Teaching initiative funding announced

Updated 5:30 PM September 5, 2007

Teaching initiative funding announced

By Laurel Thomas Gnagey

The third year of funding for the presidential initiative on Multidisciplinary Learning and Team Teaching will focus on how graduate and professional schools can enrich the undergraduate offerings on campus. The goal is to work together with other programs to prepare students for advanced education.

The Office of the Provost in conjunction with the MLTT Steering Committee seeks proposals that "bring the expertise of graduate and professional school faculty to bear on undergraduate education." As with the first round of proposals under the initiative, preference will be given to those that lead to the development of multidisciplinary courses and new degree programs that reach a large number of students, says committee chair Ben van der Pluijm, professor of geology and of the environment.

When she established the initiative in 2005, President Mary Sue Coleman committed $2.5 million over five years to stimulate team teaching and develop multidisciplinary courses and degree programs across the University. The initiative is built on the premise that to understand and tackle the world's problems future leaders "must learn problem solving across disciplines and launch inquiries in uncharted territories of knowledge and practice."

"We believe that the major problems of our time, from the environment to poverty, from human rights to terrorism, from religious movements to health care, cannot be studied effectively within any single discipline; all involve integrative thinking," wrote members of the MLTT Task Force, who established the framework for the initiative.

In its second year the MLTT initiative funded a new interdisciplinary undergraduate program, based in LSA but drawing on faculty in the School of Information (SI) and the College of Engineering (CoE), for a concentration in informatics. To be launched in 2008, informatics focuses on the daily lives of people as they relate to technology and information systems.

Other multidisciplinary proposals that were funded bring together faculty from the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, the School of Natural Resources and the Environment, the Institute for Social Research, the Stephen M. Ross School of Business, SI, CoE and LSA to address topics such as policy analysis, complex systems and social issues in Southeast Asia, among others.

The deadline for the current request for proposals (RFP) is Dec. 14. Although the steering committee especially encourages submissions from the graduate and professional schools in the 2007-08 round, all instructional staff members from the Ann Arbor campus may submit a proposal. For more information on the initiative, for descriptions of funded activities and to download the RFP form, go to www.provost.umich.edu/programs/MLTT/rfp.

Teaching initiative funding announced

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