Funded Projects
| Project Title | Overview of the Project |
|---|---|
| Lighting Design: Techniques for Live Events and the Camera Jess Fialko Music, Theatre & Dance $500.00 |
I currently teach advanced lighting design courses for the Dept of Theatre & Drama in The School of Music, Theatre, and Dance. The course content emphasizes lighting for live theatrical events, including theatre, musical theatre, opera, and dance. Our industry continues to move towards further integration of video content in various forms as part of production design. These multifaceted applications could include filmed content to be projected onstage, a live camera feed projected onstage, or a performance that is filmed to be broadcast. As the industry integrates this technology into production practices, lighting designers entering the profession should have the skills to successfully manipulate light to function both for a live audience and a camera. I am seeking funding to attend an online seminar course titled “Lighting Live Events for Camera” through the Studio School of Design, taught by Robert Barnhart, a prolific lighting designer and twelve time Emmy winner. Topics that will be covered in the course include: contrast levels, color rendering/temperature, exposure levels, camera and light placement, pre-production planning, and communication with video operators. The funding from this grant will allow me to re-envision advanced lighting design course content to best prepare students for careers in this evolving industry. |
| The Zulu Kingdom: History and Representations from Shaka to T'Chaka Raevin Jimenez LSA - History $255.00 |
This grant will provide funding for students to attend a viewing of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022) as a final example of the ways representations of the Zulu Kingdom and Shaka Zulu have been subject to repeated inventions. In this class, students explore historical sources from the 19th to 21st century to trace the politics of myth-making and knowledge production surrounding the Zulu and King Shaka. During the colonial and Apartheid eras, the image of Shaka and ideas of Zulu tribalism justified the extension of European powers and imposition of segregation. In more recent times, Shaka has been reimagined as a warrior-hero and symbol of African independence. Towards the end of the semester, students will explore the legacy of Shaka in pop culture, including novels, music, film, and art. Their final set of sources will include the original Black Panther graphic novel series and the 2018 Black Panther film. A viewing of the 2022 film will provide a valuable capstone to consider the ways Zulu imagery and the figure of Shaka continue to appear in popular politics and media. |
| Engaging Scholar-Practitioners to Inspire Preservation of MultiMedia Course Assignments Nancy Khalil LSA - American Culture $500.00 |
AM384 Islamophobia is an interdisciplinary course I am transitioning to be primarily multimedia in efforts of preserving student work documenting important (and rapid) developments in Islamophobia across various fields and public spaces. My hope is to make this course one that is digitally preserved and thus includes multimedia class assignments to keep available and accessible online. I also want students to be exposed in the course to the variety of disciplinary approaches from which it can be studied, and to think about how the material is relevant simultaneously in academic and public spaces. I am applying for funding to support an honorarium for guest lecturers who are both scholars trained in other disciplines as well as practitioners in non-academic fields heavily entangled in the course topic, including journalism and media/entertainment. |
| Problem Solving Initiative: Addressing the Child Care Crisis Tifani Sadek Law $500.00 |
This grant will fund guest speakers for Michigan Law’s Problem Solving Initiative on addressing the child care crisis. This Problem Solving Initiative is a graduate-level multidisciplinary course with students from the schools of law, public policy, public health, and social work. These graduate students are placed in interdisciplinary teams and will apply the “socially engaged design” problem solving framework to come up with policy and program solutions to the child care crisis. At the end of the semester, teams will present their capstone projects to experts in government and policy. This semester, the students have narrowed their focus to creating solutions to attract, retain, and engage child care providers. This grant would provide monetary support to have five current child care providers (directors, lead teachers, and assistant teachers) come speak to the students and share important expertise, background, and opinions on the causes of the child care crisis. This crucial information would form the basis for many of the groups’ capstone projects. Given that the child care providers will have to miss a day of work and are typically paid on an hourly basis, we would like to offer compensation to make the visits a viable option for them. |
| Guided tour of Ypsilanti Melissa Stull Education Kathleen Fortini Education Jill Coultas Education $493.20 |
