Grant of Almost $100,000 to Calvin Will Benefit Many

December 14, 2005 == MEDIA ADVISORY

Calvin College has received a grant of $99,340 from the Teagle Foundation, one
of five such grants given by Teagle to generate fresh thinking about how to
strengthen liberal arts education.

Calvin's project is titled "Strengthening Liberal Arts Education by Embracing
Place and Particularity."

Calvin director of community engagement Gail Heffner says the money will allow
Calvin to deepen current community partnerships and focus some academic work on
issues of greatest importance to the city of Grand Rapids.

"Calvin is embedded in a particular community with particular strengths,
issues and needs," she says. "The needs here, such as urban revitalization,
literacy, racial tensions and environmental concerns, create the context from
which our scholarship of engagement grows."

The Teagle-funded project will see Calvin convene a working group, composed of
faculty, administrators, trustees, alumni, students and community members, to
study the relationship between the liberal arts and the particularity of place.
 

Heffner says some key questions for the group will include:

How can the liberal arts tradition serve the common good in a particular
place?
How should this particular place (Grand Rapids) influence and shape the
liberal arts tradition at Calvin?
How can we use our city as text to strengthen liberal arts education?

At the end of the project Calvin will produce a white paper that will identify
how the liberal arts can influence the burgeoning civic engagement and
community-partnership literature and practice in higher education.

The college also will produce six city-based case studies for liberal arts
classes that will provide other institutions with not only the studies
themselves, but bibliographies of relevant theory that links liberal arts
content with the specific local issue, suggestions for how the case might be
used in courses, as well as pedagogical suggestions for individual or
team-based work, and suggestions for how to involve community leaders in the
design of a locally situated study.

The idea behind the grants, says W. Robert Connor, president of the Teagle
Foundation, is to strengthen liberal arts education not only on the campuses
that earned the recent grants, but also beyond those campuses.

Other colleges receiving grants are College of Saint Benedict/Saint Johns
University; Lawrence University; Mount Holyoke College; and Wheaton College
(MA).

This round of Teagle Foundation grants also includes $500,000 to Dillard
University and $100,000 for Tulane University to support efforts to recover
from damage caused by hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Please visit www.teaglefoundation.org for more information on the Foundation
and its programs

Contact Gail Heffner at 616-526-6940

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Received on Wed Dec 14 15:52:35 2005