Guidelines for Collaborative Research Projects
While research activities may involve collaborations with students and faculty across disciplines on a single campus, special priority will go to proposals focused on promoting collaboration across campuses and disciplines.
Each of these proposals should also address issues of dissemination and impact. That is, the proposal should outline methods to share the work of the collaboration with a wider audience, through web pages or other publications. The proposal also should outline how the collaboration might result in best practices or innovations that can be adopted more widely in post-secondary education.
All grant recipients will be expected to report to ACM about the accomplishment of the grant activity within a year of the award. For more information, see Guidelines for Preparing a Proposal.
Collaborative Research Projects can be funded in four areas:
A. Innovative faculty/student research collaborations that have the potential to demonstrate the effectiveness of new approaches.
These proposals should be able to make a case for innovative models of faculty-student research collaborations that can be sustained beyond the grant.
- One project funded by FaCE attempts to stretch the frontiers of faculty-undergraduate collaboration in two respects: 1) by completing a multi-year collaborative research cycle involving overseas field research; and 2) by contributing to the growing trend of treating student collaborators as junior colleagues rather than assistants. The project attempts a pedagogically bold approach that aspires to full-fledged faculty-student collaboration at every stage of the research process: project conception, literature review, research design, grant-writing, intensive fieldwork in Latin America, conference presentations, journal submission and revision, and publication of a co-authored article in a major peer reviewed journal, printed in time for Commencement. Thus, within the field of social science field research, this work aims to set a “best practices” precedent for a bold and innovative approach to student-faculty collaboration.
- Other examples might include projects that explore ways to export traditional scientific models of faculty-student research (including co-authorship) to other academic areas or that model ways to conduct experiential, project-based work (for instance, in areas such as human rights or environmental studies) with students. Proposals that bring together students and faculty from different campuses and disciplines are especially welcome. Faculty and students in the humanities might work together with primary sources in databases or textbases on research or editing projects that then are published in online form; students participating in off-campus study programs might explore ways to connect research projects back to the home campus as a way of shaping new kinds of international collaboration.
B. Research projects by several faculty that:
- Include either collaboration across colleges or collaboration across disciplines, and
- Have potential for continuation after grant.
While worthy projects may involve work on just one campus, FaCE Phase II especially seeks to promote collaborations that strengthen our consortial ties and build models that can be sustained. These collaborations may well arise out of Collaborative Events and will, ideally, lead to new programs, new and ongoing research projects, or new knowledge that highlights the synthesizing power of the liberal arts. Possible areas for collaboration include:
- Working groups that bring researchers together from a variety of disciplines to focus on pressing issues — human rights, human migration, genocide, global warming — and that offer means of pooling individual research together into collaborative syntheses. Similarly, researchers working individually on topics such as node patterns or visualization might find beneficial collaborations across disciplines that highlight the kind of synthesis especially characteristic of liberal arts colleges.
- Disciplinary interest groups that involve collaborative partners across institutions. This research might focus on pedagogical questions — for instance, humanities professors from three institutions conducting research in their classrooms and in the literature about effective discussion techniques or professors from mathematics, economics, and psychology collaborating on research about teaching statistics. Or it might involve several professors from a small department (e.g., Russian, linguistics) providing disciplinary support and critiques of ongoing research for colleagues at other ACM institutions — and then providing reflection and synthesis (through print or web publication) about the process, thus providing a model for other cross-institutional support for research.
C. Research collaborations that facilitate innovative on- or off-campus courses or programs with a multi-cultural or international focus that have the potential to become new models for the ACM.
These collaborations, like those in Area B above, will ideally connect colleagues from different institutions in the exploration of new models.
- One possible example: colleagues from 3 different institutions interested in issues of global warming, water issues, or aging develop a model for a research and travel course with interdisciplinary instruction and changing locations. The grant would support the forming of a course or program that could be explored and sustained as an ongoing project.
- Attendees at a conference on a topic such as Latino studies follow up with plans for courses that offer new strategies or approaches — and might be a model for other liberal arts colleges.
D. Projects addressing the scholarship of teaching and learning at residential liberal arts colleges that have the potential for allowing liberal arts colleges to create more effective and substantial learning for their students.
- Many of these projects may be in the form of traditional scholarship of teaching and learning (sotl) work. For example, the grant supported small grants ($500) for those presenting work at the “Innovations in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at Liberal Arts” conference at Wabash College in March 2009.
- Proposals might also arise out of other areas of FaCE Phase II. For instance, a project creating a new model of faculty-student research may provide an excellent platform for a scholarly project assessing student learning in that format.
- Creating knowledge about effective learning in the liberal arts college can also take the shape of working groups (as in area B above) that investigate a common pedagogical issue — effective uses of technology, better forms of lectures, effective question asking — and produce knowledge that can enrich the larger higher education community.
Proposals, funding, and organization of events
Typically, awards will range from $3,000 to $6,000 each; projects involving several collaborators and efforts to develop international courses or programs (Area C above) can be funded at a higher level, up to $15,000.
Funding will support the resources necessary for conducting research — supplies, travel, necessary accommodations for students during summer projects, and the like. Funding cannot be provided for student or faculty stipends or for institutional research. Campuses can submit two proposals for Collaborative Research Projects each year of the grant.
More details are available in the Guidelines for Preparing a Proposal.
Deadlines: Proposals for Collaborative Research Projects will be reviewed twice each year. Each campus sets its own internal deadlines for review and nomination prior to the Evaluation Committee's meeting; consult your FaCE liaison for details.
Please contact ACM Vice President John Ottenhoff with questions.