Course Enrichment Grants, offered by the University of Virginia Library, provide support to faculty who would like to enhance students’ abilities to seek, evaluate, manage, and use information and data in scholarly contexts, as well as create new types of media-rich class assignments.
Faculty recipients of these grants will be awarded:
The program is intended to fund projects that promote student learning in the areas described below. All funded projects will involve partnership with a team of library staff with expertise in the proposed topic.
Applications are welcome from all disciplines. We especially encourage applications that explore the use of open educational resources as a means of practicing inclusive or active pedagogy.
Proposals should be for courses in which planning can be completed in anticipation of the course offering. That means for Fall 2022 courses, planning should be undertaken in the summer 2022; and for J-Term 2023, Spring 2023, and Summer 2023 courses, planning should be completed before the start of the target semester.
Attend an information session:
See a list of previously funded projects.
For questions about any aspect of the program, please email Judith Thomas at jthomas@virginia.edu.
Francesca Calamita, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, College of Arts & Sciences: First-year students of “Food for Feminist Global Thought” will learn how to develop connections between ideas covered in the seminar and everyday life through online and in-class cross-cultural reflections. They will also learn how to critically find, evaluate, and manage sources for their final presentation on food and gender across the globe.
Library team:
Yoon Hwa Choi, East Asian Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, College of Arts & Sciences: Students will be required to research Korean culture using authentic materials and create two 5 to 7-minute videos introducing their topic, in both Korean and English, to students with basic Korean language skills.
Library team:
Lisa Goff, English, College of Arts & Sciences: The course “Moving On: Migration to/from US” will include a course enrichment project designed to help the 25-30 class members better understand how their lives, and the lives of their families and friends, have intersected with migration in, to, and around the United States. We will partner with the Library to guide students in researching and documenting their own family trees, using genealogical tools and family interviews to trace their families back in time, as broad geographically as possible..
There will be other options — for example, tracing the family history of an historical figure — for students who are not comfortable with documenting the status of living family members.
Library team:
Erin Putalik, Architectural History, School of Architecture: This project for a survey course in architectural history will teach students to find lesser-known representations of a single iconic work of early 20th century architecture, showing changes in the work or its context over the course of a half-century or more. Students will be taught to effectively use various image databases and develop annotated, image-based essays that challenge the ways these buildings are typically represented — as standing heroically outside of time, untouched by their human and environmental contexts.
Library team:
Hallie Richmond, English, College of Arts & Sciences: Students will design a virtual narrative that illustrates differences in student access to challenging and inclusive literary texts in K-12 classes across Albemarle County. The narrative will be housed in a new course website intended to serve English teachers who are seeking open educational resources related to reading and teaching literature of a challenging nature.
Library team:
Jennifer Sessions, History, College of Arts & Sciences: Students in a new “Workshop” seminar for History majors will learn essential research skills by exploring the history of crime and scandal in fin-de-siècle Europe and building ArcGIS StoryMaps to organize, analyze, and present their research on a particular case study.
Library team:
Christopher Ali, Media Studies, College of Arts of Sciences: Christopher Ali, Department of Media Studies: Undergraduates will learn about the methods of policy analysis by consulting digital platforms to retrieve and organize key documents, and then apply different methods of analysis such as stakeholder analysis and discourse analysis. These methods will be applied to student’s final assignment, a critical policy memo, and will give students a foundation both in the specifics of policy analysis and in the methods of media studies more broadly
Library team:
Federico Cuatlcuatl, Studio Art, College of Arts of Sciences: This course will challenge and engage students in multiple modes of fabrication and digital productions through the conceptual framework of wearable self-portraits.
Library team:
Bremen Donovan, Anthropology, College of Arts of Sciences: Students from across disciplines will be introduced to diverse modes of ethnographic research and creative practice in this course designed to broaden understanding of what rigorous scholarship can look, sound, and feel like. In addition to readings, screenings, and other interventions, students will collaboratively explore different forms of knowledge production and representation, and will engage in practical training to guide them in the conception and bringing to fruition their own small-scale experimental projects.
Library team:
Erin Lambert, History, College of Arts of Sciences: Students will develop skills in historical research by tracing the travels of a single object through early modern global trade networks and presenting their projects in an ArcGIS StoryMap.
Library team:
Stella Mattioli, Spanish, College of Arts of Sciences: The students of Elementary Italian will work in pairs to create an interactive picture book about an Italian cultural aspect that they will have to choose and research.
Library team:
David Singerman, History, College of Arts of Sciences: First-year students will explore the 2008 financial crisis by learning to think like historians. They’ll combine scholarship, media accounts, and interviews with friends and family into multimedia projects about what it’s like to live through a major historical event.
Library team:
Tyler Jo Smith, McIntire Department of Art/Interdisciplinary Archaeology Program, College of Arts and Sciences: In a seminar setting, students will learn how to research individual objects of religious significance belonging to the Fralin Museum of Art. They will share their final project results using 3D technologies of scanning, printing, and digital presentation.
