In the penultimate round of grantmaking through the Broadening the Bridge project supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, St. Olaf Provost and Dean of the College Marci Sortor and Carleton Dean of the College Beverly Nagel have announced seven new collaborative awards worth a total of $73,840.

Karil Kucera (Art and Art History/Asian Studies, St. Olaf) and Kathleen Ryor (Art and Art History/Asian Studies, Carleton) received a grant to continue their joint efforts to use the colleges’ museum resources in art history and Asian studies courses. Ryor and Kucera will develop course units and projects using the East Asian art collection at the Flaten Museum for seven courses at Carleton and St. Olaf.

Julie Neiworth (Psychology/Neurosci, Carleton) and Jessica Petok (Psychology/Neurosci, St. Olaf) will use funding to work on a cross-registered course at St Olaf/Carleton called “Neuropsychology of Aging” that examines how the brain and cognition change in healthy and pathological aging. The course will include lab activities, work with animal models, and community outreach to the Northfield Senior Community.

Under the direction of Dale Kruse (Music, St. Olaf) and Victoria Vargas (Music, Carleton), students from Carleton and St. Olaf will collaborate on producing and performing an original opera, Swede Hollow, by Minnesota composer Ann Millikan.

With the goal of educating students about agriculture and assessing farm conservation measures, Kathleen Shea (Biology, Environmental Studies, St. Olaf) and Mary Savina (Geology, Archaeology, and Environmental Studies, Carleton) will work with a student from each college to establish a continuing and ongoing framework of courses and student/faculty research on local farms.

Neil Lutsky (Psychology, Carleton), Donna McMillan (Psychology, St. Olaf), and Janet Lewis-Muth (Office of Health Promotion, Carleton) received a second Broadening the Bridge grant to strengthen collaborations on positive psychology, both within and beyond courses in psychology, and to stimulate campus-wide discussions of the implications of positive psychology for faculty and student well-being and learning.

Laska Jimsen (Cinema & Media Studies, Carleton) and Peter B. Nelson (Studio Art, St. Olaf) will capitalize on areas of shared interests and complementary expertise to expand media arts offerings at both colleges through co-teaching, strategizing about distribution and exhibition opportunities, and facilitating shared visits from media artists.

In the fall, Provost Sortor and Dean Nagel will solicit applications for a final round of grants to support collaborative curricular grants.

St. Olaf Provost and Dean of the College Marci Sortor and Carleton Dean of the College Beverly Nagel have announced the eighth round of collaborative grants through the colleges’ “Broadening the Bridge” grant project, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

In this round, the Broadening the Bridge grants committee made seven grants, three to support new projects and four to advance ongoing efforts. The final call for proposals for “Broadening the Bridge” grants will occur in spring 2018.

Kim Smith (Environmental Studies, Carleton), Doug Casson (Political Science, St. Olaf), and Serena Zabin (History, Carleton) received a grant to begin planning a three-year series of faculty development and public events on constitutional law, constitutional history, and relationship between historical scholarship and public law.

Seth Peabody and Amanda Randall (German, St. Olaf) and Juliane Schicker (German, Carleton) will use Broadening the Bridge funding to deepen collaboration between the colleges’ German programs through a joint student-faculty research project in advanced courses, a series of events focused on critical issues in Germany today, and a long-term project to develop a collaborative exchange program on issues of environment and identity both abroad in Germany and on campus in Minnesota.

Jay Beck & Cecilia Cornejo (Cinema and Media Studies, Carleton) and Linda Mokdad & Bjorn Nordfjord (Film Studies & English, St. Olaf) received a grant to support a visit to the campuses in winter 2018 by a well-known international filmmaker. The director will work with film studies and production students through sustained visits to classes at both colleges, a workshop for students interested in film production, and a filmmaking contest. Another filmmaker will visit the campuses later in the year.

Shelly Dickinson (Psychology/Neuroscience, St. Olaf) and Sarah Meerts (Psychology/Neuroscience, Carleton) received support to continue’ efforts to develop a collaborative neuroscience major, which would enhance educational opportunities for students in numerous departments and promote increased faculty interaction around both teaching and research.

