ABOUT the HOT program
HOT is a collaborative enterprise between UCI’s School of Humanities and Orange County schools with support from UCI’s Center for Educational Partnerships in collaboration with UCI’s California History-Social Science Project. Founded in 1997, HOT now reaches over three hundred 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 Has Two Basic Goals:
First, we aim to increase college enrollability of students from underserved groups by promoting a broad-based, knowledge-driven literacy.
Second, we hope to encourage students from all backgrounds to increase their general literacy by incorporating the humanities into their studies for a lifetime of learning.
HOT workshops use materials from Western and non-Western traditions in order to develop skills in reading, writing, and critical thinking. HOT counterpoints cultural literacy (knowledge of Western civilization) and multicultural literacy (informed awareness of other traditions) in the service of basic literacy.
This literacy triangle is designed to help students develop their reading and writing skills through the paired tasks of building a common base of shared cultural knowledge and fostering understanding among people from different backgrounds. |
