| Patricipants | Title, Principal Investigator (PI) and Project Summary |
| Birmingham-Southern College – Lead Rhodes College | Activating Potentials in Early Chemistry Education – Kate Hayden Students enter introductory chemistry courses with variable background knowledge and experience in chemistry, which creates a dynamic challenge for chemistry programs across the ACS. Alarmingly, underrepresented minorities drop out at disproportionately higher rates than their peers. Literature suggests that this problem may be twofold: students who have had limited exposure to scientific reasoning or mathematics lack the problem-solving skills necessary for success in STEM; and/or students are unable to visualize themselves as scientists due to a lack of self-identifiable models presented in the course. These students, therefore, frequently disengage from chemistry. To address these retention challenges, we will create and implement a shared supplemental instructional video series for the first-year chemistry course. These videos will contain fundamental concepts in chemistry with a focus on problem-solving strategies that will reinforce the material and assist them with developing their own approach to solving problems. Each video will begin with a different chemist sharing a short vignette of his/her journey through science, highlighting personal challenges and successes. |
| Birmingham-Southern College – Lead Davidson College Furman University Hendrix College Rhodes College University of Richmond Sewanee: University of the South | ACS Global Learning Abroad – Anne Ledvina The ACS Study Abroad Course (ACS Global Learning Abroad) will be taught remotely across multiple campuses to students participating in an overseas experience during the summer or semester. There will be 3 phases to the course that involve a pre-departure component in the term prior to study abroad, an overseas component and a re-entry process. The re-entry component will include individual reflections, cross-campus reflections and the creation of digital stories. In addition, an optional campus “Lessons from Abroad” conference will bring students, faculty, staff and global professional together. |
| Centre College – Lead Birmingham-Southern College Millsaps College | Active Learning Design – Kerry Paumi This project extends a previous grant and the faculty professional development curriculum of the June ACS Teaching & Learning (T & L) Workshop by developing a stand-alone, two-day regional workshop that incorporates student-centered pedagogies and the science of learning into classrooms and co-curricular projects. The two-day workshop will be grounded in recent scholarship on student learning and effective course design and will provide participants with tools and strategies that support learners at all stages of intellectual and emotional development, skill level, or background. Content will be flexible, but determined by the needs of the institutions involved, and may include intentional course design, innovative pedagogies, promotion of metacognition, development and assessment of learning outcomes, creative problem-solving pedagogies, problem-based learning, collaborative undergraduate research, or development of high-impact practices. Design of the workshop will be intentional and grounded in a thorough literature review about student learning and learning design in general, with the specific topic selected by the regional participants. In collaboration with participating institutions, we will identify relevant foci and metrics as well as relevant evaluation and assessment of the workshop. In addition to these elements, the project will refine the delivery models considered in the previous grant and make a recommendation about how to offer a similar workshop going forward. Our long-term intent is to offer the workshop once per year by T&L Workshop staff. This grant cycle will facilitate a second round of the workshop, this time offered at Millsaps and open to regional campuses. During the fall term of 2018, one course on each campus will utilize the materials found during the discovery process to create projects that illustrate historical and or current issues of diversity and inclusion. Campus offices involved in this effort will include: Diversity and Inclusion, Library and Archives, Center for Teaching and Learning, Information Technology Services, and Communications. The long-term goal is an inclusive ACS digital archive that speaks to the broader experience of desegregation on small college campuses across the South. |
| Centre College – Lead Birmingham-Southern College | Regional Faculty Development through Active Learning Design – Kerry Paumi This project was funded for a third year to extend the faculty professional development curriculum of the 2020 ACS Teaching & Learning Workshop. The activities proposed during this grant period include testing the feasibility of offering an annual two-day workshop for ACS faculty. For the last two grant cycles, we have developed stand-alone, two-day, faculty professional development workshops grounded in the science of learning. In 2018, we offered a campus-specific workshop at Centenary College; in 2019, we offered a regional ACS workshop at Millsaps College. For this continuation, we will offer a third workshop offered to all ACS institutions and hosted at Birmingham-Southern. The proposed workshop will provide participants with