Library team:
Jeffrey Boichuk, McIntire School of Commerce: Students will develop life-long skills in the areas of research, written communication, and information, strengthening their marketing projects through connection with the larger marketing literature and the business press at large.
Library team:
Phoebe Crisman, Architecture, School of Architecture: Students will improve their ability to employ media-rich technologies and data visualization in their semester-long Think Global/Act Local project, the goal of which is to inspire sustainability action through new interactive research and communication methods.
Library team:
Kevin Driscoll, Media Studies, College of Arts & Sciences: Undergraduates will engage in original research for media archival projects related to social change; the course will culminate in a museum-style exhibit based on a comparative analysis of media artifacts.
Library team:
Bonnie Hagerman, Women, Gender & Sexuality, College of Arts & Sciences: Working with a detailed data set (created in part by the class) about Olympic medal winners, students will analyze the data to better understand the intersections of gender, race, geography, age, ability, and sexual orientation in the Games.
Library team:
Foteini Kondyli, Art History, College of Arts & Sciences. As part of a new multilayered approach to learning about Byzantine cities, students will balance scholarly reading and writing with hands-on activities using a range digital technologies, such as 3D modeling, virtual reality, and 3D printing.
Library team:
Hsin-Hsin Liang (Department of East Asian Languages, Literatures, and Cultures) and Yingyao Wang (Sociology), College of Arts & Sciences: By enhancing the newly redesigned Media Chinese language course to incorporate expert lectures of current topics on China, library instruction, and media technology workshops, students will better understand scholarly information, develop research skills related to their Chinese studies, and apply newly gained media technology expertise to their video projects.
Library team:
Andrea Hansen Phillips, Landscape Architecture, School of Architecture. Architecture students will be introduced to the fundamentals of coding and digital technologies such as web mapping, user experience design, and data visualization, in order to elevate the role of civic engagement and public interest design.
Library team:
Kim Brooks Mata, Drama, College of Arts & Sciences: Students will develop the skills to engage in research in the context of artistic practice and will enhance their understanding of dance as both an expressive and investigative field.
Library team:
Meredith Clark, Media Studies, College of Arts & Sciences: Students will engage in a critical analysis of social media data to produce case studies about specific issues related to race and digital culture.
Library team:
Max Edelson (History) and Ricardo Padron (Spanish, Italian & Portuguese), College of Arts & Sciences: Students will embark on research projects in a variety of fields of study, gaining understanding of the relationship between space, knowledge, and power, and developing competencies with research strategies and tools.
Library team:
Sean Ferguson, Science, Technology and Society Program, School of Engineering and Applied Science: Through hands-on activities, students will learn how to combine quantitative and qualitative material to gain deep understanding of social phenomena, developing their skills in data manipulation, curation, and visualization.
Library team:
Bonnie Gordon, Music, College of Arts & Sciences: Students will develop skills in critical reflection and information literacy as they engage with historical sources to understand how music reflects and influences history and cultural change.
Library team:
Mary Kuhn, English, College of Arts & Sciences: Students will broaden their understanding of what constitutes an environmental text, conducting research to uncover primary and secondary sources and using digital tools to practice public-facing research and writing.
Library team:
Jonah Shulhofer-Wohl, Politics, College of Arts & Sciences: After learning how to define an answerable research question about Middle East politics, students will conduct independent research, gaining necessary skills in assessing, analyzing, and synthesizing information.
Library team:
Jeanine Braithwaite, Frank Batten School: Students working on their Applied Policy Projects will gain foundational information literacy skills, allowing them to choosing substantial, meaty policy problems and conduct original research on their area of policy interest.
Library team:
George Gilliam, History, College of Arts & Sciences: Working with archival source material, students will learn historical research methods for identifying and finding primary sources, understand the difference between primary and secondary sources, and analyze sources in order to answer a research question.
Library team:
Cristina Griffin, English, College of Arts & Sciences: As part of their in-depth exploration of the history of gothic literature, students will work with archival texts on a focused information literacy project, learning to form research questions, discover unexpected ways of finding answers, and interrogate information dynamically along the way.
Library team:
Katelyn Hale Wood, Drama, College of Arts & Sciences: In this course, with a new emphasis on historiographical methodology, students will engage in the process of information creation, link structures of authority to the construction of historical evidence, and learn effective research strategies.
Library team:
Zaneta Hong, Landscape Architecture, School of Architecture: Students will understand and practice research and design methodologies related to materials and technologies for the built environment, in the interest of creating a sustainable, ethical, and environmentally-sensitive design practice.
Library team:
Deborah McGrady, French, College of Arts & Sciences: Students will learn how to conduct research – in particular to identify and find information, and evaluate its credibility – in their investigations into the historical and artistic legacy of Joan of Arc, from medieval to modern times.
Library team: