News

Press Release

January 2005

TEAGLE FOUNDATION GRANTS IN HIGHER EDUCATION

After a year-long moratorium on new grants, the Teagle Foundation is pleased to announce its return to grantmaking with awards in two areas. Five grants to national educational organizations and to college consortias will facilitate systematic assessment of the outcomes achieved in courses, institutions, and whole sectors of higher education. Ten grants to Teagle Forums and Working Groups will support collaboration between research universities and liberal arts colleges for the purpose of stimulating fresh thinking about the liberal arts and circulating that work in print. These fifteen grants were approved by the Foundation's Board of Directors at its November 2004 meeting. They total $1,724,559 and will be used over periods ranging from seven months to three years.

The Teagle Foundation is strongly committed to supporting the liberal arts and liberal arts education. For more information about the Foundation, please visit our website: www.teaglefoundation.org.

Teagle Grants for Outcomes and Assessment

Appalachian College Association
Proof of Progress: Measuring Academic Achievement in Appalachian Colleges

$149,650 over 18 months for a study that will use the Collegiate Assessment of Academic Proficiencies (CAAP), to assess the academic gains, through the junior year, of students at 21 of the 35 ACA colleges.

Associated Colleges of the South (ACS), Associated Colleges of the Midwest (ACM) and the Great Lakes College Association
Learning Outcomes and Study Abroad (Planning grant)

$60,000 over 12 months to develop a project to assess varying models of study abroad programs for students at liberal arts colleges and to measure the learning outcomes that result from such programs.

Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U)
Engaging Faculty with the Assessment of Liberal Education Outcomes

$150,000 over 18 months for a program of faculty development to self-identified consortia of colleges and universities-invited to apply for funding from the Foundation-working on assessment of liberal education outcomes.

RAND Corporation's Council for Aid to Education (CAE)
Collegiate Learning Assessment: Informing Best Educational Practice

$300,000 over 3 years for development of the Collegiate Learning Assessment project (CLA), which responds to the need for systematic measurement of the value added of liberal education. Working with the Council for Independent Colleges' consortium of liberal arts colleges (see below), CAE plans to show the practical benefits of the inter-institutional comparison opportunities afforded by the CLA.

Council of Independent Colleges (CIC)
Using Collegiate Learning Assessment) to Measure Value Added Assessment at Liberal Arts Colleges

$300,000 over three years to support work with a consortium of small and mid-sized private colleges and universities administering the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA).

Teagle Working Groups

American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS)
Scholar-Teachers and Student Learning

$92,100 over 18 months. ACLS will convene a working group of liberal arts faculty, institutional leaders, educational researchers, and learned society leaders who will address the vitality of the teacher-scholar model and its relation to the success of general liberal arts education across the institutional spectrum of higher education.

Barnard College
Integrative Learning in Liberal Education: A Case Study

$75,951 over 12 months. The working group will address two pressing and persistent challenges - developing effective interdisciplinary course content and instituting successful learning strategies for such curricula. In collaboration with institutions in the Hudson River Valley, Barnard will lead a faculty seminar on a five-week course called "River Summer" that will take students and faculty on a voyage of inquiry and discovery from the headwaters of the Hudson to the sea.

Brown University
The Values of the Open Curriculum: An Alternative Tradition in Liberal Education

$98,245 over 12 months. An "open curriculum" that emphasizes student choice, exploration, and discovery constitutes an important alternative tradition in American higher education. Representatives from colleges where the open curriculum thrives will summarize and compare what they have learned in more than forty years of experimentation. Amherst, Smith, Wesleyan, Hampshire, Evergreen, New College, Sarah Lawrence, and Antioch have expressed interest in participating.

Cornell University
Eliminating Racial and Ethnic Disparities in College Completion and Achievement:
A Teagle Working Group on What Works and Why

$99,978 over 18 months. Cornell University will joined by Colgate University, Hamilton College, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and Wells College in a working group on diversity, college completion, and achievement to explore and evaluate programs designed to eliminate racial and ethnic disparities in college completion and achievement.

Princeton University
Technology Fluency and its Place in a Liberal Education

$80,000 over 18 months. Princeton University will work with Dartmouth, Drew, Lafayette, Maryland, Penn, Rutgers, Stanford, Swarthmore and Yale on the issue of technology fluency and its place in liberal education.

Social Science Research Council.(SSRC)
Assessing Interdisciplinary Products of Work and Habits of Mind

$99,990 over 12 months. Higher education researchers and liberal arts leaders will focus on undergraduate education as they seek to address critical shortcomings in our understanding of interdisciplinary learning.

Washington University - St. Louis
Re-Thinking The Pedagogy of Ethnicity

$95,275 over 18 months. Scholars at Washington University - St. Louis will work with colleagues from Austin College, Luther College, Millsaps College, Ohio Wesleyan, and Union College on the teaching of ethnicity, seeking to unite theoretical, historical, and literary exploration with a concrete interest in classroom teaching.

Yale University
Strengthening Liberal Education through Special Collections

$98,830 over 18 months. The Yale University Library will explore the strengthening of liberal arts education through making students aware of special collections materials and objects and helping them use and even create such materials. Partners will include community colleges (such as Naugatuck), four-year liberal arts colleges (such as Connecticut College), and small universities (such as Wesleyan).

Teagle Forums

The New York Public Library
Forum on Poetry

A $4,540 planning grant over 7 months. The NYPL, working with the Center for the Humanities located at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, will plan a forum to stimulate discussions about the study of poetry as part of a liberal education and broaden awareness and use of the Library's collections.

Northwestern University
Classical Antiquity and American Popular Culture

$30,000 over 12 months. The forum will consider whether recent fascination with different "fragments of antiquity" tells us something particular about the cultural moment in which we live, and will ask how humanities teachers might take advantage of this interest. Participants will include students, faculty and administrators from Northwestern and other liberal arts institutions in the Chicago area, and representatives of leading liberal arts colleges in the Midwest.