Oswego State University will improve its teaching of science, mathematics and technology through a three-year $450,000 project. The campus received word last week of $200,000 in funding from the National Science Foundation. Oswego is commited to providing $250,000 in matching funds. The project will aim to increase scientific literacy amoung all Oswego students and develop and improve courses in the new general education program.
The grant process was competitive, according to Jack Narayan, a member of the project team. The NSF complimented the Oswego team on strong support from campus leadership, especially from the president. The project is headed by six co-principal investigators: President Deborah Stanley, Naraan, Dean of Arts and Sciences Sara Varhus, Project Director Suzanne Weber of curriculum and instruction department, physics department Chair Roger Hinrichs and Director of General Education Douglas Deal.
The team has devised a five-pronged approach, focusing on courses improvement, professional development, partnerships, reward system and institutional structures. Top on the list is the improvement of courses for science majors and other students. Faculty members will be supported by the grant to strengthen existing courses and develop new, issues oriented, multidisciplinary courses for general education. The result will be a suite of required courses which will provide all students (majors and non-majors, women and minorities) with direct experience with inquiry in a collaborative setting and active learning of important science, math and technology concepts in a real world context, the team wrote.
Grant money will be used to sponsor faculty development activities to help faculty memebers collaborate with colleagues on multidisciplinary courses, to increase their awarenes of the new scholarship of pedagogy and to introduce practical stragegies for the classroom that will result in active learning for students. The grant will fund two summer institutes, in 1999 and 2000, where Oswego faculty can share ideas with each other and with consultants form other campuses working on similar goals. Already team members have met with colleagues from SUNY Binghamton, which has completed the second year of its NSF-funded “Science Across the Curriculum project.
Community partnerships will help professors learn what real-world approaches to problems can be infused into the curriculum. Businesses will benefit by employing graduates better trained in math and sciences. The grant team will advocate changes in the reward system for faculty to emphasize excellence in teaching as a priority. They will also encourage the scholarship of pedagogy on campus and multidisciplinary activities.
Finally, the grant will help streamline and augment existing institutional structures to sustain these initiatives over the long run and across all disciplines. Work on the grant began in the fall of 1996 and included more than a year of preparatory planning and discussion before the formal application was sent forward last October. A year of meetings among faculty members across the disciplines led to a writing team headed by Hinrichs and Weber and including Sewall Oertling of the art department, Joseph Lipsig of chemistry, William Bosch of computer sciences and the Center for Teaching and Innovation, Andrew Nelson of Rice Creek Field Station, David Thomas of earth sciences and Jean Chambers of philosophy, as well as the project’s principal investigators. Robert Schell and Pat Russo will do project evaluation.
Team members pointed out that the NSF-funded project will dovetail with the Auxiliary Services-funded LINKS project, which in 1998-99 will host guest lectures and colloquia on interdisciplinary themes.