We are seeking funds to support a guided tour of Ypsilanti, led by Deborah Meadows of the African American Cultural and Historical Museum of Washtenaw County. We will explore historical and current sites significant to Black people’s experiences in Ypsilanti. This tour is for undergraduate students pursuing their elementary teacher certification in the School of Education. The focus on Ypsilanti is intentional and significant, as all of these students currently have a field placement at Perry Early Learning Center and some of them will have future field placements in other Ypsilanti schools as part of the teacher education program. As instructors for many years in the School of Education, we have found that students often hold deficit perspectives of Ypsilanti and do not necessarily see the community’s assets and strengths. We believe that actually exploring the community with a knowledgeable community member has the potential to positively counter the dominant narratives some students hold by humanizing and historically situating the Black communities in Ypsilanti. We intend to use this field trip as a touch point to create further learning opportunities in our courses. For example, in ED 307, the instructors plan to discuss the way these beginning teachers might use the guided tour to further build their understanding of and relationship with students and their families. In ED 392, the instructor plans to capitalize on these beginning teachers’ deepened understanding of Ypsilanti by exploring policy issues, such as redlining and school choice, that have greatly impacted schooling in the community. |
| Guest speaker Zoom event with Fernando Abruña (Sustainable architect from Puerto Rico) $200.00 |
I am currently teaching a Spanish 232 Special Topics Course “Environmental Issues in Latin America and Spain” and I would like to invite Fernando Abruña to give a talk to my students via Zoom. Abruña is featured as a fierce sustainability advocate and green build architect in a documentary we watched this semester called “La casa ausente” or in English, “The Absent House.” I would like to request $200 for a speaking honorarium. This is an excellent opportunity for my students to engage with the curriculum in a very personal way (there will be a Q&A) and to see the real-life implications of climate change and sustainability. The intended learning goals are to have a more personalized encounter with the featured architect from the film. I hope he will give us an update on his sustainability projects and on the situation in Puerto Rico after hurricane Fiona. If I am able to arrange the visit for this semester, my colleague Marlene Beiza’s students will be able to join us as well. If Fernando Abruña agrees to being recorded, I hope to make a recording for possible use in future semesters. |
| Learning outcomes data analysis for RLL Assessment Committee Susanna Coll Ramirez LSA - Romance Languages and Literatures $500.00 |
On behalf of the Assessment Committee at RLL, I am writing to request the Instructional Development Fund (IDF) to complete the final phase of this year’s committee plan which consists of analyzing data from the Fall 2022 Exit Survey implemented in French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish 230 and 232 courses. Back in 2018, the RLL Lucky 9 group was tasked with developing the learning outcomes for the ELP courses. The end project of the Lucky 9 was to implement an Exit Survey in the 4th semester and gather data. The goal was to see if students at the 4th semester were fulfilling the learning outcomes established during the Lucky 9 process. This task was handed to the Assessment Committee at RLL when the Lucky 9 project ended. The data collected in previous semesters has been analyzed during Fall 2022. RLL funded the Committee with $500 to hire a student to analyze the data and write a report. In Winter, 2023 we want to implement the last phase for data analysis by hiring a student to analyze the results of the Fall 2022 Exit Survey which students completed by December 10th, 2022. With this last set of data, the Assessment Committee will meet to produce a report that will be shared with ELP directorship and coordinators during next academic year to help review the ELP learning outcomes that were written during the Lucky 9 Committee time. |
| Soundwalk of the University of Michigan's Central Campus Diane Oliva Music, Theatre & Dance $500.00 |
Musicology 346: “Historical Sounds” (Winter 2023) asks students: How do we reorient our modern selves toward an audible past? How do we hear history? An exciting aspect of this course is the exploration of the artistic and scholarly practice of (re)creating past soundscapes using the latest digital technologies. Funding will be used for a year-long subscription to the ECHOES platform, a sound mapping application that allows users to create geolocated audio tours. Over the course of the semester, students will collaborate on a class-curated soundwalk of the University of Michigan's central campus. This is a multi-faceted project with the main goal of providing non-music majors an opportunity to be creative with sound. Soundwalks are immersive, GPS-enabled works of public art. Sound materials for this soundwalk will draw on archival recordings from University of Michigan archives, students’ own field recordings of the campus, their recordings of historical texts and sounds, and their soundscape compositions. In this project, students will explore the conceptual connections between sound, space, memory, and environment. As students learn to listen carefully and critically, they will also develop skills using audio GPS guided systems. Upon completion of the project, the soundwalk will feature audio content tailored to landmarks on campus and will be available for free to the general public. |
