Macalester College
AC-7: Incentives for Developing Courses

Macalester recently received grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in order to fund a new initiative called “Mississippi River Watershed: An Immersive Humanities Curriculum. This project has a major focus on sustainability within the watershed. It allows for the development of transdisciplenary curriculum that facilitiates real-world experiential learning and problem solving to address major issues faced by communities along the Mississipi River. May of these issues lie at the intersection between race, environment, and natural resource extraction. Over the fall, 2022 semester students participated in a Study Away program in which they traveled up and down the Mississippi learning about environmental and social issues along the river

Macalester also has course development funds available to faculty. These funds are not specifically for sustainability but faculty regularly use them to develop sustainability-focused courses.

Finally, Project Pericles, a higher ed consortium that strengthens civic engagement,provided $4,500 grants to develop or revise science, math-cs, or social science courses with a civic engagement component for the 2021-2022 academic year (next year). Macalester is a founding member of Project Pericles.
An overview of the grant: The course can be taught in the sciences, math-cs, or social sciences either this spring or in the following academic year (Fall 2021 or Spring 2022). The civic engagement project should be developed in collaboration with a community partner or organization. The course has to engage at least one social issue identified by Pericles: climate change, education access, immigration, mass incarceration, public health, race and inequality, and/or voter engagement. For the 2023/2024 and 2024/2025 school years Project Pericles is focusing on supporting humanities courses and courses that are cross listed with humanities to incorporate communitity-initiated projects identified with local community partners into a course. These courses are designed to work with community partners to address a grand challenge such as climate change, economic justice, immigration, public health, and inequity. Last year, one of the courses developed with this funding was ENVI 337 Energy Justice which has the following course description: Energy Justice builds on the concepts of environmental and climate justice, with a focus on the visible and invisible infrastructures that produce, deliver, maintain and transform our economies and societies. We will chart social movements that have responded to both fossil fuel extraction (pipelines) and the transition to renewable energies. The course will also focus on citizen science as a tool for revealing injustice and promoting justice, such as the work of the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science, a non-profit that develops open source, Do It Yourself tools for community based environmental analysis. Students will work in small groups to support research for a local energy client. Students will also develop an independent research project over the semester using the Storymaps platform. Project pericles is also currently working with Macalester's geography department to integrate more civil engagmeent into courses.

Faculty whose proposals are accepted for the Project Pericles grant will receive funding of $4500 to be used for class activities, trips, materials, course development, stipends for community partners, even really creative ideas, There are also opportunities for professional development and engagement as part of the grant. Each of the Fellows who get the grant would be placed into a network of other faculty from Pericles colleges who are also working on class projects.