This spring, the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning once again solicited applications for our Inclusive Pedagogy Grant. These grants invite faculty to revise an element of a course to more strongly reflect equitable and inclusive teaching practices. The Inclusive Pedagogy Grants support revisions that are smaller in scope than those that the 250^th Fund for Innovation in Undergraduate Education support.

This year, the McGraw Center funded ten proposals. Among the recipients are lecturers, fellows, and tenure-track faculty from across divisions. Each grantee will receive a modest honorarium for their work on their course. The McGraw Center ask that they share their experience by submitting a summary of the course modification and its outcomes to us by the end of the academic year and by participating in our faculty programs.

Several proposals reflect a desire to include a wider range of voices in course materials. Sujit Datta will use the grant to develop new modules for CBE/MAE/MSE 430: Squishy Engineering: Using Soft Materials to Solve Hard Problems; he will profile and invite as guest speakers women and individuals from underrepresented groups who are leading scientists and engineers in the field of soft matter. Tanushree Goyal will expand the use of community journalism documentaries in POL 357/SPI 314/GSS 399/SAS 357: Gender and Development to include regions beyond South Asia. Johnny LaForêt will revise the curriculum in Intermediate French to include writing by women of color from former French colonies with the goal of showing students “the complexity, the richness, and the beauty of the Francophone world at large.”

Several faculty members will use the grant to devise new assignments for their courses. Christopher Núñez will introduce an Audio Description project into DAN 326: Introduction to Vortex: A Sacred Dance Practice. Laurel Lorenz proposed an expansion of her “This I Believe” assignment in Experimental Molecular Biology, which asks students to reflect on how their guiding principles influence their perspectives in science. The grant will enable Fang-Yen Hsieh to develop a survey/interview project for Intensive Third-Year Modern Chinese II.

The grant will enable some faculty to alter their course’s structure—adding units or shifting their overall approach. Tehseen Thaver will create two units in Introduction to Islam: one on Islam in North America and another on Islam, gender, and sexuality. Marcus Lee will move AAS 306/POL 425: Black Politics Since 1965 to a case study model and revise the course’s assignments to encourage students to connect course materials to contemporary issues of their choosing.

Two proposals offered revisions that will support student access to STEM courses. Jesse Gomez plans to replace half of the homework assignments in Introduction to Cognitive Neuroscience with hands-on, interactive online coding notebooks designed to walk students through introductory programming. He hopes this shift will “lower the accessibility barrier into quantitative STEM fields such as neuroscience.” Jason Puchalla will implement a structured, one-on-one meeting schedule for the first two weeks of PHYS 108: Physics for the Life Sciences, where, as course director, he will meet with each of the students for a 10-minute introductory chat. 

Senior Associate Director Jessica Del Vecchio, who administers the grants, noted that she was “thrilled by the number and diversity of the proposals received this year and their demonstration of Princeton faculty’s commitment to equitable and inclusive teaching.”