2023 Pedagogical Partnership Grants winners
The American Political Science Association seeks proposals from members for projects that will bring together political science faculty from different institutions in the same geographic area to share expertise and produce cutting-edge teaching resources. PI’s will lead the organization of a series of meetings that will bring a larger group of local faculty together, allow for the sharing of best practices and innovations, and produce new teaching materials and new ties between faculty in the area. All Pedagogical Partnerships proposals must include at least one PI from a community college and one organizer from a research-intensive institution.
Materials produced through Peer-to-Peer Pedagogical Partnerships (P4) grants will be featured in APSA’s online teaching library, APSA Educate.
Pedagogical Partnership grants have four inter-related aims:
- To create partnerships among colleagues at different kinds of higher education institutions.
- To support faculty in generating cutting-edge teaching materials highlighting best practices and/or innovations, and recent political science research.
- To assist faculty at more research-intensive institutions in teaching and mentoring first-generation, under-represented minority, and economically disadvantaged students in ways they might not otherwise have done.
- To enable colleagues at more teaching-intensive institutions to teach materials that they would not otherwise have the time or inclination to teach.
“Teaching Immigration Through Digital Storytelling”
How do we teach immigration topics in the college classroom? In today’s political atmosphere, public debates around immigration are divisive and often result in damaging stalemates. With over 20 million students in U.S. schools, instructors must be better prepared to lead meaningful classroom discussions and ethical student learning related to teaching immigration related issues. Yet, few student-centered immigration teaching tools, training seminars, and resources currently exist to support instructors.
The American Political Science Association (APSA) is proud to support a group of political science educators looking to address these challenges through the development of new teaching resources. APSA has awarded Jennifer Martinez-Medina, Lizbeth De La Cruz Santana, and Dr. Randy Villegas $25,000 through a Peer-to-Peer Pedagogical Partnerships grant to support a new initiative entitled “Teaching Immigration Through Digital Storytelling.”
This project aims to prepare professors at any stage of their careers for teaching contemporary immigration and criminal law-related topics through digital storytelling. The project leaders set to accomplish this by offering a Teaching Immigration Through Digital Storytelling guide and a two-day workshop based on the Leave No One Behind Mural Project (LNOBMP). The LNOBMP is a digital storytelling project that illustrates and digitally makes available through thematic murals the myriad experiences of migrant communities directly impacted by US immigration and criminal law. The PIs believe this workshop would be valuable to post-secondary educators seeking to humanize their curriculum through real-life storytelling needed to engage in contemporary immigration debates responsibly.
P4 grants support collaboration among political science faculty at two-year and four-year institutions. Through this collaboration, faculty share best practices for mentoring first-generation, underrepresented minority, and economically disadvantaged students to develop cutting-edge teaching materials. The long-term goal of P4 is to strengthen ties between political science faculty and improve political science instruction and mentoring across higher-education institutions. P4 grants are made possible thanks to the generosity of the Ivywood Foundation.