Disciplinary Innovation Grant
The Townsend Center invites proposals from faculty (as individuals or in teams) who have an interest in participating in a new project on Disciplinary Innovation in Undergraduate Education funded by the Mellon Foundation. Two proposals will be funded each academic year beginning in Spring 2008, and the program will last four years. (Thus, a total of eight groups will be funded over the course of the project.) Awards of $30,000 will be made to each successful proposal. These funds may be distributed to individual faculty in the group for research related to work on the topic or may be used for such things as course development and enhancement, technology and office assistance, or for activities such as lectures, symposia, etc., related to the proposal.
DOWNLOAD PROPOSAL GUIDELINES. Proposal deadline: September 5, 2008
Project Description
The Project on Disciplinary Innovation is meant to invite new ways of thinking about the architecture of relationships among undergraduate courses in the humanities and related fields at U.C. Berkeley. The genesis of the project is described in full here.
The program is built around several premises: that institutions of higher education have remained surprisingly attached to a grid-like departmental structure for teaching even though cutting-edge research in the humanities has gone in very different directions; that many undergraduates at Berkeley find little coherence in their course programs beyond what they take in the major; and that Berkeley faculty are themselves often unaware of the substantial areas of intersection among courses in different departments.
Rather than generate new programs, interdisciplinary majors, or requirements, the aim of this project is to establish a flexible model for cross-disciplinary education by bringing to light some of the hidden “threads” that connect courses across existing departments and disciplines. Topics or issues pertinent to a range of disciplines will be identified by interested faculty and starred as belonging to a particular humanities thread. Each “thread” will be comprised of a relatively robust number of courses in different departments as well as by some introductory activity and a capstone experience that students may elect. For purposes of illustration, examples of potential course threads are: “Revolution” (which might include courses in History, History of Art, Political Science, Philosophy, French, Slavic Languages and Literatures, EALC, Sociology, and Comparative Literature); “Media” (which might include courses on the history of recorded sound, on printmaking and the history of prints, on the new digital media, on the transition from oral to print cultures, on film and photography, etc.); “Popularity” (which might include courses on populist political movements, on popular culture in its many forms, on the history of popular taste in various fields, and on the spread of literature in the vernacular languages). The possibility of following a particular thread or path of interest, once marked by the faculty, will be an option for undergraduates to choose, not a requirement.
For more information, interested faculty may contact Director Anthony J. Cascardi, Associate Director Teresa Stojkov, or Faculty Director of Programs Celeste Langan.