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Teagle Grant Supports Curricular Coherence
Virginia Wesleyan receives funding for 30-month collaborative effort encouraging high-impact learning and clear-cut course offerings
By Stephanie Smaglo | December 16, 2014
How can faculty work together to create a more coherent and intentional curriculum with clearer goals, pathways and outcomes? To help address this question, the Teagle Foundation has awarded a 30-month grant of $280,000 to Virginia Wesleyan College, Davis & Elkins College, Eckerd College, Saint Augustine’s University and Shenandoah University.
The grant supports a faculty-led initiative called “The C5 Consortium for a More Compelling and Coherent Liberal Arts Curriculum,” designed to reduce course proliferation and revise current offerings to better embed high-impact practices—such as undergraduate research—into students’ collegiate experience.
The participating colleges and universities are currently in various stages of curricular reform, each aiming to modify course structures in ways that make them more transparently developmental or progressive; more conducive to the incorporation of high-impact practices; more explicitly aligned with the learning outcomes and skills that the institutions have identified for their graduates; and more cost-efficient for both students and institutions.
In alignment with Virginia Wesleyan’s newly approved strategic plan and a forthcoming Quality Enhancement Plan, the College will use the grant to help establish a developmental sequence across majors; map courses to competencies; and create more rational course numbering and better assessment rubrics. These curricular changes will create valuable links to high-impact practices like internships, undergraduate research, study away and sustained service learning.
“The Teagle Foundation grant will enable faculty at partner institutions to share information on what works and, in the process, influence the national dialogue on reform in higher education,” says Timothy O'Rourke, VWC’s Vice President for Academic Affairs and Kenneth R. Perry Dean of the College. “The C5 Consortium brings together institutions with a strong history of curricular innovation; each campus has an active initiative, supported by the grant, to make further progress toward a curriculum that offers a clear roadmap to degrees and careers across all majors.”
The C5 Consortium, which is made up of five-member faculty/administrator teams from each institution, will meet at each campus throughout the next 30 months. Thus all faculty and staff in the partner campuses will have an opportunity to participate in aspects of the enterprise, which aims to improve faculty governance as well as to advance curricular change. With the support of a Teagle Foundation planning grant, the Consortium met in June 2014 to refine their proposal and lay the foundation for the larger initiative during a three-day conference held at VWC.
The summer meeting featured keynote speakers Dr. Robert Zemsky, author of Checklist for Change: Making Higher Education a Sustainable Enterprise (Rutgers University Press, 2013), whose keynote address questioned “Do We Know What We’re Doing?”; and Dr. Alvin J. Schexnider, author of Saving Black Colleges: Leading Change in a Complex Organization (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), who spoke about “Transformational Change.”
The Teagle Foundation works to support and strengthen liberal higher education, acting as a catalyst for improvements in teaching and learning in the arts and sciences.
*Image at top courtesy of The Teagle Foundation