Roy R. Charles Center

Mellon Teaching Fellowships

The QEP / Mellon Committee invites applications from faculty who wish to participate in a new Teaching Fellows initiative in either Fall 2008 or Spring 2009. With the use of funding from the Mellon Foundation, the primary objective of this program will be to employ advanced undergraduates to make it possible to increase the number and quality of “research” opportunities (very broadly understood) that are available to students in mid-level courses.

Each of about 10 participating faculty members will receive a stipend of $500 and funding for one or more Teaching Fellows, at $500 each, who will assist in their classes. These Teaching Fellows will help faculty add small-group or individual “research” experiences to sophomore- or junior-level courses that are otherwise too large for this to be a possibility. These research experiences may take place either as part of an established course, in a contemporaneous affiliated course, or in an affiliated course offered in the following semester. In addition, our plan is to honor all Mellon Teaching Fellows at graduation.

Faculty who are selected to participate in this program will recruit their own Fellow(s).

To apply, please send a letter of application to Joel Schwartz, Charles Center, by Friday, May 30, 2008. In 1-2 pages please briefly describe the course to which you plan to add a research experience, your initial ideas about the research project(s) that you would like to add to this course, and the role that the Teaching Fellow(s) would play in the projects. Please specify the number of Teaching Fellows (from 1 to a maximum of 3) that you wish to employ.

For a more detailed description of the Mellon Teaching Fellows Program, including some hypothetical examples, please see the following description.

History of the Program

Before the creation of the freshman seminar program in 1996, William and Mary students had few opportunities before the senior year to do sustained research projects. Since the institution of the freshman seminar requirement, the sophomore and junior years have become the weak link in the College’s commitment to active learning and undergraduate research. With the use of funding from the Mellon Foundation, Arts and Sciences has experimented with an undergraduate teaching fellows program since the 2005-06 academic year that is intended to make a modest but significant impact on the number and quality of research opportunities available to students in mid-level courses.

Working under the supervision of faculty mentors, approximately 20 advanced undergraduates will coordinate individual and/or group research projects in sophomore- and junior-level courses. The primary goals of this program are: (1) to enrich the learning of students in courses that currently lack research opportunities; and (2) to provide exceptional advanced students with a “sheltered” opportunity to experience the role of teacher.

Mellon Fellows

Faculty who participate in this program will have complete control over the selection of the Teaching Fellows who work for them. Fellows will usually be advanced undergraduates in the appropriate major; honors students and students who have already done well in the course would be logical candidates. Mellon Fellows will be honored with recognition upon graduation, and, with accumulated success and visibility, the program will become a distinguished, and distinguishing, feature of William and Mary’s undergraduate program.

Research Projects

While it is not uncommon for departments to hire undergraduates to lead problem sessions or help with grading, the purpose of the Mellon Teaching Fellows Program will be to supervise projects that will actively engage students in critical inquiry that will augment and enrich their course-related learning. “Research” is defined here in this broad sense, as the intellectual process of critical inquiry and discovery. It is not restricted, for instance, to laboratory or scholarly work that seeks to advance humanity’s knowledge in a specific field. Projects will involve the research process; this process may or may not be employed to discover “new” knowledge.

Four Hypothetical Examples:

A Teaching Fellow in a large Government or Sociology course might coordinate a survey research project that involves a group of 5 students in this course. This group might want to study the political opinions of William and Mary students or, perhaps, Williamsburg-area citizens on particular public policy issues. These students would investigate appropriate secondary literature, design and administer the survey, and report to the class as a whole on their findings.

A research group drawn from an appropriate Anthropology or Biology course might visit the Norfolk zoo to conduct research on primate behavior.

Teaching Fellows with strong foreign language skills could supervise language-based projects in a variety of departments. For example, a Fellow with strong Spanish skills could be assigned to a History course on Latin American history, or a Government course on Latin American politics, to coordinate a small-group project that involves the use of Spanish-language primary sources. The goal would not necessarily be to discover “new knowledge” about, say, the motives of political actors or the causes of significant events, but rather to involve students in the process of research -- in this case, the process of carefully reading, interpreting, and theorizing about the meaning and significance of important primary documents. Similarly, a Fellow in a course on ancient philosophy might work with a group of students with sufficient Greek skills to be able to work with one or more original texts.

A Biology faculty member, with the assistance of one or more Fellows who are currently conducting honors research in his or her lab, could organize a research project in a mid-level Biology course. The project could focus on a topic that is related both to the faculty member’s research and to the course’s subject matter. The project would demonstrate how research can be employed to answer questions that come up in the course, and it can also serve to recruit students who will want to work in the faculty member’s lab in the future.

While the four examples given here are group projects, it would also be possible for Fellows to supervise individual research projects.

Three Curricular Models

Faculty supervisors will choose which of three curricular models make the most sense for their circumstances -- the “embedded,” the “co-requisite,” and the “follow-up” models.

  • Faculty who select the first of these models will make use of a Teaching Fellow to embed one or more research projects into the mid-level course itself. For instance, the survey research project described above might replace the term paper for students who work on it.
  • But it would also be possible to recognize the work of research students by enrolling them in a separate, stand-alone (perhaps, 1-credit) research course. This is the co-requisite model. Under this model the students working on the survey research project would be required to enroll in both the designated mid-level Government or Sociology course and the stand-alone research course. The former would be a co-requisite for the latter.
  • Finally, a group of students who take the mid-level course in (say) the Fall term could enroll in a follow-up research course in the next (Spring) term.

Application Process and Compensation

Faculty who wish to participate in this program will be asked to submit a letter of application to the QEP / Mellon Committee. Each faculty mentor will receive a $500 planning grant. Each Teaching Fellow will receive $500 for each semester that he or she has teaching responsibilities.

For more information, please contact Joel Schwartz (1-2460; jxschw@wm.edu)