Grant Samples

From a grant to gather a seminary’s faculty for a series of focused discussions on a particular range of topics.

As noted above, involvement by faculty and students is essential to this project. Hence, there will be opportunities at each step for faculty and students to revise and re-vision particular aspects of the project. The evaluative information throughout the academic year will be fed back into our strategic planning process for the institution. One of the categories at the moment in our strategic plan is to focus on faculty development, particularly as it relates to the art and craft of teaching. The ongoing development of explicit attention to the faculty’s self-understanding of their vocation as teachers will feed into the larger strategic plan for the institution. A second, explicit category is to focus on strategies that train pastors and teachers for the church who are self-reflective of racial issues in their communities. From our evaluative process it will be possible to discern how better to have an impact on the issues of racial identity in the context of teaching and learning in the local church. Ultimately the hope of the Academic Dean is that this will lead the faculty to vision future avenues for programs and potential grant applications in the area of teaching and learning.

At the first faculty retreat the Academic Dean will lead the faculty through a reflection and writing exercise to elicit how the retreat has affected each faculty member’s particular understanding of teaching and vocation and their understanding of the dynamics of multicultural teaching. A parallel tool will be used with students. Responses from this exercise, both anonymous written responses as well as public oral discussion, will be collated and analyzed by the Grant Committee. The Grant Committee will report back to the entire faculty for discussion at the next faculty meeting; similarly, the Grant Committee’s report will be the topic of the next scheduled lunchtime colloquium discussion.

Evaluation will thus be formative of the on-going grant project as well as of the emerging self-consciousness of these issues by the school’s faculty and students.

At the end of the project a similar evaluative procedure for faculty members and for students will provide evidence that can assess how and whether the grant project has met the criteria for success. The primary criteria for evaluation is: to what degree have the conversations of the grant project assisted in shaping and changing the self-understanding that faculty and students have of their vocations, their racial identities, and their awareness of racial issues in their communities.

Excerpt from a grant to strengthen teaching through workshops, reflections, and other departmental and individual projects, during a time of major faculty turnover and transition in the department.

The evaluation plan for this project requires sensitivity to the power differential between non-tenured and tenured faculty. With that in mind, the following plan will be used:

• a) The facilitator will design a feedback form to be completed by all participants at the end of each of the seminar/workshops (fall) and workshop/discussions (spring). The form will identify learnings and surface issues to be addressed.
• b) Each new faculty participant will submit an evaluation of the reflection group at the conclusion of each year of the project.
• c) A faculty member from the Department of Sociology with expertise in research will conduct a confidential focus group with the new faculty participants at the mid-point and the end of the grant.
• d) The project director and department chair will compare the transition experiences of new faculty involved in this project with the historical pattern of transition for new faculty in the department.
• e) The project director will interview near-retirement faculty at the mid-point and the conclusion of the grant.