Swarthmore College
AC-7: Incentives for Developing Courses

In Fall 2012, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded Swarthmore College $591,000 to support a series of Tri-College activities in Environmental Studies, including establishing GIS expertise and curriculum; curriculum development workshops; course development; coordinated project-based learning opportunities integrated into the curriculum; and coordinated Tri-College events, such as capstone research project presentations, outside speaker series, and poster sessions. In addition, Swarthmore College received a million dollar match grant from Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Swarthmore received Mellon funding to support course development in ENVS, and courses developed included Our Food, GIS for Public Health, Visions of the End, Earth's Climate, and others. The Mellon proposal secured a matching grant funding an endowment that produces roughly $20K per year through the following: Course replacement and course development funds to increase flexibility and sustain depth of Environmental Studies offerings. The complicated logistics of teaching loads and core curriculum often lead to faculty who want to teach in interdisciplinary programs being unable to do so due to responsibilities to their home departments. We propose to establish a pool of funds that can be used to: • bring in a visiting instructor on a course‐by‐course basis to teach a departmental course, thus freeing a Swarthmore faculty member to teach an Environmental Studies offering • bring in a visiting instructor to teach an Environmental Studies course to supplement our faculty or to provide instruction when certain faculty are on leave. These funds are critical to the success of a robust Environmental Studies program. Swarthmore is committed to providing as many of these stipends and replacements as necessary to ensure a consistently substantial environmental studies program and to working with each affected home department to ensure that the key courses needed for their majors are taught and taught well."

These funds have been used to provide support for our faculty to develop a new course, learning new material and methods that may be far outside their areas of training. Thus we would also use these funds to provide a stipend, primarily for summer work, for Swarthmore faculty to develop new environmental studies courses or significant elements of courses or special projects. Faculty members are paid a $6,000 summer salary for course development.