At the core of Public Programming in the College of Humanities and the Arts is the fundamental belief in the interaction between our college and the surrounding community. All of the Public Programming initiatives (see Engage) are rooted in this idea of Public Engagement or Public Humanities and Arts.

Since this initiative began in 2018, the Artistic Excellence Programing Grants program has grown into the H&A in Action college-wide initiative that focuses on melding teaching, research, and public programming to involve students and our surrounding San Jose community in the engaging public programming our college offers. This rich history of public engagement is evident in our Stories of Engagement as well as in our past AEPG events.

Through Artistic Excellence Programing Grants, faculty can apply for funds to support their goals in the classroom and beyond by bringing in artists, performers, thinkers, and interactive events that directly benefit our students and our community partners. Our goal is to produce the most interactive programming possible that will support students across all disciplines, and to deepen their engagement with their own and other fields of study within the college. 

The funds for the Artistic Excellence Programming Grants are generated from student fees each year. These grants will allow us to maximize students’ exposure to and interaction with high-quality, diversified programming in the performing, visual, literary, and culinary arts. The Hammer Theatre and other performing venues on campus offer an opportunity for SJSU to create a coherent arts and culture programming series that invites students to have hands-on experiences with world-class professionals. 

The Humanities and Arts in Action encourages our students to learn by doing, to bring classroom lessons alive, and to illustrate the power of our fields in collaboration with the public to engage the most important questions of our time. Subscribe to our Monday Mailer to keep up to date.

H&A in Action sponsors more than 500 intellectual, cultural, and artistic events, performances, and exhibits annually. The goal is to involve students with actively contested questions, empirical observation, cutting-edge technologies, and the sense of excitement that comes from working to answer important questions. We encourage faculty to create robust, engaging curriculum to bring students into those conversations. Our faculty work in research that advances the very students that we serve. 

This type of experiential learning and hands-on activities increases rates of student retention and student engagement through the implementation of collaborative assignments and projects, creation of learning communities and common intellectual experiences, and is augmented by intercultural learning in the community, specifically through H&A’s live programming. This live programming, offered by our Artistic Excellent Programming Grant (AEPG) initiative, can be paired with not only ethnic studies programs and departments in the College of Social Sciences, but also with the College of Engineering, College of Information, Data & Society, College of Business, and College of Health and Human Sciences to allow students an opportunity to enact and build knowledge together before, during, and after any of the live programming through purposeful interdisciplinary pedagogical interventions.