tools and strategies that support student learning. As in the prior cycles, we will collaborate with campus leaders to identify relevant foci and determine evaluation and assessment measures. The workshop design will be intentional and grounded in a thorough literature review in student learning and learning design. Ultimately, the project will test delivery and cost models developed in the previous grant cycles and allow us to recommend how to offer a similar workshop going forward. In doing so, we will identify additional workshop facilitators from the current pool of ACS June workshop facilitators. Our long-term intent is to offer the workshop once per year by T&L Workshop staff. This continuation grant will facilitate a third round of the workshop, this time offered at Birmingham Southern College and open to all campuses of the ACS, particularly those within driving distance. |
| Centre College – Lead Southwestern University | Supporting Diversity and Inclusion in Mathematics and STEM Disciplines – Joel Kilty Mathematics plays a pivotal role in the persistence and success of students who aspire to study and work in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. While traditional methods of teaching and learning mathematics ostensibly served well for decades, the mathematics community is re-examining and re-envisioning these approaches in response to multiple changing realities, which include: evidence that the standard approach “filters” traditionally under-represented students, extremely different levels of student preparedness, the diverse career and continuing education paths of students, more sophisticated technologies, and access to large data sets that enable more realistic and more relevant applications. This project seeks to further understand the filters that inhibit student persistence and success in mathematics and other STEM disciplines, particularly among under-represented minority, first-generation, low-income, and female students, within the context of small liberal arts colleges located in the southern United States. Beyond exploring these contextual factors, this project works to make a positive difference in improving persistence and success by resequencing the calculus curriculum including the use of the statistical software R and implementing a cohort model in Calculus I. |
| Centre College – Lead Furman University Rollins College Washington and Lee University | Pathways to Diversity: Uncovering Our Collections – Carrie Frey This project seeks to build a shared online digital archive relating to the history of desegregation at these colleges and universities. As southern institutions founded long before the civil rights movement in the United States, the experiences and stories of our African American students, staff, and faculty within the historical contexts of our local communities have not been fully understood, researched, or archived. We want to uncover and illuminate these historical narratives to not only improve institutional understanding of diversity on campus, but also to help our current students confront and comprehend issues of diversity and inclusion in the context of society, their campus, and their classroom. As a first step, an archival collection of primary source materials will be researched and identified collaboratively by faculty, students, archival professionals, and staff at all four participating institutions. |
| Davidson College – Lead University of Richmond Trinity University | Blended Inclusion: Innovative Pedagogy in Clinical Psychology Research Methods and Statistics for Diverse Students Improving pedagogical approaches to teaching research methods and statistics at the undergraduate level is key to facilitating student understanding and improving retention. This need is particularly salient for underrepresented minority students, first-generation college students, women, and students with disabilities, who express greater statistics anxiety and report lower competence in these critical domains. Furthermore, while these students express high interest in clinical psychology at the undergraduate level, their representation decreases at more advanced levels of study — suggesting that students’ experiences with quantitative material are a barrier to increasing diversity in the field. Blended and active learning strategies have been shown to enhance student performance and reduce anxiety. The goal of this project is to develop blended learning resources for teaching research methods and statistics in courses and mentored research experiences in clinical psychology. By using these resources to promote active learning strategies, we aim to improve student understanding of research methods and foster a growth-oriented mindset for quantitative skills – particularly among students from underrepresented groups. |
| Furman University – Lead University of Richmond | Campus Space and Rhetorics of Race—Connecting Injustice to the Liberal Arts Geography & Built Environment – Brandon Inabinet The program pilots a campus map of both the geographical location of liberal arts campuses and the sights within them. It focuses on histories stemming from nineteenth century inequalities, especially slavery, and brings critical analysis of campus space through the vocabulary of rhetoric—the ancient consideration of how symbols work to persuade and constitute communities. Students inventory campus settings and archival holdings for public-facing symbols, create a Pocket Sights app location with photographic evidence and written contextualization, and connect these sights in a coherent campus tour by emplotting a flow. In the end, campuses serve their communities and visitors with a tool for analysis that can be utilized across the curriculum and by various constituencies, and multiple campuses like Richmond and Furman can compare their pasts to find similar tropes and narratives of race in the geographic and built landscape. |
