Cornerstone: Learning for Living Grant

Grant Name: Cornerstone: Learning for Living Grant

Sponsor: National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) & The Teagle Foundation

Amount: Upper $25,000 (over 6-12 months for planning), Upper $350,000 (over 24 months for implementation)

Important Dates:

• Concept Papers – Dec 1, 2020
• First Round of Planning & Implementation Awards – May 2021
• Project Start – Spring 2021

Application: Click to LEARN MORE

The Teagle-NEH initiative aims to reinvigorate the role of the humanities in general education, and in doing so, expose a broad array of students to the power of the humanities; help students of all backgrounds build a sense of belonging and community; strengthen the coherence and cohesiveness of general education; and increase teaching opportunities for humanities faculty.

This initiative is dedicated to the proposition that transformative texts—regardless of authorship, geography, or the era that produced them—perform a democratizing function in giving students the analytical tools and historical awareness to interrogate themselves as well as the culture and society by which we are all partially formed. Such texts give students access to a wide range of lived experiences and form the basis for creating a common intellectual experience that fosters a sense of community.

Institutions will be selected based on the design and scale of their proposed programs. Selection criteria for both planning and implementation requests are described in further detail below:

A faculty-led and faculty-owned initiative: The success of the Cornerstone initiative depends on the level of commitment of a broad array of faculty coordinating their efforts across departments. Although the support of senior leadership is essential, it is the faculty’s responsibility to ensure that the curriculum is thoughtfully designed and well delivered, and to monitor the impact of curriculum and pedagogy on student learning. Accustomed to seeing themselves as a community of scholars, faculty members are encouraged by way of this initiative to view themselves also as a community of teachers who seek to stimulate, challenge, and inspire students of all backgrounds through humanistic inquiry. Funded projects are expected to involve significant participation from tenure-track humanities and other liberal arts faculty. This initiative is committed to diversity in the faculty who teach in the funded program and to diversity in the texts they teach.

A common intellectual experience anchored in transformative texts: Participating institutions are expected to embed transformative texts in gateway courses to engage incoming undergraduate students with enduring human questions and to cultivate their written and oral communication skills. Such courses should build intellectual community among students of all backgrounds through a shared academic experience.

Coherent pathways through general education: Participating institutions are expected to create coherent pathways through general education that link the humanities to students’ professional aspirations and provide social, cultural, and ethical context for their thinking about the fields they will enter after college.

Student reach, particularly for STEM and other pre-professional majors: Projects funded under this initiative should be designed to benefit a significant share of the undergraduate student body. The curricular components of the Cornerstone program model may be adapted and delivered in a variety of curricular formats: a certificate program that fulfills general education requirements; integrating core texts into existing courses that meet distribution requirements; mandatory first-year seminars or student success courses for incoming students coupled with intensive advising to develop tailored pathways through general education; or most ambitiously, using transformative texts and questions as a unifying mechanism to develop a coherent general education program for all students. All of these curricular formats have the potential to reach a significant proportion of the undergraduate student body.

Sustainability: Major curricular redesign requires alignment with institutional priorities and strategic plans, attention to academic governance procedures, and reallocation of institutional resources. The factors that contribute to longer-term sustainability may vary campus to campus, but they are as important as the actual implementation of curricular redesign. For example, proposed curricula needs to be designed in such a way that it will meet internal standards for academic review and can be delivered by the prevailing configuration of tenure-track faculty. Grants under the Teagle-NEH partnership are made in the expectation that once the formal grant period ends, should the piloted programs be successful, the costs associated with supporting those efforts will be absorbed by the participating institutions.

Assessment: Successful proposals will include clearly articulated goals and appropriate means of assessment. They will seek to evaluate effects of curricular redesign both on student learning and faculty practices, and to use what they learn to inform ongoing improvement. There may be a follow-up study three to five years after the conclusion of the grant period in order to assess the longer-term outcomes of the funded project.

Dissemination: Active dissemination efforts will be important in order to spread the effects of the knowledge gained by grantees and practices to interested and influential audiences. Project leaders and participants will be expected to join periodic grantee convenings and faculty professional development institutes sponsored under the Teagle-NEH partnership to share lessons learned with their peers and to support each other in the challenging work of curricular redesign that brings the humanities from the periphery to the center of general education. These convenings are conceived not as burdensome obligations but as opportunities for intellectual and professional renewal.

Please contact Loni Bordoloi Pazich, program director for institutional initiatives at the Teagle Foundation, at bordoloi@teagle.org with questions about the Cornerstone: Learning for Living initiative.