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COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT & INNOVATION
COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT & INNOVATION
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A $100,000 National Endowment for the Humanities grant to the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), in partnership with the Lakeland Community Heritage Project and UMD Department of American Studies, is helping the College Park community of Lakeland establish more accessible tools to document, preserve and share the community’s cultural heritage.
Students in the Department of English’s “Writing for Change” course launched “Pandemic Perspectives,” an online collection of oral histories to broaden the public conversation around COVID-19. Students from Northwestern High School in Hyattsville contributed poetry related to the public health emergency.
As the nation faced a shortage of protective face masks due to the COVID-19 outbreak, alumni and students from the School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies and staff of The Clarice costume shop began making masks from home. The masks have been donated across the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area.
INNOVATION
When COVID-19 canceled music rehearsals and in-person performances, a reimagined National Orchestral Institute + Festival (NOI+F) had students continue their orchestral training online through intensive rehearsals, intimate master classes and insightful seminars, as well as offered a virtual coaching program to navigate future career decisions. Audiences experienced the festival through livestreams, discussions and broadcasts of past NOI+F performances.
The National Foreign Language Center (NFLC) partnered with small business AP Ventures to develop a Virtual Reality (VR) game for language learning, which was funded by a U.S. Department of Education Small Business Innovative Research grant. NFLC also created a prototype for a Russian language learning VR tool for K-12 students.
Shortly after UMD began its journey into virtual learning in March, ARHU launched “Keep Creating.” The online initiative creates spaces for the university’s innovative artists and humanists to share their works and for anyone to experience UMD’s various cultural offerings from home.
