What innovative approaches, pedagogies, and curricula are faculty and departments at ACM colleges using to prepare students to thrive and achieve their career goals after they graduate?
How can faculty from across the 14 ACM campuses leverage their collective ideas, experience, and knowledge to address this and other challenges that they face as educators?
These questions are among many to be addressed in four faculty-designed projects that recently were awarded grants totaling $62,000 from the ACM Faculty Career Enhancement Program (FaCE).
In all, 17 faculty from eight ACM colleges are involved in conceiving and planning the funded projects. Three of the projects revolve around specific academic disciplines — classics, economics, and mathematics — while the fourth takes an interdisciplinary approach to creating digital museums. All of the projects will sponsor events open to faculty from every ACM campus.
The projects and faculty leaders are:
Engaging the Community of ACM Mathematicians
- Project focus: Workshop for ACM math faculty to address curricular issues raised by the changing requirements of client disciplines and the changing interests of students and their potential employers.
- Leaders: Andrew Leahy (mathematics, Knox College), Jonathan White (mathematics, Coe College), Tyler Skorczewski (mathematics, Cornell College), Eric Egge (mathematics, Carleton College), Andrea Young (mathematical sciences, Ripon College), and Mary Vlastnik Armon (mathematics, Knox College)
Museum Re-Imaginings: Teaching through the Development of a Virtual College Museum
- Project focus: Workshop for ACM faculty and staff to learn about a model in which students collaborate to create digital museums, such as collections of materials from a college’s archive.
- Leaders from Macalester College: Scott Legge (anthropology), Vanessa Rousseau (art & art history), and Linda Sturtz (history)
Teaching and Mentoring Research of Undergraduate Economics in the ACM
- Project focus: Conference for ACM economics faculty and students on pedagogical innovation and advancing undergraduate research in economics.
- Leaders: Pedro de Araujo (economics, Colorado College), Richard G. Eichhorn (economics, Coe College), and Drew E. Westberg (economics, Coe College)
Tuning the Classics: Promoting the Shared Skills and Values of the Discipline
- Project focus: A meeting of ACM faculty in the classics to develop a common, and compelling, language around the competencies and skills learned in the field, plus collaboration to create a resource library and to undertake a survey of classics alumni.
- Leaders: John Gruber-Miller (classical studies, Cornell College), Clara Hardy (classics, Carleton College), Sanjaya Thakur (classics, Colorado College), Lisl Walsh (classics, Beloit College), and Angela Ziskowski (history, Coe College)
FaCE grants, awarded in fall and spring cycles each academic year, fund joint research projects, teaching and learning collaborations, collaboratively organized events, reading groups, and other cooperative initiatives to enhance teaching and learning. The FaCE Program is supported by generous funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Call for Pre-Proposals: Apply for a FaCE grant!
FaCE invites initial ideas, in the form of brief (2-3 page) pre-proposals, from ACM faculty interested in collaborating with their ACM peers to pursue projects aimed at innovation.
Deadline for pre-proposals: February 24, 2017
Links:
- Faculty Career Enhancement Program (FaCE)
- Call for Pre-Proposals: Apply for a FaCE grant! Deadline: February 24, 2017
- FaCE grants awarded in 2014-16
- The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation