The Mellon Foundation Information Literacy Grant includes $225,000 for curriculum development awards for faculty. Each of the Five Colleges may award up to $40,000 to faculty over the three-year grant period. An additional $25,000 is reserved by the grant steering committee for potential awards involving one or more campuses and to have some additional funds available in case there is an unusually large number of viable proposals from a given campus.
Each campus committee will solicit from their faculty proposals for curriculum development projects and will be authorized to make awards totaling up to $40,000 under these guidelines during the three years of the grant.
The primary purpose of the curriculum development awards is to assist faculty in incorporating information literacy into courses in substantive ways, working in collaboration with an instruction librarian or librarians on their campus. The emphasis of the grant project is course development, not equipment acquisitions. Proposals focusing on course design, syllabus structure, content, and types of assignments are particularly appropriate. Awards will be made for either new course development or modification of existing courses. New courses must be authorized according to the relevant procedures at each institution. Projects should involve substantial integration of information literacy into the fabric of the course, rather than simply incorporate one or two relevant assignments. Both the proposals and the projects themselves should be developed in collaboration with a librarian or librarians or other information professionals.
Departments are especially encouraged to incorporate information literacy skill development throughout the course sequence required for the major. Coordinated proposals that involve more than one course in a department and that address information literacy skills at various levels of the curriculum are especially desirable. Collaborative projects involving faculty in the same academic discipline on two or more campuses of the Five Colleges are also particularly encouraged. Interdepartmental proposals that address information literacy skills development in more than one subject area (e.g., research methods for the study of literature across several humanistic disciplines) are also of interest, though of somewhat lower priority than coordinated proposals addressing the course sequence within a discipline.
A definition of information literacy, as well as resource materials that can be drawn on in developing proposals and projects, is available at the grant website: http://collaborations.denison.edu/ohio5/grant/.
Faculty curriculum development awards may be in the form of summer stipends or course release.
Stipend grants may be awarded in amounts up to $6,500 per project, depending upon the estimated time and the nature of the work involved in the project and the requested budget for incidental expenses. Such grants will usually be for summer stipends, but also may be awarded at other times. Larger grants are appropriate for new course development, projects involving coordinated efforts within departments, or collaborative efforts among faculty; smaller grants for modification of existing courses. The amount awarded for a given project will be decided by the local campus committee, depending on the committee's estimate of the nature of the project and the amount of faculty time involved. Applicable benefits and taxes will be deducted from the amount awarded in compensation.
Faculty who apply for course release grants must go through the normal approval process for receiving such release at their institution. Institutions may be compensated in amounts up to $6,500 per course release and may use those funds to hire replacement faculty and for other purposes directly related to the course release.
Each campus committee will publicize the availability of the curriculum development grants to their faculty according to their local needs and institutional schedule. The Steering Committee will develop a sample letter that can be used by each campus to announce the availability of awards.
A faculty member who wishes to receive a curriculum development grant should contact the campus committee to determine which librarian or information professional will be the collaborator on the project. Working with that librarian, the faculty member should develop a brief project proposal (2-3 pages). The proposal should include:
Each campus may award one curriculum development grant to a faculty member to develop a pilot project in collaboration with a librarian during the summer of 2000. The faculty member should submit a proposal for the project, but the award need not be made through a competitive process. The pilot project may also involve a collaboration among faculty. The amount awarded for the pilot project will be included in the $40,000 in grants available to each institution.
For each approved proposal, the campus committee should submit to the grant director and the executive director at the appropriate time:
RE 8/9/2000 rev 4/20/01