OUR OBJECTIVES
Institutionalizing High-Impact Practices in the Liberal Arts
Undergraduate research, community-based learning, and their intersection—community-based research—are all known to be high-impact educational practices in the liberal arts. But what are the best practices when it comes to institutionalizing these high-impact practices to maximize student learning?
Through Collaboration to Institutionalize High-Impact Practices in the Liberal Arts, faculty and staff from each of the ACM’s 14 member colleges will work to answer these questions, then share the results widely with colleagues across the ACM and beyond.
Funding for Collaborative Faculty Innovation
Project support from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations includes $100,000 in re-granting funds for faculty-led collaborative projects, which are intended to drive innovative ways to institutionalize high-impact practices on and across the 14 member campuses.
Collectively, the funded projects will identify and implement new incentive structures that will improve student access to high-impact practices, increase their participation, and enhance learning outcomes.
PROJECT OVERVIEW
The project will take place in three phases over 2022–24:
- Inventory and Evaluation: In fall 2021, ACM colleges conducted an inventory and survey of faculty perceptions related to high-impact practices across the 14 campuses. In summer 2022, the colleges convened to evaluate current practices and identify strategies for institutionalizing them.
- Collaborative Faculty Projects: In fall 2022, faculty proposed collaborative projects designed to drive innovation to institutionalize high-impact practices on and across the 14 campuses. A steering committee of ACM deans evaluated the proposals and awarded a total of $133,000 in funding to support the projects.
- Outcomes and Dissemination: In 2024, the ACM will host a summative conference for faculty to share the curricular and structural outcomes from their projects and set strategies for institutionalizing practices across ACM colleges and disseminating findings broadly.