| Furman University – Lead Birmingham-Southern College Davidson College University of Richmond Washington and Lee University Sewanee: University of the South | Inclusive Pedagogy for Library Instruction – Andrea Wright As our institutions seek to cultivate more diverse and inclusive environments, library instruction provides an opportunity for librarians to also consider our own biases and utilize inclusive pedagogies to improve our learning environments for all. The literature on library instruction and inclusive pedagogies, however, is distressingly sparse. This project unites librarians from across the ACS to form an Inclusive Pedagogy for Library Instruction Working Group. They will work together to consider broader inclusive pedagogies, related library pedagogies (such as critical information literacy and anti-racist instruction), and the unique nature of library instruction. They will also work with diversity and inclusion groups on their home campuses, experts from outside the group, and leverage their individual backgrounds and experiences with diversity and inclusion. Collaborators develop all this to craft and apply inclusive best practices for information literacy instruction in academic libraries that consider the range of diverse identities including race, gender, sexuality, and abilities. |
| Hendrix College – Lead | Micro-aggression and Micro-affirmation Project – Michael Miyawaki This project will develop a photography exhibit of students’ experience with micro-aggressions and micro-affirmations and develop a website featuring the exhibit and videos of students sharing their experiences. The website can be used as part of classroom instruction for faculty teaching courses on identity and inequality, to facilitate class discussions, and to generate reflective assignments. Furthermore, the website can be used for faculty development purposes, e.g., at workshops designed to help faculty foster an inclusive classroom environment and enhance student advising. The goal is to raise campus awareness about micro-aggressions, foster dialogue on how to address them, and promote the use of micro-affirmations as an ACS model for creating more inclusive campus communities. |
| Hendrix College – Lead | Micro-aggression/micro-affirmation continuation – Michael Miyawaki The “M&M Project” is a campus photography project aimed at raising awareness about microaggressions and promoting the campus adoption of microaffirmations. The project involves taking photos of students holding up written signs of their experiences with micro-behaviors, developing a website to feature these photos, and utilizing the website as part of classroom instruction, faculty and staff development, student leadership training, etc. The goal of the project is to foster a more inclusive and welcoming Hendrix community. The theme for this year was on race, ethnicity, and culture. Next year, the project theme will focus on gender and sexuality. |
| Hendrix College – Lead Millsaps College Southwestern University | Faculty of Color Uniting for Success (FOCUS) continuation – Dionne Jackson ACS FOCUS addresses the challenges that faculty of color face in their path to professional success in the academy. This national issue manifests itself in particular ways at liberal arts colleges, where faculty of color are far less likely to have colleagues of color in their department or area. Moreover, the increasing enrollment of students of color at our three institutions—Southwestern University, Millsaps College and Hendrix College—has not been matched by increased numbers of faculty of color. As a result, these faculty often have outsized responsibilities for mentoring students and service. |
| Millsaps College – Lead | (Re)Visioning Millsaps Education Curriculum – Stacy DeZutter This project will redesign the Millsaps Education program, moving from a single track in teacher licensure to dual tracks with the addition of a non-licensure track. Central to this redesign is an invigorated focus on issues of equity and social justice in education and the use of digital tools to foster communication and collaboration for our future education professionals. This project will unfold through a series of three overlapping processes: information-gathering, piloting courses using newly designed framework, and articulating our new undergraduate education program. By the end of the grant period, we aim to submit the course sequence and descriptions for our new multi-tracked degree program to Curriculum Committee and provide a model for program redesign to other ACS schools. |