A large team of faculty in musicology, ethnomusicology, and music theory will use Broadening the Bridge funding to advance three initiatives that span disciplines: (1) a speaker series, (2) faculty seminars, and (3) a student symposium like one offered with grant funding in 2015. These initiatives will build community and coordinate research and writing development among both faculty and upper-level students in music. The team includes Louis Epstein, David Castro, and James Palmer at St. Olaf and Andrew Flory, Melinda Russell, and Ronald Rodman at Carleton as well as Megan Sarno, who teaches at both colleges.

William North (History and Medieval & Renaissance Studies, Carleton) and Chris Brunelle (Classics and Medieval Studies, St. Olaf) will build on the coincidence of medieval Latin courses in early 2018 by using grant funding to develop collaborative course elements and catalyze broader conversations among colleagues in Classics, History, and Religion.

Anne Walter (Biology, St. Olaf) and Arjendu Pattanayak (Physics, Carleton), in collaboration with numerous other faculty and staff, will use grant funding to exchange and improve the colleges’ practices in preparing students for off-campus study programs on the Indian subcontinent, for work while there, and for processing their experiences on return. The team plans to promote contact between students on both campuses as they study in India and to create shared resources for preparing them for travel in India.

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Carleton Dean of the College Beverly Nagel and St. Olaf Provost and Dean of the College Marci Sortor have announced the seventh round of collaborative grants through the colleges’ “Broadening the Bridge” grant project, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In this round, the Broadening the Bridge grants committee made eight new collaborative grants for a very wide range projects. The next – and penultimate – call for proposals for “Broadening the Bridge” grants will occur in fall 2017.

Kim Smith (Environmental Studies, Carleton) and Kathy Shea (Biology and Environmental Studies, St. Olaf) received a grant to continue their collaborative environmental studies work at the Prairie Creek Wildlife Management Area in rural Rice County. Through study of the site’s history, ecology, and restoration plans, students in Smith’s and Shea’s courses, as well as a number of other courses, will enhance the site’s value to the public and lay a foundation for future collaborative civic-engagement projects at Prairie Creek.

Amanda Randall (German, St. Olaf) and Juliane Schicker (German, Carleton) will use a Broadening the Bridge grant to advance joint program development and curriculum innovation in German at the two colleges. By attending a professional conferences and by visiting the German department at a similar liberal-arts college, Randall and Schicker will develop their own leadership skills, identify best practices, and obtain concrete guidance on St. Olaf’s and Carleton’s curricula and programs.

Associate Deans Mary Walczak (St. Olaf) and Gretchen Hofmeister (Carleton) received support to offer a workshop in summer 2017 on “high impact teaching practices” in the STEM disciplines, sharing knowledge about these practices, fostering connections among the colleges’ STEM departments, and building capacity for future collaborative work in STEM. In building on existing resources and expertise, the workshop will lead to the creation of inter-campus faculty learning circles whose members will gain experience in new pedagogical practices.

Donna McMillan (Psychology, St. Olaf), Neil Lutsky (Psychology, Carleton), and Janet Lewis-Muth (Office of Health Promotion, Carleton) were awarded a grant to capitalize on their shared interests and expertise in positive psychology. The will develop, implement, and evaluate means to weave positive psychology into the psychology departments’ offerings, beginning with attendance at a major international conference on positive psychology in summer 2017. They will then explore curricular collaborations such as teaching exchanges or common activities (e.g., visiting speakers and student projects) as well as co-curricular practices such as Carleton’s “Happy Hour” program.

Jamie Schillinger (Religion/MES, St. Olaf) and Noah Salomon (Religion/MES, Carleton) received support for the next phase of cooperation between the Carleton and St. Olaf Middle East Studies programs: linking two pairs of related courses (one in French, one in religion), sponsoring an inter-campus Middle East film series, bringing at least one visiting expert to the colleges, and coordinating the program websites and event calendars.

A team of faculty and staff (Carleton: Marty Baylor and Tom Baraniak in Physics and Paula Lackie in ITS: St. Olaf: Brian Borovsky and Devin Lackie in Physics) received another grant to finalize the development of a joint database of the departments’ equipment, from teaching-demonstration devices to research instruments.

The college registrars, Emy Farley at Carleton and Steve McKelvey at St. Olaf, received funding to offer another round of training for faculty and staff on the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), aiming to educate the campus communities on the basics of FERPA law and practice and to better guide the institutions on appropriately applying FERPA. Specifically, the registrars and their staffs will develop an online FERPA quiz for use by faculty and staff (especially those who are newly hired) and form a working group to analyze the colleges’ record retention and destruction policies and practices, recommending changes where necessary as well as means to train faculty and staff on this issue.

