Slide 1
How the NEH defines humanities (via fields)

• Ethics & Law
• Languages & Linguistics
• Archaeology
• Philosophy & Religion
• History
• Literature
• Art History

 
Interestingly, there's no room for writing in here. There's also little room for practitioners (e.g., no lawyers, no artists, no writers). Instead, there's a focus on modernist notions of critique and critical engagement.

Slide 2
Humanities Connections focuses on how the humanities connect with other fields
 
Slide 3
Deadline: 5 October
Funding: Up to $100,000
Duration: 18-36 months
 
Slide 4
Humanities Connections is a new program, so there's no data to draw from in terms of defining what works in past proposals.
 
Slide 5
The Basics
1.  At least 3 linked courses at a single institution
2.  Collaboration between fields/schools
3.  Student engagement outside the classroom
    
     Examples

• UG research (involving communities, archives or other organizations or locations off campus, etc.)
• service learning
• civic engagement projects
• internships

5.  The funding cannot be used to send faculty or
     students oversees
6.  The funding cannot be used to pay students
 
Slide 6
Resources

• NEH website
• Humanities Connections grant guidelines
• Program officers
  • bounce ideas off
  • help think through articulation/clarify thoughts
    

Slide 7
Stages of the review process

1. Peer review panel

• comprised of academics and reps from educational orgs
• provide ratings and rationales for each proposal

2. NEH staff

• go over panel results
• write funding recommendations
• present results to national council

3. National Council

• 26 people appoint by the president and confirmed by Senate
• make decisions n staff recommendations
• send decisions to chairman for approval

4. Chairman

• decisions announced in March

 
Slide 8
Grant Writing Tips
1. Prepare

• Read guidelines
• Talk to program officers
• Submit a draft proposal (due Sept. 5, 2016) to humaitiesconnections@neh.gov

2. Make your case

1. Start from the review criteria (section 5 in the guidelines)
   1. Intellectual quality
   2. Design quality
   3. Impact
2. Show the project's intellectual significance
   • First portion and most important part (but don't overlook the others)
3. Demonstrate the significance of your work plan and make sure to show how it's doable
   • Make it as concrete as possible
   • Walk through the project carefully
4. Demonstrate likely impact

 
Slide 9
Think about Your Audience

• Writing to the "educated generalist"
• Make your writing accessible and clear
• Avoid disciplinary jargon
• Address the review criteria
• Show reviewers that you know what you're doing

Make sure to demonstrate both a curricular Impact & Interdisciplinary Impact
 
Slide 10
Attend to Details

• Include all the necessary supporting materials, e.g., letter from admin supporting the grant initiatives
• Draft early and get feedback
• Proofread
• Ask for comments and reapply if the grant isn't accepted

 
Slide 11
Contacts

• Jinlei Augst: jaugst@neh.gov 202.606.8396
• Julia Nguyen: jnguyen@neh.gov 202. 606.8213
• humanitiesconnections@neh.gov

 
Questions
1. Only 1 proposal per institution?

• No

2. What does "long-term support" from admin
    mean?

• No projects that die when funding period ends
• Show buy in from the university and address long-term institutional impact

3. What counts as "linked" courses?

• Defined as connecting humanities to other fields
• Should be the crux of your intellectual rationale
• Can take place in one semester or across semesters
• The linked course should address a similar theme or question.

4. Deadlines?

• Final proposal: 5 October 2016
• Draft proposal (emailed to humanitiesconnections@neh.gov): 5 Sept

5. Can we submit drafts earlier?

• Yes, 5 Sept s the cut off.

6. Budget question

• Look at guidelines and sample
• Cannot use money for foreign travel
• Cannot use it to play students
• Not replacement pay for teaching
• Can use for things like summer stipends for faculty, to buy out courses for directors, etc.

7. How many proposals get accepted?

• New grant, so there's no data to base this on.

8. How substantial must course revision be (in lieu
    of creating new courses)?

• No firm guidelines
• They don't fund something that already exists or something that you will already be doing
• Consider how the funding will make something new possible    

9. Question about student engagement component
    related to study abroad

• Study abroad is excluded in the sense for funding travel, but you could set up prep courses for the study abroad

10. Budget question about seminars and outside
      speakers

• Bulk of the funding should be for infrastructure and planning, so that infrastructure continues to exist after the grant period ends
• Could use funding for a pilot or partnership
• Can use some funding for seminars and speakers, but it shouldn't be the bulk of the budget

11. Does the engagement have to be part of the
      courses?

• It needs to be a high-impact experience.
• It can be a companion to the course(s), but it needs to be substantial.

