COLLEGEVILLE, Pa. — The Teagle Foundation of New York has awarded a $300,000 grant to five liberal arts colleges, for a project to assess and enhance the impact of diversity initiatives on student engagement and student learning.

The collaborative includes Ursinus and Washington & Jefferson colleges, in Pennsylvania, and Goucher, McDaniel, and Washington colleges, in Maryland. The multi-year project will use campus teams to assess current diversity initiatives and make changes to integrate findings into the college curriculum and into the daily lives of the students. Application for the highly competitive grant was by invitation.

"It is hoped that the changes that come from this project will eventually impact the college community, and will lead to courses and programs with the goal of changing students' lives," said Ursinus College Associate Dean Annette Lucas, who is overseeing the grant. "We want to change the way we educate our students by engaging in conversations about what is important to us, by learning from each other's successful strategies, by identifying programs that work as well as those that do not, and by linking our conversations to solid research and assessment conducted by our faculty and our students."

Under the grant the five colleges will put together teams of 15-20 faculty, students, administrators and staff. The site visit model will allow a team from each campus to visit another campus each year, and also host a team from the collaborative, to better understand how students, faculty and staff experience the diversity initiatives on the campus. The teams will assess how the stated mission on campus actually is lived. From these visits, and the recommendations from them, each campus will determine what changes to implement on their campus. The answers will be used to propel campus-wide enhancements to the initiatives on each participating campus.

To supplement this work, the Teagle Diversity Fellows — student researchers from each school — will conduct research on diversity issues in the summers under faculty mentors.

The colleges participated in earlier Teagle planning grants which allowed them to share information about their efforts to enhance student learning and engagement through the lens of diversity. This new grant will build on that.