Princeton-Mellon Initiative receives support from Princeton University's 250th Anniversary Fund

Twenty-two faculty proposals including Princeton-Mellon Initiative Project Investigators Bruno Carvalho and Alison Isenberg were awarded funding to develop new classes or redesign existing courses through Princeton University's 250th Anniversary Fund for Innovation in Undergraduate Education.

Established in 1996 in conjunction with Princeton's 250th anniversary, the fund supports the University's "central and enduring commitment to outstanding undergraduate teaching."

Each year, the fund supports initiatives that allow faculty to explore new pedagogical methods to enhance student learning, foster interdisciplinary connections, and redefine teaching and assessment practices. This year's awards address a wide range of new and enhanced courses, embracing advances in classroom technology and supplementing the undergraduate curriculum across multiple concentrations and course levels. The selection committee reviewed more than 30 proposals. 

"Transformative teaching and learning is one of the single most important things we do as a campus," said Dean of the College Jill Dolan. "Many of this year's proposals demonstrated broad attention to important social issues and a commitment to using cutting-edge, creative classroom practices to address them through interdisciplinary knowledge. The committee also noted important innovations in introductory courses in STEM fields, for which faculty proposed new teaching methods to enhance learning and to increase student participation in these concentrations. I'm delighted by all of this innovative work and look forward to seeing how these projects will spark more pedagogical creativity in the future."

Associate Dean of the College Lisa Herschbach, a member of the selection committee and director of the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning, added, "McGraw looks forward to supporting this year's awardees as they implement new instructional technology and explore innovative avenues of teaching and assessment."

Bruno Carvalho

Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese

Bruno Carvalho will create an undergraduate seminar to be first offered in Spring 2017 on Diversity and Segregation in the Americas to explore how urban diversity has been viewed in the U.S., Latin America, and the Caribbean. The course aims to explore how a hemispheric perspective can shed new light on our understanding of the U.S. He will expand the course to a lecture in subsequent years.

Co-sponsored by the Provost’s Fund for Cultural Studies

Alison E. Isenberg

Professor of History

History professor Alison Isenberg and filmmaker and WWS lecturer Purcell Carson are exploring the 1960s unrest in Trenton and the events surrounding the death of one young black college student who was fatally shot in April 1968 by a young white police officer. Isenberg’s historical perspective brings a new focus to Carson’s course, Documentary Film and the City, which will look this year at the 1960s, race, region, economy, memory and media representation. Working with students, community members, the CBLI and the McGraw Center, the two will build an archive from which they will produce a work of historical scholarship and a film. This collaboration presents a hands-on opportunity to integrate the disciplines of history and documentary cinema; students will produce their own research papers and video sketches, in addition to the collective projects.

Co-sponsored by the Community-Based Learning Initiative and the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning

The full list of 22 awardees is available on the Office of the Dean of the College website, along with a gallery of videos highlighting courses funded by awards in past years.

 

Read the full story here.