Hope, Heart, and the Humanities

How a Free College Course is Changing Lives Edited by Jean Cheney and L. Jackson Newell with Hikmet Sidney Loe, Jeff Metcalf, and Bridget M. Newell

Hope, Heart, and the Humanities tells how Venture, a free, interdisciplinary college humanities course inspired by the national Clemente Course, has helped open doors for hundreds of students who, for various reasons, faced barriers to attending college. This course has given them the knowledge, confidence, and power to re-chart their lives.

Readers will go inside Venture classrooms to see what occurs when adults enter serious discussions of literature, critical writing, art history, American history, and philosophy. Also apparent are the difficulties nontraditional students often encounter and the hard choices they and their teachers make. But what readers may remember most are the stories and voices of people whose views of the world have broadened and whose directions in life have change.