Course Development Grants to Enhance Notre Dame as a Catholic University
This initiative provides summer grants ($3,500) to Notre Dame scholars wishing to integrate insights from the Catholic tradition into new or existing (non-theology) courses in their disciplines. Faculty are invited to redesign existing courses or to develop new courses so as to make Catholic dimensions of the course material more prominent. Courses can be taught at the graduate or undergraduate level. For example, a course on religious themes in literature might be recast so as to intensify the Catholic focus, by choosing different authors or by focusing on specific themes. A course in the history of sociology might attend to the strongly religious orientations or concerns of three of the founding figures of sociology, Comte, Durkheim, and Weber. The goal of this initiative is to encourage faculty to think about their common undertaking in relation to the religious affiliation of the institution and to encourage students, in turn, to think about issues that touch on faith and that run across the disciplines.
Another option would be to create team-taught courses across colleges that bring faculty members from diverse fields together for a common intellectual experience with students. Ideally, such cross-college initiatives would be geared toward animating the Catholic ideal of the unity of knowledge across disciplines. We would also like to encourage faculty members, either as individuals or as teams, to develop capstone courses within their majors or across majors that attempt to view a particular discipline or set of disciplines within a broader context. For example, faculty members may offer a course that articulates where anthropology as a discipline lies in relationship to the other disciplines and the broader questions of philosophy and theology. This would allow students to experience something more holistic instead of the increasing specialization that is normally characteristic of advanced study. Course Development Grants to Enhance Notre Dame as a Catholic University are being generously supported by the Strake Endowment in the College of Arts and Letters. (Also see Seed Grants for Cooperative Projects; Teaching and Learning Communities for First Year-Students.)
Applications should follow the Guidelines for Course Development Proposals in the General Course Development category.