Course Enrichment Grants (CEG), offered by the University of Virginia Library, provide support to faculty who would like to enhance their students’ ability to seek, evaluate, manage, and use information and data and create new types of media-rich class assignments.
Participating faculty receive $2,500 which can be applied to summer wages or a research account; and they get collaboration from a dedicated team of library specialists helping to develop active research and learning environments. The Library teams won praise in 2020 for their extraordinary efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic — the following are comments from just a few of the CEG faculty instructors in 2020:
“The reviews I got for this course this semester (Fall 2020) were some of the best I have gotten in my 8 years at UVA.”
“The projects included some of the best student work I have seen at UVA … students were truly excited about research.”
“Not only did the … students all learn a lot … I too learned more about these technologies and gained the confidence to use them in other classes.”
We’re delighted to have the opportunity to work with this year’s grant recipients:
Francesca Calamita, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, College of Arts & Sciences: First-year students of “Food for Feminist Global Thought” will learn how to develop connections between ideas covered in the seminar and everyday life through online and in-class cross-cultural reflections. They will also learn how to critically find, evaluate, and manage sources for their final presentation on food and gender across the globe.
Library team:
- Erin Pappas, Research Librarian for the Humanities
- Miguel Valladares-Llata, Librarian for Romance Languages and Latin American Studies
- Cecilia Parks, Undergraduate Student Success Librarian
- Bethany Mickel, Teaching and Instructional Design Librarian
- Leigh Rockey, Video Collections Librarian
- Christine Slaughter, Social Sciences Research Librarian
Yoon Hwa Choi, East Asian Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, College of Arts & Sciences: Students will be required to research Korean culture using authentic materials and create two 5 to 7-minute videos introducing their topic, in both Korean and English, to students with basic Korean language skills.
Library team:
- Wei Wang, Research Librarian for East Asian Studies
- Josh Thorud, Multimedia Teaching and Learning Librarian
- Bethany Mickel, Teaching and Instructional Design Librarian
- Brandon Butler, Director of Information Policy
Lisa Goff, English, College of Arts & Sciences: The course “Moving On: Migration to/from US” will include a course enrichment project designed to help the 25-30 class members better understand how their lives, and the lives of their families and friends, have intersected with migration in, to, and around the United States. We will partner with the Library to guide students in researching and documenting their own family trees, using genealogical tools and family interviews to trace their families back in time, as broad geographically as possible..
There will be other options — for example, tracing the family history of an historical figure — for students who are not comfortable with documenting the status of living family members.
Library team:
- Sherri Brown, Librarian for English
- Drew MacQueen, Geospatial Consultant
- Chris Gist, Geographic Information Systems Specialist
- Krystal Appiah, Instruction Librarian, Special Collections
- Jean Cooper, Metadata Librarian
- Bethany Mickel, Teaching and Instructional Design Librarian
Erin Putalik, Architectural History, School of Architecture: This project for a survey course in architectural history will teach students to find lesser-known representations of a single iconic work of early 20th century architecture, showing changes in the work or its context over the course of a half-century or more. Students will be taught to effectively use various image databases and develop annotated, image-based essays that challenge the ways these buildings are typically represented — as standing heroically outside of time, untouched by their human and environmental contexts.
Library team:
- Rebecca Coleman, Research Librarian for Architecture
- Bethany Mickel, Teaching and Instructional Design Librarian
- Ann Burns, Metadata Librarian
- Brandon Butler, Director of Information Policy
Hallie Richmond, English, College of Arts & Sciences: Students will design a virtual narrative that illustrates differences in student access to challenging and inclusive literary texts in K-12 classes across Albemarle County. The narrative will be housed in a new course website intended to serve English teachers who are seeking open educational resources related to reading and teaching literature of a challenging nature.
Library team:
- Brandon Walsh, Head of Scholars’ Lab Student Programs
- Sherri Brown, Librarian for English
- Ashley Hosbach, Education and Social Science Research Librarian
- Bethany Mickel, Teaching and Instructional Design Librarian
- Arin Bennett, Information Visualization Specialist
- Drew MacQueen, Geospatial Consultant
- Chris Gist, Geographic Information Systems Specialist
- Nancy Kechner, ADSTP Specialist
Jennifer Sessions, History, College of Arts & Sciences: Students in a new “Workshop” seminar for History majors will learn essential research skills by exploring the history of crime and scandal in fin-de-siècle Europe and building ArcGIS StoryMaps to organize, analyze, and present their research on a particular case study.
Library team:
- Keith Weimer, Librarian for History, Politics, and Religious Studies
- Drew MacQueen Geospatial Consultant
- Todd Burks, Teaching and Learning Librarian
- Bethany Mickel, Teaching and Instructional Design Librarian
- Leigh Rockey, Video Collections Librarian
Planning for this year’s projects begins in the summer 2021. The grants cover courses in fall of 2021, J-Term 2022, and spring and summer of 2022. Read more about Course Enrichment Grants.