| Millsaps College – Lead Hendrix College Southwestern University | ACS FOCUS—Associated Colleges of the South Faculty of Color Uniting for Success (third year) ACS FOCUS in its third year of funding will address the challenges that faculty of color face in their path to professional success in the academy. This national issue manifests itself in particular ways at liberal arts colleges, where faculty of color are far less likely to have colleagues of color in their department or area. Moreover, the increasing enrollment of students of color at our three institutions—Southwestern University, Millsaps College and Hendrix College—has not been matched by increased numbers of faculty of color. As a result, these faculty often have outsized responsibilities for mentoring students and service. ACS FOCUS will provide a summer institute for faculty of color. The institute will address scholarly productivity through specific goal setting, designated time for scholarship each day, and follow-ups on progress made. The project will also bring in trained facilitators to assist faculty with topics such as self-care, cultivating mentors, tenure and promotion, and navigating service demands. In addition, it aims to explicitly build a peer mentoring network by facilitating cross-institutional relationships. Additionally, this grant project aims to raise awareness and support for the challenges that faculty of color within ACS consortia schools face through sustained advocacy. The project’s overall objectives are to enhance recruitment, success, and the retention of faculty of color at our institutions. |
| Morehouse College – Lead | Africana Music Experiential Pedagogy – Uzee Brown Africana Music Experiential Pedagogy (AMEP) is an Innovative Instruction project emphasizing multisensory learning. AMEP will engage students through three pedagogical components implemented in music major and general education music courses: discussion of ethnographic primary sources; instrument making; and performance seminars. AMEP responds to program-level student learning outcomes (SLOs) of our new general education framework, approved in May 2017. During the implementation to be funded by ACS, AMEP will reach 50 music majors and minors and 75 general education students enrolled in courses Africana music (including Africa and its Diaspora). We have developed a coordinated curriculum which pools resources to have a greater impact in both our major and minor as well as existing general education courses required to be redesigned for the new general education framework. This curricular program will also be the basis for a new course, Africana Music, Technology and the World to be developed and submitted for review during the grant period. Our materials and methods will be disseminated: internally, through the establishment of a faculty learning community; and externally, by offering an invited workshop on diversity and inclusion in the undergraduate music classroom at the Society for Music Theory Annual Meeting in Columbus, OH in Nov. 2019. The latter will be facilitated by two of our core faculty and six students who successfully complete AMEP-enhanced courses in Spring 2019 ahead of the Fall 2019 conference. The program goals make valuable and lasting contributions to our department, the College and music in higher education at large. |
| Rollins College – Lead Centenary College Sewanee: University of the South | Cognitive Science in the College Classroom Cognitive science is interdisciplinary with strong ties to psychology, linguistics, anthropology, computer science, neuroscience, and mathematics. However, despite these interdisciplinary endeavors, few experimental findings are extended to improve the essentials of teaching and learning such as course design, student development, and effective instruction. Cognitive psychology explores the manner in which experience influences actions and thoughts, and how mental operations are used to solve problems, maintain goals, and learn and remember information. The goal of our proposal is to directly apply empirical evidence from human learning and information processing studies in our field to the college classroom. The aim of the project is to provide ACS professors with additional tools to craft syllabi, courses, and assignments with students’ cognitive systems in mind. Three web-based modules designed to help faculty incorporate the latest and most essential findings in cognitive science in their courses to maximize student learning. |
| Rhodes College – Lead Birmingham-Southern College Millsaps College Southwestern University Spelman College | Cultures of the Ancient Mediterranean – Kenny Morrell The purpose of this project is to allow more students among the member institutions of ACS to study cultures of the ancient Mediterranean through a comprehensive, inter-institutional program that incorporates the best practices in the field, embraces the values associated with undergraduate colleges of the liberal arts and sciences, and achieves a better balance between the interest in the field and the available instructional resources. |
| Sewanee: University of the South – Lead Birmingham-Southern College Centre College | Improving Inclusion and Pedagogical Practices for Students with Learning Disabilities – Jordan D. Troisi and Betsy Sandlin Though students with learning disabilities or learning differences (LD) are entering universities at a higher rate than ever, they are often underserved in these universities. This project seeks to improve education-related experiences of students with LD and their overall sense of inclusion on campuses. The project has four primary goals: (1) to increase understanding/knowledge of the education-related LD experience among faculty, staff, students, and members of the ACS; (2) to increase awareness of campus resources, processes, and people associated with LD among faculty, staff, students, and members of the ACS; (3) to equip students, faculty, and staff, and members of the ACS to have more informed and collegial conversations about LD; and (4) to introduce effective pedagogical practices for faculty members to implement in the classroom among our faculties and members of the ACS. |
