First Year Seminar Grants

GRANT APPLICATION PROCEDURE FOR FIRST-YEAR SEMINAR GRANTS

From the Hope College proposal to the Lilly Endowment:

“To enable effective teaching in [First-Year Seminars that address issues of vocation], we will make available grants for faculty members to develop vocation materials for FYS. These materials could include the identification of topics and common readings that could be used across course sections, development of discussion questions and learning activities, and the formulation of possible paper assignments. One promising idea is to encourage the development of a cohesive teaching/learning module on vocation that could be imported into virtually any FYS course, creating appeal for a wider range of FYS faculty. The grantee may also write a monograph/article on vocation for use in FYS. The materials developed for FYS will be shared more broadly, as desired, with other faculty both within and beyond Hope College.”

The CrossRoads Project invites applications from Hope faculty to develop First-Year Seminars and related course materials that meet the above criteria. In the first year of this program, the Project expects to award up to two grants of $4,400 each for faculty who plan to develop new First-Year Seminars with an emphasis on question of vocation, and up to two grants of $2,200 each to faculty who plan to develop modules or other materials that could be used across a variety of First-Year Seminars. Joint applications are possible; if applying for a grant to develop a course, all applicants should expect to teach the course (either as a team-taught section or as two concurrent or sequential sections) within the following academic year. Grants will typically be made for the summer; however, faculty may seek approval from the Department Chair and the Divisional Dean for released time during the fall or spring semester, with the grant money going to the Department for staffing purposes.

Applications should be submitted to Dr. David S. Cunningham, Director of The CrossRoads Project. Decisions will be made by the CrossRoads Advisory Committee, in consulation with the Director of the FYS Program. The deadline is Monday, November 12, 2007; this will allow decisions to be made before Christmas break, which in turn will allow unsuccessful applicants to apply for other grants, including those administered by the College’s summer grant program. Each application should be in the following format:

1. Indicate your name, your academic title, and any experience that you have with the First-Year Seminar program to date.

2. Provide a one-paragraph narrative describing the development of your interest in participating in the interdisciplinary work of the First-Year Seminar program, as well as the development of your interest in the particular theme that you plan to address in the course or module that you expect to design.

3. Provide a brief (500 words or fewer) description of the course or module that you intend to design or to enhance with the help of this grant. Obviously, the course or module will not be fully fleshed out at this point, but the grant evaluators would like some sense of the general theme that you are pursuing, and the broad outlines of the development work that you propose to undertake. Thus, this section should indicate the state of your thinking about the project at this point. Please include some indication of when you first expect the new or revised course to be offered, or when you expect to be able to make the module or other materials available to FYS faculty. N.B.: the information in this section should be descriptive, rather than evaluative; it should not include a discussion of expected outcomes, which is addressed in section 7, below.

4. Offer a brief annotated bibliography of references that may be useful in the pursuit of your work on the theme of your proposed course or module, either as works that students might read in class, or works that you have read or intend to read as you prepare to develop the course. The grant evaluators are aware that projects will be at various stages of development at the time of the application, and do not expect these bibliographies to be comprehensive. The purpose of this requirement is to demonstrate that the applicant has given some thought to the theme and has either (a) done some reading about it, or (b) knows where to look, in order to begin to do so. Bibliographies should normally be in the range of five to fifteen entries.

5. Construct a brief timeline for your implementation of the grant, describing in general terms the steps you expect to undertake in order to bring the project to a successful conclusion. Include a description of any work that you have already done (or that you plan to do) either before or after the actual period of work (e.g., summer) that the grant is intended to fund.

6. If you expect to use any of the grant money for other purposes than a stipend for yourself, provide a basic line-item budget estimate, indicating the amount of money request in specific categories and providing, where necessary, an explanation of any unusual expenses. Such categories might include travel, equipment and supplies, and student work-study. Small details are not needed, and all numbers are assumed to be rough estimates. If the full grant will be earmarked as a stipend, you need only indicate that fact in this section.

7. Offer a brief (750 words or fewer) description of the positive outcomes that would result from your receipt of this grant and your development of the course or module. This section should address both the benefits that would accrue to students who would take the course, and benefits that would accrue to you in terms of your own professional development. Applicants should demonstrate an awareness of the goals of the First-Year Seminar program and the expectations and needs of the students that are likely to elect the course. In addition, Keep in mind that, because the funding for this grant comes from a program focused on the theological exploration of vocation, your argument should indicate, as concretely as possible, how the proposed course or module will encourage such exploration to take place.

8. Applications should be countersigned by the Department Chair and the Divisional Dean. This does not indicate “approval” of the proposed program so much as a willingness to support the faculty member’s time commitments toward the program (and course replacement, if the money is intended for released time). If the proposed course will be team-taught, or dependent upon some other already-established campus program, please include a letter from the co-teacher(s) and/or the Director of any cooperating program(s) indicating support for the proposal.

Please submit one copy of your application, no later than Monday, November 12, 2007. Please paper-clip rather than staple, to facilitate duplicating. Send it via campus mail to David Cunningham at the CrossRoads Project. We would also appreciate an electronic version of the application for our files; send it via e-mail to crossroads@hope.edu.