12. Question about PI

• Should be faculty member, not administrator
• Should be the Project Director/Co-Directors

13. UG or grad?

•  Has to be UG

14. Is there any UG research that isn't experiential
       learning/engagement?

• Yes, and that's not acceptable for the grant.
• (Think action research.)

15. Is cross-institutional collaboration ok?

• No. It should be within one university, but can be cross institutional in the sense of working with
  
• A community partner organization, archive, etc.

16. Do all students have to take all three courses?

• Not necessarily; it depends on how your institution wants to work that out.
• Be sure to make the case for your model.

17. Can faculty apply who are not on the tenure
      track?

• Yes

18. Another linked courses question...

• They need to be in different disciplines (and not all humanities)
  

19. Use funds for students?

• No

20. Working with NTT faculty...

• They can be included in the budget based on the amount of work they'll do.

21. Do all students have to do the engagement
      component, e.g., if they take one course and not
      the others?

• Yes. Don't design fail models. CE is REQUIRED! In fact, it's one of the main components of the grant, not simply interdisciplinarity.

22. Can the same person be on multiple proposals?

• Don't be stupid, and don't ask stupid questions.
• Of course you can; you just look unserious and hurt both proposals.

 

Over summer 2016, I'll be posting my notes on readings about institutionalizing community engagement. I'm beginning with Institutionalizing Community Engagement in Higher Education: The First Wave of Carnegie Classified Institutions edited by Lorilee R. Sandmann, Courtney H. Thornton, and Audrey J. Jaeger. Before I begin these posts, I want to set up why I'm reading this work. I was recently awarded the position of Faculty Fellow for Community Engaged Teaching & learning with St. Edward's University's Center for Teaching Excellence. In this position, I will document and assess community engagement work at the university. These steps are necessary in order to prepare our application to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and obtain the "Community Engaged Campus" designation.
 
Institutionalizing Community Engagement in Higher Education helps me understand the history of the designation, the issues that application processes raises, and how the first schools who were awarded the designation accomplished the task. In that sense and in light of my new position, I read the book(let) as a how to guide, but I am also deeply skeptical about what the designation is meant to achieve. Who cares about the designation, and why?
 
I care about it because: (1) it connects to my research; (2) the Faculty Fellow gives me some course reassignments, which in turn allow me to focus on my research interests if not on scholarship in particular; working at a 4/4 that places increasing emphasis on research and creative expression means that one has to figure out how to get that done with a demanding teaching load and hefty university service expectations; (3) I am sympathetic to arguments that undergird the "community engaged campus" designation, specifically that institutions of higher ed. should benefit their local communities and not simply draw from community resources to educate students or make them  marketable. All that being said, I am skeptical about what moving toward this classification does, that is to say how it forces a certain view of engagement onto universities, and this view is imposed  onto faculty and curricula, students, and people in places near the university (or wherever the university becomes "engaged"). From the outset, I note that the Carnegie guidelines are extremely explicit. They define community engagement in one way, and their criteria reach into and tinker with university identity, culture, and practices. That does not sit well with me.
 
My research on service in computer networks and my attempts to define networked engagement work against the idea that any one entity can codify concepts like service or engagement. I argue that we, as representatives of or administrators in institutions, can make moves to increase participation, that we can shape infrastructures to be useful to myriad people, and that this should be our focus, not pushing one particular definition, critique, or course of action. In other words, my research runs counter to my new position, or so it seems.
 
With all this in mind, I read Institutionalizing Community Engagement in Higher Education as a practical guide to work toward the Carnegie designation as well as challenge. This challenge reflects my desire to create an infrastructure for community engaged work at St. Edward's that allows for faculty and students to succeed in such work, however they define it and choose to pursue it. (As a note to myself, I'm immediately inclined to draw from feminist ethics of care and the rhetoric of care from St. Edward's mission statement to define engagement as care that takes many forms. It connects to my university's existing institutional identity, and I can use it to help faculty and students reflect on their work in ways that concepts like community engagement cannot. I'm sure I will come back to this later as I read more over the summer in prepping for my position.) Still, the Carnegie guidelines, or the folks who wrote them, argue that the designation and the points enumerated in the application provide a flexible framework that institutions should adapt for themselves. The authors' aim to help universities consider, from top to bottom, how to show value for community engaged work and to articulate best practices. For now, I'll take their word for it, having noted my skepticism.