| Sewanee: University of the South – Lead Morehouse College Spelman College | Studies of Slavery and Its Legacies – Scott Wilson The issue of institutions’ relationship to slavery and its legacies is perhaps even more important for Southern colleges and universities to confront, and it is unsurprising that fewer institutions in the South have taken on such a project. The Studies of Slavery Project entails collaboration among three institutions – Morehouse College, Spelman College, and the University of the South – in the development and implementation of coordinated courses on the three campuses. The three courses, which will be titled and numbered to comply with standards on the three campuses, will address their respective institution’s relationship to slavery and its enduring legacies through historical analysis of new world slavery and slave-based economy, discussion of memory, ethical considerations of how to respond to the legacies of slavery in the present context. The grant will conclude with a conference for ACS representatives on the project’s accomplishments. |
| Sewanee: University of the South – Lead Davidson College Furman University Washington and Lee University | Science, Society and the Archives – Kelly Whitmer This collaborative “Science, Society and the Archives” project leverages the expertise of scholars across our respective campuses interested in studying science, medicine and technology as historically developing enterprises that are socially and culturally situated. We approach the endeavor with a genuine interest in interdisciplinary and innovative approaches to “Science and Society” curriculum development and undergraduate research. We are also interested in responding to the following observation, which has become the focus of a growing literature: undergraduates report coming away from their classes energized and with reinvigorated interest when instructors use archival or special collections material to bring into focus larger questions pursued in the course. The project consists of three interrelated components: i.) a new, collaboratively taught course, ii.) an online digital archives featuring teaching and research materials for use in future “Science and Society” courses and/or undergraduate research projects, and iii.) a “Science and Society” virtual working group and speaker series. Each of these components will work to reinforce the importance of archives and special collections as knowledge spaces, which play central roles in our ongoing efforts to study the histories, culture and politics of science, medicine, technology and society. |
| Sewanee: University of the South – Lead Davidson College Rhodes College University of Richmond | Summer in Russia – Yuliya Ladygina The project sets out to develop Sewanee’s existing small-scale summer in Russia program into a long-term multi-campus collaborative study abroad program, which eventually will be open to all ACS campuses. Our project has several clear academic and practical goals. First, we aim to establish a long-lasting academic program that will accelerate our undergraduates’ Russian language acquisition through intensive on-site pedagogy in St. Petersburg and enrich our curricula through a custom-design and jointly-taught by the ACS faculty course on Russian Imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet culture. The program will be 6-7 weeks long and will offer two full courses. Preliminary, we plan to run this program on a bi-annual basis, unless student demand allows us to offer it annually. Second, we hope to offer our students a significantly more affordable study abroad opportunity than other available option and possibly establish several scholarships for students with financial need. Third, we plan to use this program for fostering networking between our small programs and facilitating professional collaboration between the ACS scholars of Slavic Studies. |
| Sewanee: University of the South – Lead Hendrix College | Inclusiveness in Academic Departments – Al Bardi The project focuses on inclusiveness in academic departments. While extant research and resources focus heavily on improving diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in terms of vital broadly defined areas such as campus climate or specific areas such as faculty hiring, little to no work has been done to assist with specifically assessing and improving inclusiveness within academic departments. Indeed, respondents to a brief survey of ACS institutions’ personnel working in DEI areas indicated substantial interest in assessing and improving inclusiveness within their institution’s departments. This project is developing a web-based toolkit to guide and assist with assessing inclusiveness within a department and improving inclusiveness in strategic ways. The centerpiece of the project is a scientifically robust measure of inclusiveness, which leads to discovery of