Library directors Roberta Lembke (St. Olaf) and Brad Schaffner (Carleton) received a grant to organize a series on “The Future of Publishing” during the 2017-2018 academic year. Open to faculty, staff, and students, the series will offer an overview of the forces likely to shape publishing in the next decade, such as the increasing ease and acceptance of born-digital publishing, the growth of digital publishing as a pedagogical tool, the changing rights of content producers and consumers, and the ethical challenges facing information access and preservation. The series will support subsequent development by the libraries of new research tools.

Paul Roback (Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science, St. Olaf) and Katie St. Clair (Math & Statistics, Carleton) will use a grant to jointly develop a common set of case studies, assignments and projects for a course in Data Science. Working together but also consulting with colleagues in their departments, St. Clair and Roback will produce materials such as in-class examples, homework sets, and larger projects to address real and interesting questions for use in the college’s statistics courses. They hope to build towards a jointly-offered course in Data Science.

Carleton Dean of the College Beverly Nagel and St. Olaf Provost and Dean of the College Marci Sortor have announced the sixth round of collaborative grants through the colleges’ “Broadening the Bridge” grant project, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In this round, the Broadening the Bridge grants committee made nine new collaborative grants:

Deborah Appleman (Educational Studies, Carleton) and Heather Campbell (Education, St. Olaf) will receive one course release each for a project during the 2016-2017 academic year to align their departments’ education licensure processes and curricula.

Steve Richardson (Director of the Arts, Carleton) and Janice Haws Roberts (Dance, St. Olaf) received a grant to complete planning for a major collaborative arts project under the direction of guest artist Stephan Koplowitz. Building on work funded by Broadening the Bridge in 2015-16, they will finalize arrangements with Northfield community collaborators and agree on the roles and contributions of Carleton and St. Olaf faculty and students. By the end of the 2016-17 academic year, the entire framework of the project will be established and ready for production during 2017-18.

Kristin O’Connell (TRIO-SSS, Carleton) and Matt Richey (Mathematics and Statistics, St. Olaf) will use grant funding to launch an “Inclusive Excellence in Science and Mathematics” speaker series which will bringing distinguished visitors to campus to highlight the important achievements and perspectives of underrepresented scientists and mathematicians. The visitors’ addresses and other campus activities will increase student participation in science and mathematics at St. Olaf and Carleton.

Jay Beck & Cecilia Cornejo (Cinema and Media Studies, Carleton) and Linda Mokdad & Bjorn Nordfjord (Film Studies & English, St. Olaf) received a pair of grants to advance projects related to teaching and learning about film. With one grant, they will sponsor a field trip by film students and faculty to the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival in April 2017. With the second grant, the team will engage a prominent international filmmaker to offer a one- to two-week teaching workshop in Northfield, collaborating with film studies and production students at the colleges.

Shelly Dickinson (Psychology/Neuroscience, St. Olaf) and Sarah Meerts (Psychology/Neuroscience, Carleton) received two grants to advance a project that will reshape the colleges’ neuroscience curriculum. They will develop and offer in fall 2017 a jointly-taught capstone seminar for senior neuroscience students, orienting the course around that winter’s Society for Neuroscience conference. They will then attend the conference with the capstone students and subsequently work with each other and other neuroscience faculty to center research in the neuroscience curriculum.

Heather Campbell and Jill Watson (Education, St. Olaf) and Anita Chikkatur (Education Studies, Carleton) will design a co-enrolled civic-engagement course for St. Olaf and Carleton students focused on a topic relevant to community partners in the nearby town of Faribault, Minnesota.

A team of faculty and staff in the colleges’ physics departments and IT organizations – Marty Baylor, Tom Baraniak, and Paula Lackie (Carleton), Brian Borovsky and Devin Lackie (St. Olaf) – will create a web interface for a common, searchable catalog of equipment and other resources that can be shared between the two departments.

The next call for proposals for “Broadening the Bridge” grants will occur in spring 2017. As in the previous rounds, successful applications will propose projects that explore curricular collaboration and efficiency, especially by linking departments and programs, and that aim to achieve durable, long-term effects.

