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The Foundation currently makes grants in higher education, soliciting proposals in areas of interest to us from time to time. We have focused our grantmaking here in these major areas:
Outcomes and Assessment
The Teagle Foundation is giving high priority to systematic assessment of the outcomes achieved in courses, institutions, and whole sectors of higher education. While colleges already expend great effort in assessing what they do, through such means as teaching evaluations and program reviews, the systematic measurement of the value added in various settings of higher education is an area in which more can be done. Nothing, we believe, has more potential to affect students' educational experience as much as sustained and appropriate assessment of what they learn.
Our approach to assessment—which was shaped in part by Listenings with college and university leaders—begins with helping teachers in the classroom develop better models of how students learn and how specific academic disciplines can measure outcomes. To this end, the Foundation has made several rounds of grants that support faculty-driven, ground-up assessment of student learning. For more information on value-added assessment, see our Resources page.
Fresh Thinking
By fostering collaborations among institutions that support liberal learning (such as universities, liberal arts colleges, and national organizations), or among different constituencies at a single institution (such faculty, students, alumni, and trustees), we seek to stimulate fresh thinking about the goals of liberal education. The goal of this program is to produce and circulate fresh thinking on this issue. The collaborative work encouraged by the RFPs both recall Teagle's successful Collaborative Ventures program, and forwards the Foundation's work in liberal education.
The Teagle Working Groups in Liberal Education:
- Encourage in-depth analysis of issues of high importance for liberal education.
- Expand the empirical base upon which the understanding of such issues depends.
- Develop collegial relationships and networks among participants from different institutions, including small liberal arts colleges, and/or among different constituencies on a single college campus.
- Produce work that can be disseminated, so that the results of these analyses can be integrated into the practice of higher education.
The Teagle Forums in Liberal Education:
- Stimulate fresh thinking about liberal education, ultimately improving and enlivening the educational experience of undergraduate students in the liberal arts.
- Encourage exchange of ideas and build linkages between liberal arts colleges and places with the potential to help them.
- Produce a text that will deserve wide dissemination.
All groups meet regularly over a period of a year to eighteen months, and at the conclusion of the grant period, each produces a White Paper on the topic it has been exploring. These will be posted on this site as they are submitted, and may also be available in print. Permission will regularly be granted to authors, however, to publish the text in any additional place they choose on whatever terms they negotiate with other publishers.
Religious Work:
In the early years of the Foundation, Mr. Teagle urged the trustees to be sympathetic to appeals for support of "religious work." Since then the Foundation has helped seminaries and church-related colleges and charities of a wide range of denominational affiliations. In considering Mr. Teagle's injunction, the Foundation has recently been exploring the relationship between students' interests in and commitment to religion and their academic and intellectual engagement. We are especially interested in determining whether there are ways in which these two aspects of (some) students' experience can work together to produce a richer and deeper educational experience during the undergraduate years.
The issues surrounding such an inquiry, as we all know, are complex. In September, 2005, we convened a Listening to investigate this topic. At its February, 2006 meeting, the Foundation's Board of Directors approved a grant to the Social Science Research Council for a pamphlet on "What College Teachers Should Know about the Religious Engagements of Today's Undergraduates." See our Resources page for informative articles on work in this area.
We do not accept unsolicited proposals.
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