Above: Carleton is among the 11 ACM institutions where new FaCE funding will support interesting and innovative faculty collaborations.
Innovative, faculty-led projects at 11 member institutions of the Associated Colleges of the Midwest (ACM) will share in $166,500 in financial support through ACM’s Faculty Career Enhancement (FaCE) initiative. FaCE grants support collaborative work to strengthen the liberal arts tradition and provide valuable takeaways that can be shared with educators, staffers, and leaders across and beyond the ACM consortium.
Since 2014, FaCE funding has filled significant gaps in the needs of faculty members at small liberal arts colleges seeking to pilot outside-the-box approaches. Since 2014, a generous grant from the Mellon Foundation enabled ACM to support collaborative solutions to shared challenges related to teaching, learning, and scholarly inquiry. The grant recipients announced in the fall of 2024 represent the last group of awardees after twelve previous funding rounds.
“ACM was thrilled with the quality and range of proposals submitted this fall,” said Brian Williams, ACM’s vice president for strategic initiatives, noting that this was among the most competitive applicant pool in FaCE program history. “The eleven exceptional projects we selected for funding will advance our colleges’ shared aspirations in important ways.”
One award went to a team comprising St. Olaf, Macalester, and Carleton faculty members. For their project, Building a Community Engagement Credential Program for Students in the Arts and Humanities, grantees will develop ways for students to identify skills developed through community-based learning and coursework in the humanities and fine arts. The team envisions having students reflect on their growth and learn to communicate with future employers how they will utilize enhanced skills like writing, problem-solving, and time management in the workplace.
“Our institutions are committed to developing innovative curricular and co-curricular programming,” the project leads wrote in their FaCE grant proposal, adding their hope that emphasizing career readiness could help reverse public skepticism around the value of a liberal arts degree. “All three colleges prioritize experiential learning and high-impact practices that enhance student engagement and learning.”
Another project to receive FaCE funding was Leveling Up Grading in the Liberal Arts. Faculty at Grinnell, Coe, and Luther will host virtual gatherings and an in-person workshop to explore alternatives to how student work has long been graded. The project leads believe alternatives to traditional letter grades have the strong potential to reduce classroom inequities, foster positive risk-taking by students, and lighten instructors’ workloads.
“Because grading systems and assessments exist in every classroom, alternative grading efforts can change the culture of the entire institution,” the applicants told ACM in their successful proposal. “We hope this project starts a new revolution of alternative grading practices among ACM institutions.”
Nine other collaborative projects received financial support from the ACM in this final round of FaCE funding.
- A team of Beloit, Coe, Cornell, and Grinnell faculty will develop open-access websites guiding students through relatable scenarios to help them visualize data-based decision-making processes and improve their quantitative reasoning skills.
- Computer scientists at Coe, Cornell, and Lawrence will design a new introductory programming course that embraces disruptive technologies like Generative AI.
- Representatives of Carleton, Coe, Colorado, Grinnell, Knox, and Lawrence will gather data on challenges women in STEM encounter on ACM campuses. Participants hope their research will result in an ACM-wide proposal to the National Science Foundation to advance equitable excellence in STEM.
- Faculty at Grinnell, Knox, and Macalester will lead a workshop series to support the well-being of students, faculty, and staff. The team will also examine how undergraduates’ well-being and experiences impact their ability to learn.
- The nursing departments at St. Olaf and Luther will develop realistic scenarios to deepen future nurses’ intercultural competence and understanding of ways systemic racism manifests itself in medical settings.
- Led by educators at Colorado and Macalester, an intensive summer workshop will analyze the landscape of Open Educational Resources (OER), adapt and develop these freely-available educational materials, and highlight ways OER may benefit ACM faculty and students.
- A team of Carleton and St. Olaf faculty will create interactive materials to help statistics instructors and students better understand the implications of machine learning to develop accurate models and statistical forecasting to benefit society.
- Carleton, Macalester, and St. Olaf faculty will chart a course toward greater use of cloud-based high-performance computing resources on ACM campuses and liberal arts colleges nationwide.
- Colleagues from several departments at St. Olaf will collaborate to create an intensive, weekend-long immersive workshop to boost intercultural competency around active lifestyles for persons of all abilities. The goal is to use an interdisciplinary approach to reduce the marginalization of groups of people and foster inclusive approaches to greater societal health and wellness.
All projects will be completed by December 2025.
“It is exciting and inspiring to see such forward-thinking, cross-campus teamwork on display in these FaCE projects,” said ACM President Lisa Jasinski. “This kind of close collaboration is what ACM is built on, and I have no doubt it will help our colleges become even more vibrant and rewarding places to teach and learn, while setting a new national standard of innovation.”
Jasinski expressed her gratitude to the Mellon Foundation for its integral support for the FaCE initiative. Thanks to Mellon’s backing, ACM has provided a total of $1.15 million in funding since the fall of 2014 to support 62 collaborative projects. These projects have involved faculty on all 14 of the consortium’s campuses and have impacted thousands of students.