specific areas for growth. This measure will be piloted, revised and refined based upon a substantial sample of ACS faculty respondents. The toolkit will include the measure, along with materials to guide a departmental self-study of inclusiveness and to improve inclusiveness based upon the department’s assessed areas of growth. This grant was funded for a second year, to continue development of a web-based toolkit to guide and assist with assessing inclusiveness within a department and improve inclusiveness in strategic ways. The centerpiece of the project is a scientifically robust measure of inclusiveness, which leads to discovery of specific areas for growth. This measure has already been piloted on a substantial sample of over 250 ACS faculty respondents. Statistical analysis and refinement of the measure is underway. The toolkit will include the measure, along with materials to guide a departmental self-study of inclusiveness and to improve inclusiveness based upon the department’s assessed areas of growth. Changes in personnel (loss of Elizabeth Skomp and Dionne Jackson due to employment changes) have not slowed the project yet, but have left us in a significantly challenging place going forward with toolkit development. Dr. Skomp was replaced by Sewanee’s Associate Dean, Betsy Sandlin and Jackson with her colleague at Hendrix, A. Goldberg (Associate Odyssey Director, Undergraduate Research Coordinator, and Charles Prentiss Hough Odyssey Professor of Anthropology at Hendrix). This year’s activities included launching an initiative to increase participation of faculty of color in the toolkit development via a process of rewarded, surveyed input. |
| Southwestern University – Lead Hendrix College Millsaps College | ACS FOCUS – Faculty of Color Uniting for Success – Alicia Moore FOCUS addresses the challenges that faculty of color face in their path to professional success in the academy. This national issue manifests itself in particular ways at liberal arts colleges, where faculty of color are far less likely to have colleagues of color in their department or area. Moreover, the increasing enrollment of students of color at our three institutions has not been matched by increased numbers of faculty of color. As a result, these faculty often have outsized responsibilities for mentoring students and service. FOCUS will develop summer workshops for faculty of color over three successive years. The week-long workshops will address scholarly productivity through specific goal setting, designated time for scholarship each day, and follow-ups on progress made. The project will also bring in trained facilitators to assist faculty with issues such as self-care, cultivating mentors, tenure & promotion, and navigating service demands. In addition, it aims to explicitly build a peer mentoring network by facilitating cross-institutional relationships. |
| Spelman College – Lead Rhodes College | Just Food: Race, Class, and Gender in the Urban U.S. South – Ashanté Reese The interdisciplinary course will bring together theoretical perspectives from Anthropology, Food, Environmental and Black Studies alongside hands-on, community-based experiences in Atlanta and Memphis. The course will be taught during the fall of 2018. The primary objectives of the course are to: (a) foster collaboration, diversity and inclusion within and across the Rhodes College and Spelman campuses; (b) provide Rhodes and Spelman students an in-depth, comparative approach to theorizing, studying and analyzing food inequalities along the lines of race, class, and gender in the urban US South; and (c) increase the visibility of food justice work in Memphis and Atlanta, and more broadly the southern U.S., through a public-facing project. |
| Spelman College – Lead Centenary College Centre College Millsaps College Rollins College Sewanee: University of the South Southwestern University Trinity University | Diversity in the STEM Pipeline through the Incorporation of Culturally and Socially Responsive Pedagogy in the Organic Chemistry Laboratory – Shanina Sanders Johnson As the nation seeks to realize a more diverse STEM-trained workforce, diversity should also be acknowledged in the STEM classroom. This project seeks to incorporate culturally relevant and socially responsible practices and curriculum in the organic chemistry laboratory. A Community of Practice will be established among institutions in the Associated Colleges of the South that creates these teaching materials while promoting student engagement. The learning environments will be designed to connect students to real world experiences in hopes of improving retention rates and improved success in STEM courses. In addition to creating novel learning resources for use in chemistry labs at these institutions, this project will bring visibility to teaching and scholarship being done on these campuses. To this end, specific activities will include a training workshop, the creation of standard protocols for increasing culturally and socially responsible content in courses, and peer review of developed resources. |
