How to Apply
Marci Sortor and Beverly Nagel are pleased to solicit a ninth round of proposals for grants to pursue curricular collaboration at St. Olaf and Carleton. Proposals will be accepted through the online application form through Friday, April 13, 2018.
In this round of funding, the committee will give priority to providing additional support to projects that have already received some funding from the Broadening the Bridge grant and now seek to maintain momentum toward broader goals.
Above all, the project seeks to foster proposals that investigate, propose, and implement far-reaching and sustainable changes to the colleges’ curriculum, especially at the departmental or program level. Note that since the Broadening the Bridge grant will end in June 2019, projects must take place over the remainder of 2018, and must be completed by May 2019.
Curriculum-Development Grants for Inter-College Collaborations
The project leadership committee anticipates making several grants $2,000 – $10,000 to small teams of faculty (and/or staff) to develop or continue developing new joint curricular offerings. In this round of funding, the committee will give priority to providing additional support to projects that have already received some funding from the Broadening the Bridge grant and now seek to undertake new activities toward the original project’s goals. Teams should propose activities that best advance their projects, such as those funded in previous rounds:
- Visiting successful joint programs at other liberal arts consortia.
- Investigating or, better, developing new shared curricular offerings – for example, joint course assignments or new courses, especially those that include collaborative engaged-learning experiences, such as major-centered research or methods seminars or courses with experiential learning components.
- Staging faculty workshops to discuss new directions in their disciplines/fields, examine specific topics or pedagogical approaches (e.g., digital scholarship or academic civic engagement), or otherwise stimulate further curricular collaboration.
- Aligning prerequisites and curriculum structures so that students can cross-register or so that courses provide greater coverage and depth.
- Considering or implementing new jointly-offered majors.
- Exploring ways to mitigate or resolve differences in our academic calendars—for example, “flipped” classes, asynchronous course meetings, or “modules” that run for less than a regular academic term.
Note that since the Broadening the Bridge grant will end in June 2019, all funded activities must be completed well in advance of that date – ideally, by December 2018.
Course Release Funding
The Broadening the Bridge project leadership committee will also consider requests for major grants for course releases to pairs of faculty (one from each college) to offer a team-taught course through their departments to students from both colleges. Course-release funding will permit the faculty members to actually lead the course. The colleges expect that after being team-taught one or two times, such collaborative courses could then be taught by a single faculty member, either rotating between the campuses or with input from the faculty counterpart at the other college, ensuring the course’s sustainability. Note that since the Broadening the Bridge grant will end in June 2019, all course-release activities must be completed by that date.
The application form asks for essential but not extensive information about the project:
- information about the applicants;
- a description of the project, including a title, a one-sentence summary, a specific period of support, and a project description of up to 625 words;
- details about and an explanation of the budget, which can include faculty stipends at the rate of $600 per week per person, travel costs, project materials, contracted services, or other expenses;
- and a short statement on the likely trajectory of the project after an initial grant period.