| Field Trip to the National Forest Corporation of Chile in the Andes Mountains Amy Harris Public Policy $500.00 |
This project consists of a field trip to the National Forest Corporation of Chile (Chile’s version of the National Park Service) within Chile’s Ministry of Agriculture. The field trip will be to a field office in the Andes Mountains in the surroundings of Santiago, Chile to learn about Andean conservation policy and related work. The field trip is part of the Ford School’s 2023 International Economic Development Program (IEDP) policy study tour in Chile, which will take place over winter break. The excursion will permit students to learn about the Chilean Government’s policy approach towards environmental conservation, with a focus on the Andes mountain range. Students in this group have a particular policy interest in environmental and conservation policy, and Chile has been globally recognized for their progress in advancing environmental conservation goals. The field trip will allow students to talk with the field office’s environmental policy and education team that focuses on the Andean region. Students will get an up-close-and-personal view of conversation policy from Chile’s government agency responsible for implementing and promoting it, while also experiencing the areas of geological and biodiversity significance that so many are fighting to protect. |
| Summer Online Korean Conversation Club Jiyoung Kim LSA - Asian Languages and Cultures $500.00 |
The purpose of this project is to help current Korean language students maintain and improve their Korean proficiency over the summer break, and ease their transition to a new Korean course in the following year by establishing a weekly online conversation club. During a long break, students rarely use Korean, and often forget what they have learned, making it difficult for them to recall their language skills and speak fluently in the next year. A weekly online conversation club will help students practice their Korean and motivate them to continue learning, while also fostering a sense of community within the Korean program. |
| Sensors in Pharmacy and Medicine – demonstration tools Gergely Lautner Pharmacy $475.00 |
I would like to apply for IDF support for my Sensors in Pharmacy and Medicine class (PharmSci 407, 2 credit). This course introduces the principles of modern physical-, chemical- and biosensors that are used in pharmacy and medicine, and have critical roles in pharmaceutical preparations, point-of-care diagnostics, and patient monitoring. I wish to use this fund to supplement my effort to build a collection of sensors that are discussed during the class for demonstration purposes. I contacted several sensor manufacturers to request demo sensors. However, some sensors are not available this way. I purchased some low-cost sensors using personal funds, but this practice is cost-prohibitive for the more expensive sensors. Students responded positively to the opportunity taking these devices into their hands. Seeing and touching these devices helped them to better understand how these sensors work, supported the concepts discussed and enhanced their interest in the subject matter. |
| Orienting U-M Students Toward Ypsilanti’s Strengths by Centering Black History Chauncey Monte-Sano Education $500.00 |
Request. We request $500 to cover the cost of a bus to support a tour of historical sites of significance to Black history in Ypsilanti. This tour will be hosted by Ms. Deborah Meadows on behalf of the African American Cultural and Historical Museum of Washtenaw County. The tour will include Starkweather Homestead, Adams Street between Michigan Avenue and Harriet Street where the first Black families who settled in Ypsi lives, several murals in the downtown Ypsilanti area, Harwood Cemetery in Pittsfield Township where notable abolitionists are buried, and historical sites related to Perry Early Learning Center where the participating students have internships this fall. Participants in the tour will be University of Michigan undergraduates who are mostly juniors and in their first year of the Elementary Teacher Education (ETE) program - a two-year program leading to teacher certification for grades Pre-K to 3 and grades 3-6. There are 22 students in the first year of this program. Four instructors in the program will participate in this tour initiative. |
| Navigating Disability in 19th-Century America: A Student-Created Online and In-Person Exhibit at the Clements Library Ittai Orr LSA $470.00 |
