Bulletin News
04/01/2010
SUNY Cortland’s award-winning commitment to develop more well-rounded and civically engaged students will pick up speed with an initiative to assess and improve the quality of its programs, supported by a $100,000 Bringing Theory to Practice grant.
By accepting the two-year matching grant, which runs from July 1 of this year until June 30, 2012, the College’s Institute for Civic Engagement (ICE) agrees to launch a demonstration site for Bringing Theory to Practice (BTtoP), an independent project in partnership with the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), of which SUNY Cortland is a member. The Bringing Theory to Practice project is supported by the Charles Englehard Foundation.
The grant, which is intended to improve the well-being and academic preparation of SUNY Cortland’s students, will research a host of projects both inside and outside the classroom that incorporate high-impact learning practices to measure their effects on student learning outcomes, particularly indicators of well-being such as perspective taking, identity formation, emotional competence and resilience.
The term “high-impact learning” is used to describe a variety of engaged learning activities, whether performed in classroom or external settings. For example, students might engage in service-learning, undergraduate research, community-based research, senior theses, capstone courses, internships, international experiences and multi-cultural experiences.
“With this grant, the Institute for Civic Engagement is now able to add a research component to its program,” observed Richard Kendrick, who directs SUNY Cortland’s institute. “And we are including some of our newer faculty members in this project.”
“This project will advance the goals of the Presidents' Leadership Coalition for Student Engagement, which will learn much from the research design and findings,” observed Amy Henderson-Harr, SUNY Cortland’s assistant vice president for research and sponsored programs.
“Building upon SUNY Cortland’s history of engagement, we will deepen transformational change on our campus and in the lives of our students by intensifying the use of high-impact learning practices in the College’s three schools,” Henderson-Harr stated. “This effort should also further SUNY Cortland's top standing as a national model for engaged learning.”
Through this project, the institute will systematically examine the connection between high-impact learning practices and students’ flourishing at college, including the cumulative effects of such practices, Kendrick explained. In addition, the College will share with its peers in higher education findings about effective ways of deepening transformational change through high-impact learning.
The four grant reviewers, whof represent the AAC&U, The Charles Engelhard Foundation, and the BTtoP Demonstration Site Program, noted that SUNY Cortland was among the very few institutions to receive the highly competitive grant for which limited funding was available.
“Our approval of the proposal is based on our belief in the promise of your work to build capacity for engaged learning in ways that promote transformative learning affecting the psychosocial well-being of students and contribute to their civic development,” the reviewers wrote.
SUNY Cortland was one of only six institutions accepted out of more than 50 proposals to create one of the BTtoP Project's most rebust initiatives of campus support and research, a demonstration site. The other chosen campuses are: Otterbein College, Tufts University, the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, Georgetown University and Wagner College.
The new funding builds upon a $247,000 congressionally directed grant called “Building Community Leaders” that the institute received last fall to develop academic programs that will train tomorrow's community leaders and help keep young people in the state after graduation. This initiative is administered through the Fund for the Improvement of Post Secondary Education (FIPSE).
Kendrick expressed appreciation to the grant team which included Christopher Latimer, associate director of the institute and an assistant professor of political science; Edward Hill, assistant professor of recreation, parks and leisure studies; Barbara Shiplett, assistant professor of health; John Suarez, coordinator of service learning; and Lori Schlicht, associate director of advisement and transition and COR 101 coordinator. Hill and Shiplett will serve as the project’s lead evaluator and co-evaluator, respectively.