Cornerstone: Learning for Living- Planning Grants

The Cornerstone: Learning for Living Planning Grants, sponsored by The Teagle Foundation and NEH, aim to revitalize humanities education in higher learning. With a focus on transformative texts and faculty engagement, the initiative encourages diverse institutions to innovate general education. Grants up to $25,000 support curriculum reform and professional development, fostering a sense of belonging and community among students while enhancing their analytical skills and cultural awareness.

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.
Planning grants up to $25,000 over 6-12 months are strongly encouraged to lay the groundwork for successful curricular reform and faculty professional development.
Planning grants provide support for faculty at participating institutions to achieve the following:
establish criteria for inclusion of works of literature and philosophy and generate a consensus list of transformative texts, along with a policy for how texts from the consensus list will be used across sections of the gateway course, with an eye to creating a common intellectual experience for studentsdesign coherent pathways through general educationlay the curricular groundwork for the proposed program, including achieving any necessary approvals by the appropriate academic governance committeesengage the leadership and faculty of professional schools, where appropriate, so the program is accepted as part of their majors’ degree plansestablish a clear strategy for faculty professional development and scale-up, particularly to ensure there are enough sections of the course(s) designated as the gateway to your program to ensure a significant share of the incoming undergraduate student body participates in a common intellectual experiencewhenever possible, pilot courses featuring transformative texts

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