This online and in-person archival exhibit is the product of a semester of work by graduate and undergraduate students enrolled in the course “Disabilities Past,” which investigated the cultural history of disability in the United States over the course of the long nineteenth century. Beginning with a long list of objects created by the experts at the Clement Library, students selected items for digitization and display, argued for their significance, placed them within larger historical shifts, and worked together to organize and interpret these items to produce historical conclusions. Along the way, they debated the limitations of the archive, theorized different approaches to exhibit design, researched best practices for ensuring accessibility both in-person and online, and engaged with live historiographical debates. Their online exhibit can be found at https://disabilitiespast.english.lsa.umich.edu. A Zoom symposium in which the students will share their findings at greater length will conclude the course on April 13, 2022. |
| A Taste of Italy in Ann Arbor: Speaker Series Giulia Ricco LSA - Romance Languages and Literatures $300.00 |
This grant will help fund three speakers for the Freshman Seminar “Taste of Italy: Food and Identity in Italian Culture.” In this course, students explore the ways in which food and culinary knowledge have shaped specific Italian identities—Italians in Italy, in the USA, and the so-called New Italians. Toward the end of class I would like to invite representatives from the food industry of Ann Arbor to talk to students about what it means to serve, import, and make Italian food. Some of the questions I would like them to address are: Why did you choose to serve/import/make Italian food? What does Italy/ Italian mean to you? What does authenticity mean to you? Having a restaurateur, an importer, and a chef come to class would show students how our conversations about national identity, immigration, and authenticity transpose very seamlessly to the real world. In addition, seeking the involvement of the Ann Arbor food industry allows me to develop a more business-oriented model for the study of Italian. As a matter of fact, students would see firsthand some of the career opportunities that studying Italian affords them, which in turn would entice them to continue their language education. The CRLT grant would enable me to offer each speaker an honoraria of $100 for their time and knowledge. The form of their visits (virtual or in person) will depend on the latest University’s COVID-19 policy. |
| Inside/Out Prison Exchange Teacher Training $300.00 |
program. I have volunteered at the Women’s Huron Valley MDoC facility for about five years and have been deeply nourished and transformed by what I’ve learned there. While my volunteering continues, I want to do more prison work—and make it possible for more “outside” people to learn from the incarcerated (and, of course, vice-versa). The Inside/Out program is a perfect way to do that. I will use this training to design and offer new undergraduate courses at the University of Michigan (thru the department of Comparative Literature and the Residential College) |
| Authentic material development for Gender Equality in Latin America Nina O'Connor LSA - Romance Languages and Literatures $500.00 |
The project will focus on the development of DEI minded course materials for the Spanish Topics Course Gender Equality in Latin America. I will be working in collaboration with colleagues and contacts in Mexico, Argentina and Costa Rica, in order to get a variety of perspectives. The course material development will include developing level appropriate video and/or audio recordings, as well as written testimonies. These primary sources will then be the basis for developing language acquisition activities as outlined below. |
| A Novel, Web-based Curriculum on Guardianship Kahli Zietlow Medical School $250.00 |
As part of the Medical Education Scholar’s Program, I am developing a web-based course on the topic of guardianship for internal medicine (IM) and family medicine (FM) residents. Older adults with dementia or other medical conditions that impair rational thinking may ultimately require guardianship for protection. However, the incapacitated patient (ward) who is assigned a guardian loses the ability to make independent decisions, presenting a major threat to personal freedom of choice. Guardianship can pose an ethical dilemma for providers who must weigh the principals of nonmaleficence and autonomy. Although physicians may perform capacity assessments, serve as witnesses in guardianship hearings, and/or care for wards, they receive little, if any, formal education on this topic. Furthermore, guardianship is ultimately pursued in the probate court system, outside of the clinical realm. A curriculum targeted to the need of internists and family medicine physicians is needed to fill these educational gaps and allow physicians to understand the guardianship process, perform therapeutic alliances with guardians, and most importantly, understand alternatives to guardians such that guardianship is only pursued for those who truly require it. This curriculum is being developed with input from geriatricians, hospitalists, primary care providers, social work, and risk management. As a pilot project, it will be deployed to first year IM and FM residents. Their pre- and post-curriculum knowledge will be assessed and we will solicit feedback on the efficacy and clinical relevance of the content. |
