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Bush Faculty Development Committee

this project addresses primary vector three, Teaching and Technology, and secondary vector one, Diversified Teaching Methods. I hope to acquire the statistical and mapping program Census CDBlocks 1990 for use in SOCI 340 Wealth and Poverty. This program is the first to contain complete demographic and housing data and map boundaries from the U.S. Census Bureau for all 7 million+ census blocks nationwide on a single CD. As a stand-alone program, CensusCD Blocks 1990 enables researchers to conduct complex statistical analyses on census data. It is the only stand-alone program available with a unique mapping feature that allows researchers to produce maps containing key demographic distributions. Users can quickly and easily view, query, and map census data and can export data to word processors, spreadsheets (including Excel), desktop publishers, and statistical packages such as SPSS.

This proposal addresses the problems and opportunities in achieving excellence in teaching qualitative research methods to undergraduate students. Faculty research is used as a test bed for the choice of appropriate hardware/software tools for students' analysis. This project is best located in the "First Circle: Individual faculty members and their students," and falls within Vector 2 which is intended to "support faculty members as they develop ways to involve students, even students in lower level classes, in actual research and investigation...[and] further support faculty members as they create ways to feed the results of this research back into classes that are taught at Augustana College" (Augustana Bush Foundation Faculty Development Grant 1999-2002 Abstract: Specific Activities).

This proposal will modify the curriculum for Genl 116, Becoming a Master Student by incorporating web-based lessons. The department of Academic Development must continue to provide active learning opportunities as well as promote appropriate use of technology in its study skills class according to the department's mission statement. Thus the targeted students are those who enroll in Genl 116, the college study skills class. The team of instructors, Sue Bies, Nancy Dickinson, and D'Lisa McKenzie will create a class web page using the web CT platform and will post both required and supplemental opportunities for students to practice academic skills in a web-based environment. The goal of the project is to reduce web-anxiety ( if it exists), to allow for critical thinking about the effects of web-enhanced assignments, and to encourage more academic use of web-enhanced learning.

The purpose of this proposal is to create a cell group of faculty involved in collaborative faculty/student research and investigation. Targeting Vector 2, Active Learning Through Collaborative Research, the grant will support faculty members as they develop innovative ways of disseminating information about collaborative faculty/student research and investigation in general, as well as information about their projects in particular. Cell group members will learn to use the Web editor, Dreamweaver, to create Websites that highlight student research projects and share information about those projects with a wider audience. An attempt has been made to draw faculty members from each division, in order to provide a broad base of support and encourage creative approaches to student involvement in research. Participants are from chemistry, education, computer science, nursing, philosophy, and religion. It is hoped that through the efforts of the cell group members, the Augustana community, as well as prospective students, will gain a deeper appreciation of the variety and scope of collaborative faculty/student research at Augustana.

Targeting Vector 3, this proposal addresses the importance of our students' ability to locate, evaluate, synthesize and utilize information, regardless of format, in an information rich, democratic society. We propose to develop a series of activities to introduce these information literacy skills within the structure of Social Psychology (Spring '02). The activities will be designed to allow students to apply the skills during the course of the semester as they work toward the completion of their final Annotated Review Paper. Activity One will strengthen the students' familiarity with scholarly literature of Social Psychology through the compilation of an electronic bibliography of JSTOR articles highlighting the major debates in social psychology. Activity Two will broaden the writing component to incorporate a more deliberate emphasis on an information literacy approach by using JSTOR as a benchmark for evaluating scholarly electronic resources through database evaluation, search strategies, and search result analysis. In addition, JSTOR information resources will be essential in developing the individual Annotated Review Paper projects.

The goal of the Augustana Coalition for Social Justice is to help raise issues of social justice and diversity on the Augustana campus among students, faculty, and staff; this Bush project therefore targets no single course, but rather the entire community of classes, events, and people that make up Augustana. This grant particularly proposes to redress the relative cultural isolation of our student body by raising awareness about injustices based on gender, race, class, or sexuality locally and worldwide. Our goal is to help everyone on campus realize that they can help to fight these injustices, and thereby actualize the Augustana motto: "Enter to learn, leave to serve." Toward this end, we will be: compiling a permanent collection of posters, videos and other materials to promote awareness of diversity and social justice issues like domestic violence, racism, sexual intolerance, and world hunger; developing a WEB page featuring the mission statement of ACSJ, events on campus and in the local community, and links to regional, national, and international peace and justice organizations; designing a logo and flyers for dissemination to new (and returning) students and faculty describing ACSJ and its mission at Augustana; and establishing contacts with peace and justice organizations at other ELCA schools in order to develop a regional coalition.