Dr. Phillip Payne and Dr. Gabriel Swarts led a successful grant application for a Connections Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Faculty from History and Adolescent Education will work with community partners to explore ways to develop innovative projects for students.
The official SBU press release:
ST. BONAVENTURE, N.Y., July 15, 2022 — St. Bonaventure
University has been awarded one of only 18 Humanities Connections Planning
Grants by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The $34,924 NEH grant will support a project titled “Collaborative Pathways
for Inquiry-Based Education: Piloting a Humanities Education Partnership.”
One of just 18 Connections grants awarded to universities
and colleges in the country, the project will initially focus on collaborations
between the Department of History and the School of Education, said Dr. Phillip
Payne, professor and Department of History chair.
Payne and Dr.
Gabriel Swarts from the School of Education developed the project proposal.
Swarts, who was named associate dean of education at Baldwin Wallace University
in May, will continue to serve as a consultant on the project.
The pilot phase
of the Collaborative Pathways project will promote student engagement with two
community partners — the Seneca Iroquois National Museum in Salamanca and Cuba
Circulating Library in Cuba, New York — with inquiry-based experiential
learning supported by technology in both history and education courses.
“Modern
technology will allow us to build bridges to experiment and build on existing
strengths. Working with our community partners allows our students to work on
real-world history projects that they can use in their careers. Working with
new technologies and techniques that are grounded in old-fashioned historical
archival work is exciting, and a process that will prove extremely valuable to
future educators,” Payne said.
“The curricular
innovations introduced through this project will strengthen history faculty
members’ understanding of the needs of education students, train both history
and education faculty members to incorporate inquiry-based experiential
learning activities and assignments into their courses, and better prepare education
students to teach history in the K-12 classroom,” Payne said.
The grant was a “natural fit” for St. Bonaventure, Swarts
said.
“We are incredibly excited to elevate the amazing work that
students and faculty are already doing with technology and their respective
disciplines,” Swarts said. “With the collaboration between history and the
humanities and education already strong, this grant will strengthen student
experiences and our relationships with community partners.”
If the pilot
project is successful, the university will scale up the project to incorporate
additional humanities disciplines and multiple institutions, Payne said.
The project planning team included Dr. Steven Pitt and Dr.
Lori Henning, assistant professors of history; Chris Dalton, history lecturer;
Dr. Tracy Schrems, assistant professor of adolescence education; and Bethanne
Chimbel, visiting assistant professor of adolescence education.
The planning team
will participate in professional development workshops and meet regularly to
explore ways to work together and use technology to facilitate inquiry-based
experiential learning in history and advance cooperation between faculty in
history and education. In the upcoming academic year, a history course and
education course will be paired in a virtual learning community to complete a
shared project with a community partner.
The project will
feature a technology-rich Humanities Hub to link project participants,
curriculum resources, and collaborative work and provide a platform for shared
research, analysis, and scholarship.
History was identified as the pilot academic program to
partner with the School of Education because approximately two-thirds of SBU’s education majors choose a concentration in
social studies education, which requires taking multiple history courses. Payne
said.
“Despite a large
number of cross-enrollments in history and education courses, we’ve
historically had little collaboration between history and education faculty,”
Payne said. “History faculty members lack understanding of the education
curriculum and pedagogical training that future teachers receive. At the same
time, humanities education needs to be integrated more intentionally into
education courses with a focus on how historians work.”
Additional goals of the year-long project include:
- developing
at least
seven stand-alone classroom activities or assignments that incorporate the
use of technology to promote inquiry;
- offering
two professional development workshops for faculty led by visiting
scholars on how to teach digital history and use technology to develop
experiential learning projects for courses.
By the end of the
project period, Payne said, the team will develop recommended strategies for
scaling up the curricular model and implementing it more broadly across
humanities disciplines and the School of Education.
______________
About the University: The nation’s first Franciscan
university, St. Bonaventure University is a community committed to transforming
the lives of our students inside and outside the classroom, inspiring in them a
lifelong commitment to service and citizenship. St. Bonaventure was named the
#5 regional university value in the North in U.S. News and World Report’s 2022
college rankings edition.
