College of Charleston awarded large grant that shines spotlight on learning through culture, foodways

The College of Charleston is announcing a transformative $1.5 million grant from the Mellon Foundation to reshape experiential learning through the lens of Lowcountry foodways. This funding will empower the new Lowcountry Learning Exchange (“The Exchange”) to serve as the College’s hub for redefining how students from across all academic disciplines engage with real-world challenges. 

Foodways are practices and meanings that surround food: how it’s grown, prepared, shared and remembered. In the Lowcountry region of South Carolina, foodways reflect a rich historic tapestry of influences spanning Indigenous, African, European and Gullah Geechee traditions which meet with more recent Central and South American as well as Asian foodways influences. These foodways—past and present, from land and sea—offer a powerful lodestar for exploring such issues as sustainability and community resilience.

With this support, The Exchange aims to spark a lasting change in how the College thinks about and carries out experiential education across disciplines. The work remains grounded in the humanities yet reaches outward using Lowcountry foodways to create a sturdy and adaptable structure for community-engaged study. The Exchange’s approach responds to social realities and sets its sights on tangible local and regional interests.

“Lowcountry foodways offer an ideal entry point because they touch every discipline from anthropology to environmental science to public health. With this grant, we will create  pathways for students to engage in meaningful collaborative work outside the classroom, and we will ensure those experiences  inform our curriculum so that our entire institution learns and grows together,” says Suzanne Austin, provost and executive vice president of academic affairs.

The Exchange seeks to redefine how experiential learning is conceived and sustained across disciplines at the College. The initiative will involve cross-disciplinary partnerships on campus to develop campus-community projects where students and faculty collaborate with Lowcountry foodways communities, from farmers and shrimpers to home cooks and chefs. As these collaborative projects develop, digital humanities will further their research and expand public access to  foodways knowledge. The Exchange will also coordinate with the Lowcountry Oral History Initiative to expand the historic record of foodways narratives. The Exchange aims to create a replicable framework that other institutions can adopt, amplifying the role of the humanities in experiential education.

“This grant affords our students the opportunity to use Charleston and the Lowcountry as a living laboratory, allowing them to engage in invaluable experiential learning rooted in local foodways,” says Jason Coy, dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences.

“I see the Lowcountry Learning Exchange as an opportunity to empower students to think deeply, work collaboratively, and learn directly from community members whose experience and expertise shapes the region’s foodways,” says Lauren Ravalico, associate professor, chair of the Department of French, Francophone, and Italian Studies and The Exchange’s co-primary investigator. “It’s a forward‑thinking model for cultivating the next generation of engaged scholars and citizens.”

“Lowcountry foodways are cultural and historical traditions that warrant serious attention, moving beyond ‘foodie’ framing to a deeper understanding of how foodways have shaped and reflected Lowcountry culture,” says Leah Worthington, the College’s digital projects librarian and The Exchange’s co-primary investigator. “Through this grant, we are excited for foodways research to strengthen and expand partnerships between our campus and Lowcountry communities. Applying digital humanities will further these goals by allowing broad public access to the foodways research and knowledge that emerges from The Exchange.”

Outcomes of the three-year project will include:

• Sustainable cross-campus and campus-community networks via two faculty-student Core Research Teams.  

• Foodways place-based, digital humanities curricular components piloted and implemented into new or existing courses by faculty cohorts. 

• Strengthened applied digital humanities capacity by equipping faculty, students and interested community partners with skills training and tool kits.  

• Transformative experiential learning opportunities for students through internships, developing cultural competencies, civic responsibility and skills that prepare graduates for meaningful work.   

• Community Ambassador program through listening-based engagement to foster long-term collaborative partnerships between the College of Charleston faculty and students and the Lowcountry community. 

• Public programming, including exhibitions, culinary demonstrations and lectures.  

  “This grant gives us the chance to center the humanities in the kind of learning that truly changes how students see the world around them,” says Andrew W. Hsu, president of the College. “By rooting everything in Lowcountry foodways we get to explore history, culture and ecology all at once while students tackle concrete issues like food access, land use and cultural preservation. This isn’t a one-off project—it’s the beginning of a model other colleges can borrow and demonstrate how relevant and useful the humanities are to the communities around us.”

“This grant arrives at exactly the right moment for our libraries because it recognizes how central archival collections, oral histories and rare materials are to understanding Lowcountry foodways,” says John W. White ’99, dean of the College Libraries. “This grant will allow us to expand access to primary documents — from Gullah Geechee rice cultivation to historic Lowcountry recipes and community food traditions — so our patrons can draw on sources that have been thoughtfully collected and preserved.”

The College Libraries make available a comprehensive collection of scholarly resources, expert instruction and diverse programming to support the College’s mission of developing ethically centered, intellectually versatile, and globally fluent citizens who create innovative solutions to social, economic, and environmental challenges. The College Libraries promote intellectual curiosity, creative and collaborative learning and an uncompromising commitment to open and equitable access to information, redefining liberal arts education through innovation, instruction and technology to meet the educational and professional needs of the communities the College Libraries serve. library.charleston.edu