Carleton Dean of the College Beverly Nagel and St. Olaf Provost and Dean of the College Marci Sortor have announced the fifth round of collaborative grants through the colleges’ “Broadening the Bridge” grant project, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In this round, the Broadening the Bridge grants committee made eleven new collaborative grants:

Deborah Appleman (Educational Studies, Carleton) and Heather Campbell (Education, St. Olaf) will receive one course release each for a project during the 2016-2017 academic year to align their departments’ education licensure processes and curricula.

Registrars Emy Farley (Carleton) and Steve McKelvey (St. Olaf) will use a grant to offer an intensive, multi-departmental workshop on the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) to a broad group of faculty and staff. Facilitated by an outside expert, the workshop will include a review of best practices to help ensure that policies and procedures across campuses are adequately protecting education records.

Art historians Karil Kucera (St. Olaf) and Katie Ryor (Carleton) received a third grant to advance their long-term work on the colleges’ Asian art holdings and curricula. With this grant, Karil and Katie will help prepare materials for students of both colleges to launch a jointly-curated show of Chinese art materials from the St Olaf collection in fall 2016 and create processes for curating additional exhibitions in upcoming years.

Philosophers Daniel Groll (Carleton) and Jason Marsh (St. Olaf) received a second grant to continue their efforts to combine their medical ethics classes while also working to establish a bioethics internship for two students at a leading bioethics center in the United States.

Wendy Allen (St. Olaf) and Juliane Schicker (Carleton) will, with their colleagues in the colleges’ German departments, use Broadening the Bridge funding explore curricular and co-curricular collaboration between the departments, including course options on both campuses and study and internships abroad.

Marty Baylor (Physics, Carleton) and Brian Borovsky (Physics, St. Olaf) received a second grant to catalog the equipment and other resources that can be shared between the physics departments at the two campuses.

Laura Goering (Russian, Carleton) and Marc Robinson (Russian, St. Olaf) received funding to support joint field trips by the colleges’ Russian students to venues in the Twin Cities, a step toward broader collaborations between the departments’ faculty and students.

Biologists Jean Porterfield (St. Olaf) and Dan Hernandez (Biology, Carleton) will use a grant to align their research collaborations on the prairies at the St. Olaf Natural Lands and Carleton Cowling Arboretum, connecting their upper-level ecosystems and evolutionary genetics courses in fall 2016 but also fostering links between other biology courses at the colleges.

Janice Roberts (Dance, St. Olaf) and Judith Howard (Dance, Carleton) received additional funding to continue planning by arts faculty and staff for a major site-based performance project that will occur in Northfield in April 2018 under the direction of Stephan Koplowitz, a nationally prominent director/choreographer and the dean of the School of Dance at the California Institute of the Arts.

Noah Salomon (Religion, Carleton) and Jamie Schillinger (Religion, St. Olaf) will use collaborative grant funding to develop a new approach to Middle East Studies at the colleges, reconceptualizing that field’s goals through a focus on the liberal arts strengths at both colleges and on deeper, more creative sharing of resources.

Kim Smith (Environmental Studies, Carleton) and Kathy Shea (Biology and Environmental Studies, St. Olaf) will use grant funding to advance collaborative environmental studies research with a team of undergraduate students who are enhancing the value of a local wildlife management area.

The next call for proposals for “Broadening the Bridge” grants will occur in fall 2016. As in the previous rounds, successful applications will propose projects that explore curricular collaboration and efficiency, especially by linking departments and programs, and that aim to achieve durable, long-term effects.

St. Olaf Provost and Dean of the College Marci Sortor and Carleton Dean of the College Beverly Nagel are pleased to announce the fourth round of grants to faculty teams through the colleges’ “Broadening the Bridge” grant project, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This round – the largest yet – includes ten new collaborative grants with a total value of $61,741.

Psychology professors Ken Abrams and Sharon Akimoto (Carleton) and Grace Cho, Dana Gross, and Anna Johnson (St. Olaf) will develop and coordinate academic civic and community engagement assignments that enhance psychology students’ opportunities for experiential learning in and beyond Northfield.

A broad team of fine arts faculty, led by dance faculty Janice Roberts (St. Olaf) and Judith Howard (Carleton), will work with artist Stephan Koplowitz to develop plans for a large performance art work to be launched in spring 2018. The site-specific art will involve faculty, students, and staff of both colleges as well as arts-minded members of the broader Northfield community and would centrally concern the town and its unique history and places.

