Senior Seminar Grants

Click here for a Description of Senior Seminars (PDF)

GRANT APPLICATION PROCEDURE
SENIOR SEMINAR GRANTS

From the Hope College proposal to the Lilly Endowment:

“Lilly Endowment funding will assist the Senior Seminar . . . through course development funding. This will encourage new faculty to participate in the program, and encourage seasoned Senior Seminar instructors to rethink and remold their courses in light of the new college-wide emphasis on vocation. Vetted by the Lilly Program Director and the Director of Interdisciplinary Studies, grants will be dispensed to faculty members with strong proposals for Senior Seminars with a vocation emphasis or containing a significant vocation module.”

The CrossRoads Project invites applications from Hope faculty to develop Senior Seminars that meet the above criteria. This includes both the invention of new courses and revision of courses that have already been taught to include a significant focus on vocation and related issues. Now in its extension phase, the Project expects to offer grants from $400 to $2000 depending on the amount of work proposed (i.e. from one to five weeks) and the nature of the proposed course or revision. The Project is particularly interested in supporting revisions to existing courses in order to incorporate a vocation theme and the development of approaches that might be transferable to other Senior Seminars (in which case the proposal should include discussion of how the results would be communicated with other instructors). Joint applications are possible, if all applicants expect to teach the course (either as a team-taught section or as two concurrent or sequential sections). Grants will typically be made for the summer.

Applications should be submitted to Dr. David S. Cunningham, Director of The CrossRoads Project. Decisions will be made by the CrossRoads Advisory Committee, in consultation with the Director of the Senior Seminar Program. The deadline is noon on Tuesday, November 17, 2009; 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:

Use these header titles and format at the top left of your first page.

Type of grant: Senior Seminar Course (Development or Module)
Name: ________________________________________
Your formal academic title: _______________________
Title of grant: __________________________________
Date of submission: ___________

1. Describe any experience that you have with the Senior Seminar program to date.

2. Provide a one-paragraph narrative describing the development of your interest in participating in the interdisciplinary work of the Senior Seminar program, as well as the development of your interest in the particular theme that you plan to address.

3. Provide a brief (500 words or fewer) description of your present thinking about the course that you intend to design or to enhance with the help of this grant. Obviously, the course 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. Please include some indication of when you first expect the new or revised course to be offered. This 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 seminar, 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. 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 Senior Seminar program and the expectations of the students that are likely to elect the course. (Senior Seminar guidelines are available at www.hope.edu/academic/ids.) In addition, please 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 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 travel and time commitments toward the program. Also, the Chair and Dean must approve any arrangements 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 use this Word document form as your cover sheet for the signatures when submitting your hard-copy.

Please submit the following:

1. One paper clipped / signed copy (see #8 above) of your application, no later than 12pm Tuesday, November 17, 2009 via campus mail to David Cunningham - CrossRoads Project -or- drop off at Van Zoeren 182.
2. One electronic version of the application for our files; send as a MSWord attachment via e-mail to crossroads@hope.edu with 'Grant Proposal' in the subject line.

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