St. Olaf Provost and Dean of the College Marci Sortor and Carleton Dean of the College Beverly Nagel are pleased to announce the second round of grants to faculty & staff teams through the colleges’ “Broadening the Bridge” grant project, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
As in the spring, this second “Exploration Round” of funding emphasized four priorities:
- Exploring curricular collaboration and efficiency;
- Advancing connections among departments and programs;
- Exploring sharing of equipment and resources; and
- Looking to achieve long-term impact.
The funded projects all meet these priorities, covering topics from Gothic art to immigration to Northfield and from off-campus study programs to science-teacher preparation. The third round of funding, to be run in late winter 2015 for projects over the summer, will continue to support projects like these but further emphasize projects with ambitious long-range goals.
Baird Jarman at Carleton and Nancy Thompson at St. Olaf will team-teach a new course, “Religion, Royalty & Romantics: The Gothic and the Gothic Revival,” in fall 2015. Course development began in summer 2014 with an initial Broadening the Bridge Grant and will continue through summer 2015 with the current grant. The course will be open to both St. Olaf and Carleton students and will capitalize on Baird’s and Nancy’s complementary expertise in the Gothic.
A team of music faculty – Louis Epstein, David Castro, Tiffany Ng, and Jeff Trevino at St. Olaf and Melinda Russell and Andrew Flory at Carleton – will plan and stage a one-day symposium in spring 2015 for upper-level St. Olaf and Carleton students doing original research in music. In addition to offering a venue for students to discuss their research with each other and with faculty, the symposium will include performances of student compositions and a keynote address by a nationally respected scholar.
The staffs of the colleges’ off-campus studies offices, led by Helena Kaufman at Carleton and Jodi Malmgren at St. Olaf, will convene in December 2014 to explore joint off-campus study programming by the colleges, laying the foundation for innovative, collaborative and interdisciplinary off-campus study program models. Kaufman and Malmgren anticipate submitting a follow-up grant for a larger, more focused project in the spring.
Katherine Tegtmeyer Pak in Political Science at St. Olaf and Adrienne Falcón in Sociology at Carleton will deepen and formalize interdisciplinary, cross-campus collaboration around immigration-related initiatives in Rice County. Working with local community partners as well as faculty, staff, and students at the colleges, Pak and Falcón aim to link several academic civic engagement courses with an ongoing research project on immigration in rural communities and small towns.
A team of education and STEM faculty led by Heather Campbell at St. Olaf and Eric Swan McDonald at Carleton will explore coordination of the science teacher preparation programs in St. Olaf’s Education Department and Carleton’s Department of Education Studies. The exploration will include the development of a grant proposal to the National Science Foundation for a pilot project on science teacher preparation at the colleges.
Led by Mike Flynn at Carleton, faculty interested in linguistics at the two colleges will meet to discuss the feasibility of integrating St. Olaf faculty and students into Carleton’s long-running “Linguistics and Culture” program in Kyoto.