| Spelman College – Lead Morehouse College Rollins College | Social Justice Math – Viveka Brown This project entails a two-day symposium focused on integrating issues of fairness and equity into mathematics lessons and classroom discourses. The symposium builds on a previously funded ACS workshop focused on social justice mathematics. In this symposium, participants will create mathematics modules focused on social justice that will be shared across participants and ACS campuses. our goals for the symposium are to: (a) develop and cultivate a community of practitioners who are committed to integrating social justice issues into undergraduate mathematics, (b) facilitate and nurture collaborative research among a faculty community of practitioners, and (c) identify and document promising practices and limitations when integrating social justice issues into undergraduate mathematics. This symposium will bring faculty together to accomplish these goals and set an agenda for collaborative work. The project fits within the Diversity and Inclusion grant theme outlined by ACS because it has the potential to have a lasting impact on the culture of mathematics by engaging students in discussions about fairness and equity while utilizing their quantitative skills. |
| Washington and Lee University – Lead Rollins College | Pre-chemistry Tutorial System – Kyle Friend Nationally, and within the ACS, there is a lack of diversity among college science and math graduates. This is not due to a lack of interest since beginning STEM students reflect the general population; however, STEM persistence rates are higher for high-income, white and Asian-American students. Higher and lower STEM persistence rates are frequently set in first college STEM courses, where a failing grade is more commonly due to a lack of high school preparation than any other factor. At Rollins and W&L, we have data to support these arguments, and we seek to level the playing field for students with poor high school STEM preparation. Currently, we have an early-stage web application (ChemTutor) that has been designed to aid students with an interest in chemistry. Our project involves modules designed to build essential skills that are often assumed knowledge in introductory college chemistry courses. We plan to roll out ChemTutor during the grant period and to assess the efficacy of the web application by querying whether students who engage with the software perform at a higher level in their first college chemistry class and whether these students begin to identify more as scientists. As a result, our web application should increase rates of STEM persistence among a more diverse student group at two ACS institutions. |
| Washington and Lee University – Lead Davidson College University of Richmond Rollins College Sewanee: University of the South Spelman College | ACS Dance Consortium – Jenefer Davies The goal of this project was to bring professors from 6 ACS dance departments (out of 8 total) to visit participating campuses and create a model for shared teaching where each professor, in her own unique voice, engages with new students, and exposes them to fresh, specialty-specific, pedagogy through master classes, lectures and workshops. Through this, students, in effect, came to understand and experience the richness of a pan-cultural dance program with a diversity of styles and forms. This benefits the campuses involved by strengthening small dance programs through the diversification of course offerings and leads to inclusive excellence, which the project participants anticipate will help departments attract and retain a broader range of students to our classes and majors/minors. The hope is that the relationships formed through this project will flourish and lead to collaboration on a larger scale, where students might visit one another’s campuses to share work, delve into critical analysis, or make new dance works together. This might be a small step toward the colleges’ ultimate goal of attracting a more diverse student body and faculty. This inter-campus collaboration will be facilitated by a newly created database, through which we will organize, schedule and plan the visits and an annual meeting, where we will work collaboratively on the shared consortium plan. |
| Washington and Lee University– Lead Birmingham-Southern College Rollins College Rhodes College | ChemTutor 2.0 – Sara Sprenkle This proposal seeks to address issues of STEM persistence of students with low socioeconomic status or who identify as underrepresented minorities by further developing a free, focused, online tutorial system tailored to entry-level ACS chemistry courses. Developed with a previous round of funding from the ACS, “ChemTutor 1.0” has been used at Rollins and W&L since August 2019. Currently, students have access to short videos demonstrating concepts and content to prepare students for college-level chemistry, and, importantly, these videos are accompanied by chemistry and math practice problem sets with real-time feedback. Also developed with previous ACS funding, “Activating Potentials” was used to develop video content to help students with college-level chemistry. We propose to build on the successes and lessons learned from both projects to create “ChemTutor 2.0”. We plan to integrate work from both projects, increasing access at all four ACS institutions to general chemistry content, increasing faculty diversity in the videos, and enhancing the associated problem sets. Assessment will focus on changes to initial student performance on pre-course tests versus final grades within first science and math courses as well as long-term persistence in a STEM field. |