A team of faculty and staff in the physics departments (Marty Baylor and Tom Baraniak in Physics and Paula Lackie in ITS at Carleton; Brian Borovsky and Devin Lackie in Physics at St. Olaf) will work together to create a common, searchable, catalogue of equipment and other resources that can be shared between the physics departments at the two campuses.

Physicists Marty Baylor, Jason Engbrecht, and Brian Borovsky will guide an inter-collegiate team of 16 students who will compete in the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition, strengthening both institutions’ engineering opportunities and improving the colleges’ capacities to sustainably participate in future engineering competitions.

Ceramics faculty and staff Kelly Connole, Juliane Shibata, Kate Fisher, and Ron Gallas will extend a previously-funded project by hosting artists who can provide Carleton and St. Olaf ceramics students with new opportunities to do atmospheric firing in the colleges’ unique kilns.

Leading a broader group of neuroscience faculty, Jay Demas (Physics/Biology/Neuroscience, St. Olaf) and Sarah Meerts (Psychology/Neuroscience, Carleton) will plan a series of neuroscience colloquia and faculty dinners to foster conversation among faculty and students of Carleton and St. Olaf, aiming in the near term to promote cross-campus neuroscience course registrations and research.

Photography professors Meg Ojala (Art, St. Olaf) and Linda Rossi (Art, Carleton) will jointly develop shared modules for a course in spring 2016 that will require students to study nature aesthetics, natural history, and photographic theory as they explore and shoot the local landscape. This pilot project will provide build momentum toward a team-taught course with an academic civic engagement component in fall 2017.

An interdisciplinary team of faculty members interested in public health – Amna Khalid (History, Carleton), Debby Walser-Kuntz (Biology, Carleton), Anne Walter (Biology, St. Olaf), and Tom Williamson (Sociology/Anthropology, St. Olaf) – will gather other interested faculty and staff from both campuses to share expertise in public health, to learn from invited public health professionals, and to explore ways to develop additional resources for our students, including the eventual development of a new cross-campus introductory course in public health.

Mathematicians Rob Thompson (Carleton), Marju Purin (St. Olaf), and Joseph Benson (St. Olaf) will guide a team of St. Olaf and Carleton students as they participate in a worldwide mathematical modeling competition, applying mathematics to real world problems ranging from eradicating ebola to solving sudoku puzzles.

Film scholars Jay Beck and Cecilia Cornejo (CAMS, Carleton) and Linda Mokdad and Björn Nordfjörd (English, St. Olaf) will explore curricular collaborations – shared courses, guest speakers, film series, and course modules – between Carleton’s Cinema and Media Studies Department and the St. Olaf’s Media and Film Studies Program.

The next call for proposals for “Broadening the Bridge” grants will occur in spring 2016. As in the previous rounds, successful applications will propose projects that explore curricular collaboration and efficiency, especially by linking departments and programs, and that aim to achieve durable, long-term effects.

St. Olaf Provost and Dean of the College Marci Sortor and Carleton Dean of the College Beverly Nagel are pleased to announce the third round of grants to faculty teams through the colleges’ “Broadening the Bridge” grant project, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Daniel Groll and Jason Marsh (Philosophy) will align their courses on medical ethics in winter 2016 by developing shared course modules, reciprocally visiting each other’s courses, and convening their students (and others) for sessions with an outside expert on medical ethics.

Kathleen Ryor and Karil Kucera (Art and Art History) will work over summer 2015 to plan jointly-curated exhibition on Japanese art that will be held at St. Olaf in fall 2016, coinciding with courses to be offered then on American collecting of Asian art (Prof. Kucera) and the arts of the Japanese tea ceremony (Prof. Ryor).

Mary Trull and Peter Balaam in English will design a collaborative course module on cultures of science in the Renaissance and Enlightenment. The module will center on rare books held in Carleton’s and St. Olaf’s libraries and will serve as as a springboard for deeper collaboration in their parallel courses on “Literature and Science,” to be offered in Fall 2017.

A team of female scientists including Mary Walczak, Dana Gross, and Anne Walter from St. Olaf and Julie Neiworth and Gretchen Hofmeister from Carleton will lead conversations aimed at fostering professional networks for women in STEM, laying the foundation for a wide range of research and pedagogical collaborations.

Rob Hardy and Anne Groton in Classics will broaden and deepen their departments’ partnership to offer an after-school Latin Club for at Greenvale Park Elementary School. The club introduces elementary school children to basic conversational Latin, to Roman culture, and to classical mythology, but also provides an undergraduate classics students with an opportunity to share their own knowledge of Latin in making a positive contribution to the Northfield community.

