ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the findings of an innovative curriculum project in humanitarian action with fellow Jesuit Fordham and Georgetown Universities and the University of Central America in Nicaragua carried out from 2013 to 2016, the second of two sequential grants from the Teagle Foundation. Invoking the metaphor of a crooked timber, Barnett suggests that humanitarianism can never live up to its own pure and good intentions. In early conversations with faculty, the interdependence between the affective and the cognitive dimensions of knowing and learning became a major concern. Despite the evidence provided by B. Fetherston and R. Kelly, there is an extensive research literature on the effectiveness of using active and collaborative learning methods to engage students. Students were reconsidering their own roles in solving complex global problems, and thinking about how they themselves could become agents of change. The curriculum thus engaged them in concepts of agency, space, and location, and relational caring, which emphasize human interdependence and mutual vulnerability.