| Rollins College – Lead Centenary College Centre College Davidson College University of Richmond Rollins College | Before #MeToo: How Women Historically Navigated Higher Education at ACS Schools – Claire Strom This project joins several others in investigating the lived experiences of minority groups at the ACS schools. In 2018, Sewanee, Morehouse, and Spelman joined together in “Studies of Slavery and its Legacies,” which was a course-driven grant to explore the institutional relationship to slavery and the consequent ethical ramifications for the individual colleges. Additionally, Strom and Walton initially conceived of this project while involved in another ACS grant, “Pathway to Diversity: Uncovering our Collections.” Through three different courses between 2018 and 2020, they worked with students to uncover the history of African Americans at Rollins College. The experience was rich and productive for both the students and the college, which led Walton and Strom to think about the history of other marginalized groups that have yet to be sufficiently investigated in the archival record. Deciding to focus on women’s experiences for this grant proposal, they also chose to move away from the broader and interdisciplinary focus of the Pathway grant and, instead, approach the question solely through the historical lens. Thus, they reached out to historians and archivists on all the ACS campuses in the summer and fall of 2019. Seven schools responded with interest, but participants at Hendrix and Rhodes later left the project for a variety of health and campus-related issues. Five schools—Centenary, Centre, Davidson, Richmond, and Rollins—have moved forward, with historians and archivists excited to participate in the project. Each school has a different history and a different history of women that is peculiar to their institution. Some, like Rollins, have been co-ed from the beginning, while others, like Davidson, only fully enrolled women in the 1970s. The institution’s relationship with women of color has also varied with Davidson having enslaved women on campus before the Civil War to Centenary having a close connection with Japan in the 1950s. Additionally, the schools’ religious affiliation has also affected the lives of women attending or teaching at the institutions. We hope to make our students and our campuses more aware of women’s college experiences and the struggles that women have faced and continue to face in higher education more broadly. |
| Furman University – Lead Birmingham-Southern College Rhodes College Rollins College Sewanee: University of the South | (CREATE) Creating Competency-Rich Education for Anti-Racist Teaching and Learning Environments – Diane Boyd As small liberal arts institutions in the southeastern United States, we face particular challenges during this moment of civil unrest and sustained focus on racial inequity across the country. This focus spans several levels including: the macro level (institutional racism perpetuated by state-sanctioned violence and higher education’s complicity in it); the meso level (in implicitly biased media representations that exclude and perpetuate stereotypes or statues, or campus buildings named to honor Confederate heroes); and the individual level (via microaggressions). This series of workshops would assist faculty and staff teams in creating a curriculum to address these issues with specific, actionable steps for recognizing structural racism and implicit bias and redirecting the energy generated by the “tiny cuts” of microaggressions. We see this series (which blends education with action at multiple levels) as an important tool for improving climate on our campuses. |
| Spelman College – Lead Birmingham-Southern College Morehouse College | (Re)Visioning Race and Gender in Music – Paula Grissom Broughton (Re)Visioning Race & Gender in Music is an Innovative Instruction project emphasizing feminist pedagogy and Black feminist pedagogy as instructional practices used to address the intersections of race and gender as social and cultural constructions in both the United States and parts of sub-Saharan Africa. This project will engage instructors and students in three primary teaching and learning components implemented in the music major and general education courses in the Music Departments at Spelman College, Birmingham-Southern College, and Morehouse College: examination of ethnographic primary sources; participation in performance/composition seminars; and the designing of teaching & learning resources for both students and instructors. Through innovative instruction and creative research capabilities, (Re)Visioning Race & Gender in Music will respond to the student learning outcome (SLO) of “analyzing the relationships among multiple traditions, the connection to social trends, histories and styles of music, art, and other disciplines, particularly those of women”. During the implementation to be funded by ACS, this project will impact over 150 students (40 music majors/minors and 110 general education students) enrolled in courses across three ACS campuses that address race and/or gender in music. Materials and methods will be disseminated internally through the establishment of a faculty learning community of ACS institutions, and externally through the designing of a digital database of teaching resources and scholarly works/compositions by students and instructors. |
Associated Colleges of the South