Gary Muir and Fred Hagstrom, the directors of the teaching & learning centers at the colleges, will lead an effort to widen conversations around the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) by creating a collaborative, year-long learning community for faculty engaged in SoTL projects, one which will culminate in participants presenting their work at a national conference in early 2016.

The next call for proposals for “Broadening the Bridge” grants will occur in fall 2015. As in the previous three rounds, this round will emphasize four priorities:

• Exploring curricular collaboration and efficiency;
• Advancing connections among departments and programs;
• Sharing equipment and resources; and
• Achieving durable, long-term impact.

St. Olaf Provost and Dean of the College Marci Sortor and Carleton Dean of the College Beverly Nagel are pleased to announce the second round of grants to faculty & staff teams through the colleges’ “Broadening the Bridge” grant project, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

As in the spring, this second “Exploration Round” of funding emphasized four priorities:

• Exploring curricular collaboration and efficiency;
• Advancing connections among departments and programs;
• Exploring sharing of equipment and resources; and
• Looking to achieve long-term impact.

The funded projects all meet these priorities, covering topics from Gothic art to immigration to Northfield and from off-campus study programs to science-teacher preparation. The third round of funding, to be run in late winter 2015 for projects over the summer, will continue to support projects like these but further emphasize projects with ambitious long-range goals.

Baird Jarman at Carleton and Nancy Thompson at St. Olaf will team-teach a new course, “Religion, Royalty & Romantics: The Gothic and the Gothic Revival,” in fall 2015. Course development began in summer 2014 with an initial Broadening the Bridge Grant and will continue through summer 2015 with the current grant. The course will be open to both St. Olaf and Carleton students and will capitalize on Baird’s and Nancy’s complementary expertise in the Gothic.

A team of music faculty – Louis Epstein, David Castro, Tiffany Ng, and Jeff Trevino at St. Olaf and Melinda Russell and Andrew Flory at Carleton – will plan and stage a one-day symposium in spring 2015 for upper-level St. Olaf and Carleton students doing original research in music. In addition to offering a venue for students to discuss their research with each other and with faculty, the symposium will include performances of student compositions and a keynote address by a nationally respected scholar.

The staffs of the colleges’ off-campus studies offices, led by Helena Kaufman at Carleton and Jodi Malmgren at St. Olaf, will convene in December 2014 to explore joint off-campus study programming by the colleges, laying the foundation for innovative, collaborative and interdisciplinary off-campus study program models. Kaufman and Malmgren anticipate submitting a follow-up grant for a larger, more focused project in the spring.

Katherine Tegtmeyer Pak in Political Science at St. Olaf and Adrienne Falcón in Sociology at Carleton will deepen and formalize interdisciplinary, cross-campus collaboration around immigration-related initiatives in Rice County. Working with local community partners as well as faculty, staff, and students at the colleges, Pak and Falcón aim to link several academic civic engagement courses with an ongoing research project on immigration in rural communities and small towns.

A team of education and STEM faculty led by Heather Campbell at St. Olaf and Eric Swan McDonald at Carleton will explore coordination of the science teacher preparation programs in St. Olaf’s Education Department and Carleton’s Department of Education Studies. The exploration will include the development of a grant proposal to the National Science Foundation for a pilot project on science teacher preparation at the colleges.

Led by Mike Flynn at Carleton, faculty interested in linguistics at the two colleges will meet to discuss the feasibility of integrating St. Olaf faculty and students into Carleton’s long-running “Linguistics and Culture” program in Kyoto.

Carleton Dean of the College Beverly Nagel and St. Olaf Provost and Dean of the College Marci Sortor are pleased to announce the first ten grants through the colleges’ “Broadening the Bridge” grant project, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

In this  “Exploration Round” of funding, the selection committee emphasized four priorities:

1. Exploring curricular collaboration and efficiency;
2. Advancing connections among departments and programs;
3. Exploring sharing of equipment and resources; and
4. Looking to achieve long-term impact.

The funded projects all meet these priorities, covering topics from art to atoms and activities from course planning to scholarly gatherings.  The second round of funding, to be run this fall, will seek to support projects that promise sustainable, long-term collaboration.