| Reimaging Community, Art, and Social Transformation in Cambodia $500.00 |
My upcoming special exhibition, “Angkor Complex: Cultural Heritage and Post-Genocide Memory in Cambodia” (scheduled to open at the University of Michigan Museum of Art in January 2024) will showcase the work of contemporary artists who exemplify trends in how Cambodians are responding to the still-fresh wounds inflected by the Khmer Rouge regime and related upheavals that have shattered the country. Since several contemporary artists are engaging with the forms and functions of ancient Khmer temples and sculptures and are trying to position them at the intersection of trauma and healing, I shall include several ancient architectural fragments and sculpture in my exhibition. Travel to Cambodia is currently almost impossible, because of pandemic related travel restrictions and closures. Thus, I hope to bring into the classroom, via Zoom, the voices of women and men from diverse walks of life: contemporary artists based in Cambodia and in the diaspora, monks, Khmer Rouge survivors, community organizers, primary school teachers, world renowned scholars, and prominent collectors, many of whom I have gotten to know in recent months while conducting field research for the exhibition. These short-guest lectures will help foster greater respect for justice, common humanity, and diversity, and help my students critically appreciate the role of the arts in suturing post-genocide societies. |
| Using an iPad and Apple Pencil to offer more personalized, detailed feedback on student journals submitted through Canvas $453.99 |
I am a lecturer in the Department of Romance Language and Literatures. I teach approximately 54 students each semester. My students submit a weekly hand-written journal entry in PDF or JPG format on Canvas. I am seeking a CRLT grant to purchase an Ipad Pro and Apple pencil so that I can write my comments/corrections directly into their on-line submissions. This will make giving feedback so much more efficient. Students are always asking for more feedback, and this would allow them to see exactly on which part of their writing I am annotating or commenting. |
| Illuminating interdisciplinary writing & research in Moral Psychology: A speaker series Mara Bollard LSA - Linguistics $500.00 |
This grant will fund 3-4 guest speakers, including at least 2 academic philosophers and at least 1 academic psychologist, for COGSCI 302: Moral Psychology during Fall 2021 (beginning in October 2021). This seminar class is currently being taught for the first time as an Upper Level Writing Requirement (ULWR) course and is thus heavily focused on helping students (24 in total) develop their writing and research skills. Moral psychology is an interdisciplinary area of study that draws from both moral philosophy and empirical cognitive science. In addition to sharing their content-level expertise with students via a brief presentation - students will read a paper by each speaker in preparation for their visit - the speakers will explicitly address this question: How do philosophers and psychologists differ in their academic writing and in their overall approach to the study of moral psychology topics? Speakers will share insights about their own writing process and discuss how to conduct fruitful interdisciplinary research in moral psychology, bearing in mind their own disciplinary training and the need to engage effectively with scholars with different academic backgrounds. Students will have the opportunity to ask questions and engage in discussion with each speaker. |
| Enrichment during the RC German Coffee hour Karein Goertz LSA - Residential College $500.00 |
Funds from the grant will be used to expand our German language coffee hour (Kaffeestunde) to include German-speaking guests, as well as field-trips to local sites. These required weekly co-curricular gatherings have long been central to the semi-immersive “learning beyond the classroom” pedagogy of the RC language programs. They are an excellent opportunity for current and former RC German students to mingle and speak German. Students dramatically improve their listening comprehension skills and become more comfortable speaking German. These gatherings also provide the opportunity to present topics and materials that are not covered in the classroom. Many of the Kaffeestunden are intentionally unstructured, with individual and group conversations evolving organically, much as they would in real life. However, we would like to include some more structured gatherings that allow students to meet with a wider range of German-speakers, to learn about particular cultural topics, and to go on fieldtrips out into the community to learn about local and regional German-related sites. Grant money would help defray the cost of honoraria, transportation and tickets. What follows is a list of proposed structured events for select coffeehours (Wednesdays 3-5 pm) this semester. |
