhance the contributions that humanities education makes to personal well being, responsible citizenship, and social justice.
Recent studies in the cognitive and neurosciences indicate how humanities education can develop the following key cognitive and emotional capabilities that are essential not only for personal well being but also for responsible citizenship and social justice:
- Empathy, the ability to feel what others are feeling
- Mind Reading, the ability to understand the thoughts and intentions of others
- Metacognition, the ability to monitor and regulate one’s own perceptions and judgments of others
- Bias Correction, the ability to compensate for distortions in one’s judgments of others
- Self-Knowledge, the ability to recognize troublesome traits or motives in oneself
- Self-Other Overlap Recognition, the ability to apprehend similarities between oneself and others who appear very different from oneself
- Moral Judgment, the ability to form accurate and fair assessments of oneself and of others
CALL FOR PAPERS
We invite submissions of paper and panel proposals exploring how these and other personally and socially beneficial cognitive and emotional capabilities can be developed by particular humanities disciplines, texts, genres, methodologies, or pedagogical practices.
We also welcome papers addressing fundamental questions such as:
- What cognitive and neural structures (e.g., prototypes, schemas, self-concepts) are optimal for personal well being, responsible citizenship, and social justice?
- What specific cognitive activities (e.g., acquiring new exemplars, engaging in new information-processing routines, metacognizing) are most effective in developing these structures?
- How do the humanities engage these cognitive activities?
- What are the best educational practices for maximizing the development of these cognitive and neural structures through humanities study?
- How can cross-cultural humanities study promote such development?
- What are the best ways of assessing this cognitive/neural development?
Abstracts (300 words for papers, 500 words for panels) should be emailed as an MS Word file to [email protected]. Proposed papers should run no more than 20 minutes; panels of 3 or 4 presenters should run no more than 60 minutes.
Deadline for Submissions: April 1, 2015.
For more details, visit the Kent State University webpage.