Faculty INTEL Grants

As the name implies, Innovative Teaching and Engaged Learning (INTEL) Faculty Grants encourage and advance a culture of innovation and engaged learning-related activities. Two grants in the amount of $1,000 each are available annually to full-time faculty.  An invitation for proposal submissions is circulated in the spring semester through a peer-reviewed competitive process.

Proposals are evaluated on their potential for meeting stated goal or goals of the project, feasibility, and project impact potential. Applications that are designed to do the following will be given greatest consideration:

• Increase engagement of learners, broadly defined
• Make a broad impact, beyond the scope of a single course
• Build sustainability
• Rely on funding not readily available from other sources (such as faculty development funds, summer development grants, course enhancement funds)

2019/2020 $1000 INTEL Grant Recipients

Susan Wansink
“Celebrating the Thirty Years since the Fall of the Berlin Wall”

Project Description and Impact: On November 10, 2019, Virginia Beach Public Schools students of German will travel to Virginia Wesleyan University to partake in a German cultural day revolving around the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall, hosted by the German students at VWU. Students, along with the VWU community and the community at large will discover the history surrounding the Berlin Wall and its impact on Germany and the World. This project is a way to engage several communities to learn about this important time in history and to celebrate this commemorable event for its thirty-year anniversary. This project brings experiential learning beyond the classroom, to engagement with several communities.

Takeyra Collins
“Cultivating a Civically Engaged Campus through a Student-led Service Program: Extending our Purpose & Vision”

 Project Description and Impact: This student-led service project will provide a revamped opportunity to improve academic and civic learning outcomes through a structured service-learning experience. The students who participate in this student-led service project will plan, organize, and implement activities to accommodate the homeless population in collaboration with three community organizations through an intensive and engaged week of service. This opportunity will further the civic engagement of students at Virginia Wesleyan University and allow them to apply their knowledge in an actual real-world setting. This project will support and strengthen the campus’ ability to use their knowledge towards a structured experience within the community to attain direct exposure in a real-world setting.

2018 Grants

Dan Margolies, Department of History,  and  Eric Johnson, Department of Biology  
Proposal Title:  Pollinator Behavior and Hive Maintenance in a Sustainable Greenhouse Observation Hive at Virginia Wesleyan University

This project creates a new experience for both the general public and students across disciplines to learn about and observe honeybee hive management both locally and afar. It involves the development and deployment of core apicultural knowledge with an unparalleled resource focused on both outreach efforts and enhancing the experimental capabilities of the VWU beeyard and greenhouse. This project will include the installation of a sustainable observation (glass-sided) hive in the new VWU greenhouse to accomplish two goals. 1) To increase the outreach capacity and utility of the greenhouse by implementing a user-driven high-resolution webcam on a managed bee colony; 2) To develop observation driven apicultural knowledge focused on experimental use of the VWU beeyard and the electronically monitored observation hive in INST 161.  

Katrina Henry, Department of Physics and Earth and Environmental Science, and Jason Squinobal, Department of Music
Proposal Title:  Lecture Demonstrations of Waves for STEM and Music classes

Waves and sound are topics that cross­cut the curriculum at Virginia Wesleyan. From physics to music, physical science (teacher education) to oceanography, waves and sound are a significant portion of the coursework in a over a dozen courses in the Goode and Brock schools. Concepts of wave frequency, wavelength, wave speed, wave addition and interference are applicable in physics, oceanography, mathematics, and music. This proposal seeks to purchase demonstration equipment that will illustrate waves and sound (the latter is itself is a wave). The authors will construct an online database, accessible to VWU faculty, containing Equipment Information Sheets for each piece of equipment (example is shown on the last page of this document). The sheets will categorize the equipment, describing the demonstrations that could be performed from each piece, and list its location and the contact person for that equipment. The Equipment Information sheets, written by both co­authors, will seek to provide lecture demonstration activities that suture the interface between sound and waves so that students from either side (arts/humanities or STEM) and step into the others world and see greater clarity in their own. Music majors will have the opportunity to experience and explore the physics of musical sound and make connections between the scientific aspects of music that compliment the student's artistic training. Music Technology will benefit by a greater understanding of elusive sound ways and how they can be manipulated, by conducting demonstrations of physical and visual representations of sound waves using the equipment purchased with the this grant.

