HOT has two basic goals. First, by promoting a broad-based, knowledge-driven literacy, we aim to enable students from Santa Ana to attend college. Second, we hope to persuade students from all backgrounds to increase their general literacy by incorporating the humanities into their studies for a lifetime of learning. For each workshop, HOT pursues these general goals by defining specific, immediate objectives. These objectives range from developing an entire class's writing skills, to communicating an important idea in a single class session, to facilitating interactive lessons students enjoy. This handbook serves as an invitation to HOT participants - undergraduate tutors, UCI graduate students, and host teachers - to join the process of defining, refining and assessing our growing curricula.


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 relation to 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.


HOT is a community program. Students from UCI work with students in the public schools of the Santa Ana Unified School District (SAUSD); two different communities come together around common goals and objectives. But HOT is equally a community program because the three commitments of the literacy triangle constitute a model for responsible participation in public life. In all of its workshop themes, HOT teaches "community" based on the belief that today's citizen participates most responsibly and successfully in public life through a facility with all facets of the literacy triangle.


HOT encourages individual self-expression as a means towards economic freedom, intellectual independence, and a public sphere that reflects the ethnic diversity of the region. By encouraging plurality and diversity, we also hope to define common values, principles, and narratives - both those from the past and those yet to be encountered or created. The Greek philosopher Aristotle invented the idea of politics for the Western tradition. According to Aristotle, the city or state is created when groups of people come together in order to meet their basic needs of food and shelter. Joining forces to meet these natural challenges, the members of the polis arrive at the greater aim of achieving a "good life." The "good life" involves intellectual growth and self-development, or what the Greeks called philosophy.


In our work, Aristotle's polis remains a foundation and a goal, but within the current reality of ethnic, economic, and educational fragmentation. A new "common good" must be able to account for all that is "uncommon" between us. A multi-faceted, content-rich literacy can provide one basis for such a revitalized civic space.


The literacy triangle proposes to develop basic skills - reading, writing, and critical thinking - in concert with cultural and multicultural literacy. Without skills, basic needs cannot be met, and no life at all, let alone a good life, can be maintained with comfort and stability. Skills alone, however, will trap their practitioners in an intellectually and economically bounded world. If literacy is to support ongoing self-development and civic participation, it must be exercised on challenging and rewarding content. This content includes the basic texts of Western tradition in relation to its contacts and conflicts with other histories in order to foster linguistic and cognitive fluency for a lifetime of learning.