Grant Summary
$100,000 over 24 months. Lawrence University will assemble a working group comprised of faculty, staff, students, and administrators to study the Lawrence Fellows in Liberal Arts and Sciences, a new postdoctoral teaching fellowship program. The Lawrence Fellows Program aims to develop the professoriate of the future by providing recent doctoral degree recipients with mentoring, teaching opportunities, and research collaborations that will better prepare them for tenure-track positions in academia. At the same time, the program seeks to enrich student learning, more quickly introduce to the curriculum and undergraduate research programs the newest research techniques being pursued at distinguished graduate programs, enhance faculty research and performance, and further augment the college’s robust offerings of one-on-one learning experiences for all students.
The working group will assess the degree to which the Fellows Program is achieving these goals, gathering data through a variety of methods (self-assessment of teaching and scholarship, video/class observations, course evaluations, surveys, and other reports), and then analyzing those data. Results should benefit not only the Lawrence Fellows program, but post-doctoral fellowship programs in other places as well. To ensure the latter, the group will disseminate its results through various means, including a webpage dedicated to this project, and through a conference the college will host.