
FUNDING FOR COLLABORATIVE FACULTY INNOVATION
What ideas do ACM faculty have to enhance teaching and learning at their colleges? Are there new pedagogical approaches to try, or curricula to prepare students for emerging career paths, or ways to use instructional technology that engage students and bring resources into the classroom? The Faculty Career Enhancement Program (FaCE) awards grants that enable ACM faculty to engage in collaborative projects that explore ways to strengthen liberal arts education, and then to share the results widely with colleagues across the ACM and beyond.
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. 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.
PROJECTS WITH IMPACT
With support from FaCE grants, faculty have created a wide range of projects to initiate change on ACM campuses, such as:
- New curricula: To help address the demand for classes in statistics and data science, faculty from Grinnell College, Lawrence University, and Carleton College shared their expertise to create tutorials and case studies for those courses and make the materials freely available online.
- Pedagogical advances: As field-based learning expands, Colorado College faculty and staff hosted a Symposium on Field Study to define and refine the pedagogy and practice of field study.
- Introducing technology: Lawrence University created an interdisciplinary makerspace to provide access to advanced technology, such as 3-D printers, for faculty and students across disciplines.
Recent FaCE Projects
Abstract Cognitive science research suggests students encounter difficulty using skills developed within a discipline to address problems in a different context (“transfer”). Increases in subject-specific knowledge do not correlate with […]
Abstract Faculty collaborating on this project will develop an out-of-class assignment requiring students at St. Olaf College and Macalester College to conduct regular video-conference conversations with college students outside the […]
The Faculty Career Enhancement Program (FaCE) is supported by a generous $2 million grant from the Mellon Foundation.