TEK Featured on Intentional Teaching Podcast
What can a humanities education offer students preparing for careers in an increasingly complex workforce?
According to three University of Kentucky educators featured on the Intentional Teaching podcast, the answer is clear: quite a lot.
Chelsea Brislin, TEK Faculty Fellow and Associate Director of the Gaines Center for the Humanities; Shawna Felkins, Senior Faculty Consultant in the Center for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching (CELT); and Jennifer Osterhage, TEK Director, recently spoke with podcast host, Derek Bruff, about TEK and its work to help students recognize and articulate essential skills such as communication, collaboration, adaptability, critical thinking and considering multiple perspectives.
The conversation highlighted HMN 303: Humanities in Action, a TEK course designed to make connections between humanities education and career readiness more visible to students.
Led by Brislin, the course takes an applied approach to the humanities, giving students hands-on experiences with archival work, architecture and preservation while also exploring how skills developed through humanities majors translate to careers outside the humanities.
Students researched transferable skills associated with majors such as history, English, gender and women's studies, sociology and political science. They then surveyed professionals in fields including law, business, banking, engineering and marketing to learn how often those skills are used in their work.
For Brislin, the exercise replaced an abstract promise that humanities education will be valuable with an opportunity for students to see that value for themselves.
“Don't tell them, show them,” Brislin said.
That philosophy reflects a central goal of TEK: helping students recognize the durable skills they are already developing through their coursework and understand how those skills apply beyond the classroom.
Osterhage explained that TEK provides students with a shared language for identifying and communicating those skills.
“I have just seen that over many years in my own career, that those skills are really, really important for everybody,” Osterhage said. “So that's really why I was drawn to it, to help give students a shared language for talking about these skills that they're gaining.”
TEK also works with faculty to make those skills more visible through intentional course and assignment design. Felkins described the program's approach as supporting faculty in translating learning outcomes into language students can understand and creating opportunities for students to reflect on where those skills appear in their coursework.
The approach has already made an impact. Student feedback from the most recent Humanities in Action course repeatedly highlighted the value of its hands-on experiences. One student wrote, “This class proved me wrong” after previously changing majors because of concerns about finding employment. Five students who completed the course went on to add a humanities minor.
For Brislin, these outcomes demonstrate the importance of helping students see the humanities not only as a field of study, but as a source of skills that can support a wide range of professional paths.
“As a humanities scholar, right, and someone who is instructing students who are pursuing humanities degrees, I will never balk at workforce readiness conversations,” Brislin said. “And I think it's our obligation to have those in a very clear, transparent way.”
Through TEK, UK faculty across disciplines are helping students make those connections—and recognize how the skills they develop through their education can prepare them for meaningful work in Kentucky and beyond.
Listen to the full episode of Intentional Teaching, “Durable Skills in the Humanities with Chelsea Brislin, Shawna Felkins, and Jennifer Osterhage,” to hear more about TEK and Humanities in Action.