Engaged Scholarship Teaching Grant (ESTG)

The ESTG program recognizes that teaching Engaged Scholarship courses often requires extra resources. Engaged Scholarship courses can include the kind of Community-Based Learning (CBL) courses that the Lang Center has historically supported, as well as courses that add experiential or public-facing components to subjects and problems of public interest. The common denominator of ESCH-designated courses tends to be a focus on issues/problems of interest to a community outside of Swarthmore College, along with an attempt to analyze or address those issues with some external community.

Apply

Applications are due annually on May 1 for the following academic year, but serendipity requests will be considered.

Eligibility

We invite applicants from any faculty rank, but ordinarily VAP applicants must have at least one or two years remaining on their contract with the College so that they can teach the course more than once. Priority is given to courses that the department believes will be taught repeatedly.

Requirements

Swarthmore College defines ESCH-eligible courses as those that:

Address a contemporary issue of pressing public concern
Build knowledge about how to ameliorate social problems
Engage with various publics and/or includes a community based learning component

All ESCH-eligible courses are about issues of public concern. The Engaged Scholarship Teaching Grant (ESTG) program seeks to support course components that also allow students to engage with and for the people most impacted by those issues. A few examples:

An engineering course works with grassroots organizers in Chester to develop tools to improve air quality near the Covanta incinerator
A Math/Stat class analyzes real data from a Philadelphia-based nonprofit and shares their findings back to the organization
A course in which students learn side-by-side with currently incarcerated individuals
A course on global conflict and displacement invites someone who has gone through the refugee resettlement process to give a guest lecture
A course collaborates with a local organization, museum, or group to launch a public exhibition