Announcement from Valerie Lehr
Vice President of the University and Dean of Academic Affairs
August 18, 2008
I am pleased and excited to announce that St. Lawrence University is the recipient of a four-year, $150,000 grant from the Teagle Foundation. Our diversity requirement establishes a number of goals. To paraphrase the SLU catalog's language, a course meets the diversity requirement if its primary goal is at least one of the following:
1. to engage participants in the critical study of notions of difference and sameness.
2. to encourage comparative reflection about diverse social and cultural practices and beliefs.
3. to focus on an aspect of US diversity.
4. to provide an opportunity for acquiring knowledge about, or reflecting upon, a culture other than that of the United States.
As the proposal details, this grant will allow us to assess the extent to which we meet our goals. Part of this process will be to think about how we take such vague goals and turn them into learning goals for our classes. Because the Teagle Foundation was interested in projects that have the potential to improve students' cognitive development, we have defined our project so that our work in assessing diversity will be tied to developing mechanisms to assess critical thinking as well. We hope that faculty/staff interested in either diversity education or fostering and assessing critical thinking will participate in any of a variety of grant activities. We understand this grant as an excellent opportunity to help us to think about how assessment can be used to rethink curricular requirements so that we more clearly define learning goals and are able to understand whether students meet these goals.
Eve Stoddard will be directing this project. She will work with a Steering Committee composed of: Abye Assefa, Evelyn Jennings, Kirk Fuoss, Makiko Deguchi, Christine Zimmerman, Pat Alden, Margaret Bass, Karl Schonberg, and Erin McCarthy. The kick-off for the Teagle Project will be an afternoon meeting and dinner on Friday, October 3rd. I hope that you will plan to attend if you have any interest in this project so that you can learn more about the grant and the possible ways that you might participate over the next four years. If you are interested, but unable to attend on October 3rd, please let Eve know. You will receive more details about the kickoff meeting from Eve next week.
