Cornerstone: Learning for Living- Implementation Grants

The Teagle Foundation and the NEH are offering the Cornerstone: Learning for Living implementation grants to enhance the role of humanities in higher education. Aimed at revitalizing student engagement, the initiative supports diverse institutions in creating transformative curricula and fostering community. Grants of up to $350,000 over 24 months will fund faculty development, course redesign, and outreach efforts, ensuring sustainable humanities programs that benefit a wide array of students, particularly in STEM fields.

Background
The Teagle Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) are jointly sponsoring a grant program to revitalize the role of the humanities in general education.
The humanities are essential for the health of American civic life. Yet on many campuses of higher education, the humanities have been languishing, with declining numbers of students choosing to major in the humanities, declining enrollments by non-majors in many humanities courses, and widespread demoralization of humanities faculty.
Goals
The Teagle-NEH initiative aims to reinvigorate the role of the humanities in general education, and in doing so, expose a broad array of students to the power of the humanities; help students of all backgrounds build a sense of belonging and community; strengthen the coherence and cohesiveness of general education; and increase teaching opportunities for humanities faculty.
This initiative is dedicated to the proposition that transformative texts—regardless of authorship, geography, or the era that produced them—perform a democratizing function in giving students the analytical tools and historical awareness to interrogate themselves as well as the culture and society by which we are all partially formed. Such texts give students access to a wide range of lived experiences and form the basis for creating a common intellectual experience that fosters a sense of community.
Criteria for Project Proposals
Institutions will be selected based on the design and scale of their proposed programs.
A faculty-led and faculty-owned initiativeThe success of the Cornerstone initiative depends on the level of commitment of a broad array of faculty coordinating their efforts across departments. Funded projects are expected to involve significant participation from tenure-track humanities and other liberal arts faculty. This initiative is committed to diversity in the faculty who teach in the funded program and to diversity in the texts they teach.A common intellectual experience anchored in transformative texts for incoming studentsParticipating institutions are expected to embed transformative texts in a gateway course (or courses) aimed at incoming undergraduate students that engage them in enduring human questions and cultivate their written and oral communication skillsCoherent pathways through general educationParticipating institutions are expected to create coherent pathways through general education that link the humanities to students’ professional aspirations and provide social, cultural, and ethical context for their thinking about the fields they will enter after college. This may be achieved through thematic clusters of courses, guided pathways, certificates, or other tactics.Student reach, particularly for STEM and other pre-professional majorsProjects funded under this initiative should be designed to benefit a significant share of the undergraduate student body.SustainabilityGrants under the Teagle-NEH partnership are made in the expectation that once the formal grant period ends, should the piloted programs be successful, the costs associated with supporting those efforts will be absorbed by the participating institutions.AssessmentSuccessful proposals will include clearly articulated goals and appropriate means of assessment.DisseminationActive dissemination efforts will be important in order to spread the effects of the knowledge gained by grantees and practices to interested and influential audiences.
Implementation grants of varying amounts, up to $350,000 over 24 months, will be made to each funded project participating in this initiative. The size of the implementation grant award will be based on the scope of the project and whether it includes support for fellowships for doctoral students, post-doctoral scholars, and/or visiting faculty.
Implementation grants provide support for institutions to enact concrete plans for comprehensive and sustainable curriculum development or redesign efforts. They may be used as follows:
To provide one-time stipends for faculty time committed to developing their readiness to teach in core text based courses; course releases to design and implement general education pathways; and other similar expenses likely to arise in a major curricular reform effortTo defray the cost of outreach to academic advisors who help guide students in their course enrollment, particularly at large institutions where academic advising is usually carried out by professional staff instead of facultyTo support the work of recruiting students, addressing library resources, and similar expenses
Support for fellowships for pre- or post-doctoral scholars or visiting faculty will be made available on a limited basis to a select group of institutions that are prepared to contribute significant cost-sharing and are committed to funding the fellowships for at least one year in the post-grant period. Such fellowships are intended to help prepare future faculty, early career teacher-scholars, and faculty in tenured ranks to learn how to design and teach humanities programs that are relevant for non-majors. Though the fellowships may include modest allowances to support scholarly work, they should focus primarily on teaching.

Eligibility

This funding opportunity is available to regionally accredited private not-for-profit and public institutions of higher education. The Teagle-NEH initiative welcomes the participation of a diverse array of institutions—community colleges, liberal arts colleges, regional comprehensive institutions, and research universities.Institutions are entitled to recover indirect costs under the Teagle-NEH grant program. The appropriate federally negotiated indirect cost rate will be identified in consultation with NEH staff.Additional guidance on allowable costs will be provided to applicants who are invited to submit planning or implementation grant proposals