Dialogue Intensive Course Development Grant
This course development initiative is designed to enhance students’ skills in oral expression in courses across the Arts and Letters curriculum. The purpose is to provide students with opportunities to improve their verbal articulation, to defend ideas with facts/theories, and to create model courses that foster the fruitful exchange of diverse opinions. Courses of this type might include multiple formats, such as regular, student-led seminars; periodic debates (especially ones in which students are assigned a position to defend); oral examinations; group assignments, or assignments that involve oral skills, such as the use of interviews to collect evidence. The Kaneb Center is a good resource for developing these courses, specifically as it relates to identifying strategies and resources for encouraging students to speak in class.
To insure full consideration of your proposal,
1) describe the course content and delineate how dialogue intensive approaches will be incorporated into the course. It is important for the applicant to explain what new work will be involved in the preparation of this course.
2) provide an estimate of the percentage of the course grade that will be determined by oral performance and identify the tools that will be developed to evaluate student performance.
3) define the optimal number of students in the course and provide a justification.
4) speculate about what can go wrong in such courses (student silence, injured feeling, professorial lecturing and so on) and illustrate how the course structure will help to deal with each of these potential obstacles to dialogue.
5) indicate how the effectiveness of the dialogue intensive component of the course will be assessed and how that element might be enhanced in the following year.
6) describe how the course will enhance the teaching mission of the department or university.
7) address guidelines for course development proposals.
A letter of support from the chair of the applicant’s department must be attached to proposals in this category. Awardees will receive $3,500 in materials grant support.
Applications should follow the Guidelines for Course Development Proposals in the General Course Development category.