Mission and Goals
The Mesolore Project and its course materials of content, syllabi and lesson plans focused on Mesoamerica is a division of Prolarti: Project on the Language–Art Interface. Prolarti is dedicated to developing teaching and research tools on human communication. Prolarti's tools integrate the humanities and the sciences and reach out to diverse populations of students and researchers primarily in high schools, colleges and universities.
Prolarti's mission is:
- to produce electronic materials for highly integrated, multi-disciplinary research and teaching that are accessible and affordable by any interested individual or learning community, traditional and virtual;
- to bridge the widening gap that exists on campuses between the sciences and the humanities;
- to reverse the growing inaccessibility of science to humanistically–oriented students and vice versa;
- to recognize the role nonverbal communication, particularly visual communication, can play in addressing diverse learning needs and to exploit this role in an effort to attract humanistically–oriented students into science classrooms;
- to build communities of educators, professors, students and multimedia developers in support of this effort.
The gap on college and university campuses between the humanities and sciences has had profound consequences both for students and for the history of ideas. Despite the concerted efforts of interdisciplinary–minded scholars and administrators over the past twenty years, the gap continues to widen. Yet tremendous opportunities arise when the humanities and sciences are brought together and integrated into scholastic deliberation–debates are broadened, avenues for new research are opened, paradigms are shifted. Indeed, it is believed at Prolarti that a truly integrated humanities-sciences pedagogy might very well offer an enticing invitation to women and minorities who, according to statistics, would otherwise concentrate outside the sciences.
Prolarti's goals are:
- to rethink old—and develop new—theories with which to understand human communication;
- to rethink human communication as not only verbal but visual;
- to rethink human behavior as not only biological and social but profoundly aesthetic and to give all three parts equal weight in the study and teaching of human communication;
- to draw new conclusions concerning the role visual phenomena occupy in our lives biologically, neurologically, psychologically, culturally and socially.