“Teaching Art History Collaboratively: The Gothic and the Gothic Revival,” Baird Jarman (Art and Art History, Carleton), Nancy Thompson (Art and Art History, St. Olaf) – Art historians Baird Jarman of Carleton and Nancy Thompson of St. Olaf will examine the logistics of teaching together given the two college calendars while also preparing the curriculum of a team-taught course on Gothic Art in medieval Europe and the Gothic revival in 19th-century Europe and the United States. (Summer 2014)

“Collaborative Arts Institute,” Mary Griep (Associate Dean of Fine Arts & Art, St. Olaf), Steve Richardson (Director of Arts, Carleton) – A workshop for faculty and staff to explore the design of a Collaborative Arts Institute that would take advantage of the strong Fine Arts programming and facilities of Carleton and St. Olaf. (Summer 2014)

“Greece and Rome, St. Olaf and Carleton: Bridging the Divide,” Tim Howe (History and Ancient Studies, St. Olaf), Kathryn Steed (Classics, Carleton) – This project aims to develop both a collaborative seminar on the relationships between Greece and Rome in the later Roman Republic and a model for future collaborations across the curriculum. (Summer 2014)

“Collection Database Improvement as Launching Pad for Perlman-Flaten Museum Collaboration,” Laurel Bradley (Director and Curator, Perlman Teaching Museum, Carleton), Jane Becker Nelson (Director, Flaten Art Museum, St. Olaf) – This project would improve the functionality of the museums’ art collection management web-kiosks at both campuses through shared re-design and photography projects. (Summer 2014)

“Philosophy across the river: a joint colloquium series and discussion group for faculty and students,” Daniel Groll (Philosophy, Carleton), Charles Taliaferro (Philosophy, St. Olaf), Michael Fuerstein (Philosophy, St. Olaf) – This project involves setting up a more permanent colloquium series between the philosophy departments at Carleton and St Olaf, as well as expanding the series to include events to bring philosophy majors at Carleton and St Olaf together. (academic year 2014-2015)

“Exploring opportunities for departmental resonance in physics and astronomy”, Brian Borovsky (Chair, Physics, St Olaf), Melissa Eblen-Zayas (Chair, Physics & Astronomy, Carleton) – We will explore potential opportunities for sharing laboratory equipment, expanding curricular and extracurricular opportunities, and strengthening connections between the Carleton Physics & Astronomy Department and the St Olaf Physics Department. (Summer 2014)

“Exploring Summer Research Opportunities and Course-Sharing for Neuroscience,” Julie Neiworth (Psychology/Neuroscience, Carleton), Sarah Meerts (Psychology/Neuroscience, Carleton), Jennifer Wolff (Biology/Neuroscience, Carleton), Shelly Dickinson (Psychology/Neuroscience, St. Olaf), Jay Demas (Physics/Biology/Neuroscience, St. Olaf) – A team of Carleton and St Olaf neuroscience faculty will explore labs on both campuses to discuss summer research collaborations and the possibility of co-teaching courses related to neuroscience across both campuses. (Summer 2014)

“Institute for the Study of Socio-economic Inequality,” Nathan Grawe (Economics, Carleton), Faress Bhuiyan (Economics, Carleton), Seth Binder (Economics, St. Olaf), Jenny Bourne (Economics, Carleton), Mary Carlsen (Social Work, St. Olaf), Kent Freeze (Political Science, Carleton), Ashley Hodgson (Economics, St. Olaf), Annette Nierobisz (Sociology/Anthropology, Carleton), Prathi Seneviratne (Economics, Carleton) – The Institute for the Study of Socio-economic Inequality will gather scholars working on issues of inequality to generate and highlight cutting edge research on this important issue. (Summer 2014-June 2015)

“Creating and Firing Across the Cannon: An Exploration in Collaboration for the Ceramic Arts,” Kelly Connole (Art, Carleton), Kate Fisher (Art, St. Olaf), Ron Gallas (Art, St. Olaf) – This collaborative visiting artist program provides opportunities for excellence in the making of ceramic objects and atmospheric firing education for Carleton and St Olaf students and faculty. (October 2014)

“Exploring Collaborative Education Programs,” Deborah Appleman (Educational Studies, Carleton), Maria Kelly (Education, St. Olaf) – We propose to conduct research trips to explore collaborative teacher preparation programs and to sponsor workshops for Carleton and St. Olaf education faculty to discuss further collaboration. (October 2014-May 2015)