2017 Grants

Grant: Service-Learning: Increasing the Engagement & Knowledge of Learners beyond the Classroom
Takeyra Collins

This project combines experiential learning through a structured service-learning experience that makes a broad impact on our community to enhance and increase engagement and knowledge of the learners beyond the classroom. The undergraduate students involved in the service learning aspect of the project will use the knowledge they’ve obtained within the curriculum of the classroom setting to further develop knowledge and skills, obtain experience working with young adults, and obtain various transferable skills. This project focuses on accommodating young adults with Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) by engaging undergraduate students in an interactive service learning opportunity; where they are able to put their knowledge into practice while working with young adults with a chronic illness.

Grant: Faculty Field Trip: Mapping a Faculty Integrative Experience
Kathy Stolley

This project will include faculty “field trips” and integrative collaboration in which a group of faculty from across the curriculum will collaboratively produce an interdisciplinary field trip “map” for downtown Norfolk, accompanied by an integrated resource guide, to enrich the experience of visiting each destination and nurture integrative thinking.  The project goals are: to pilot a design that explores how we might more intentionally build, enhance, and encourage integrative thinking into our formal faculty development structure; to build and “test drive” an integrated local resource guide that can be used to support course enhancements for integrated learning; and to encourage community, collaboration, and purposeful integration among faculty.

2016 Grants

"Thumbs Up (Or Down):  Engaging Students with New Clicker Technology"
Dr. Larry Hultgren

This project utilizes the latest portable "clicker" technology to develop active learning enhancements for classes that traditionally do not utilize technology, and seeks to assess their impact on activities ranging from "class-keeping" tasks to assessing student preparation and learning, as well as utilizing anonymous polling to display the views of the class in a non-threatening manner when there is no "right answer."

2015 Grants

“Advancing Digital Pedagogy at Virginia Wesleyan University, 2015-2016”
Rich Bond, Associate Professor of History and Director of the General Studies Program
Thomas Brown, Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice and Sociology
Paul Ewell, Associate Professor of Management/Business/Economics
Kellie Holzer, Assistant Professor of English

This project aims to help faculty develop pedagogical and technical skills, increase the University’s capacity to support such work, provide training, and build a community of digital pedagogues at VWU. A combination of student and faculty workshops, project competitions, funding incentives, and presentations will advance work fostering a campus-wide dialogue about digital learning initiated in 2014-2015 under a previous INTEL Grant.

“Self-Paced Critical Reasoning: CBE Within Credit-Hour Constraints”
Cathal Woods, Associate Professor of Philosophy

This two-part project explores Competency-Based Education (CBE), an approach that awards credit to a student as she demonstrates competence in a sequence of learning objectives rather than on the basis of time spent; a student is not permitted to advance to another step until she has demonstrated competence in the current step.  Part I of this project is designed to work out how CBE can be married with Credit-Hour education to the greatest extent; Part II focuses on the development of materials for sequential assessment.

2014 Grants

“Advancing Digital Pedagogy at Virginia Wesleyan University”
Rich Bond, Associate Professor of History and Director of the General Studies Program
Thomas Brown, Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice and Sociology
Paul Ewell, Associate Professor of Management/Business/Economics
Kellie Holzer, Assistant Professor of English

This multidisciplinary team has designed a symposium on the research and pedagogy of the digital classroom. By bringing faculty with digital experience together with faculty interested in learning about these pedagogies, their project seeks to foster a campus-wide dialogue about digital learning. Faculty will be able to sharpen their digital expertise, experiment with alternative approaches to knowledge production, and collaborate with their colleagues in creative, interdisciplinary ways.

“Making History Matter: Bringing Public History to Virginia Wesleyan University”
Kathleen Casey, Assistant Professor of History

Casey’s proposal sets forth a plan for developing a full-fledged public history program that affords students new opportunities for active learning by linking the theories and skills taught in the classroom to concrete, transformative experiences beyond campus. In addition to better preparing students for a wider range of careers, the program would also provide an avenue to foster meaningful relationships with neighboring institutions and raise the VWU profile in the Hampton Roads region.

2013 Grants

“Toward the Liberally Educated Physician”
Larry Hultgren, Professor of Philosophy and Director of the PORTfolio Program

Hultgren’s project addresses how our students who aspire to a career in medicine can be well-positioned for upcoming changes to the Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT). The 2015 MCAT redesign includes sections on social sciences, behavioral sciences, and the humanities in addition to the traditional emphasis on the natural sciences. In light of these significant changes, Hultgren’s project also focuses on demonstrating to current and future students and their parents that our new 4x4 liberal arts curriculum with its emphasis on inquiry can provide the best framework for developing more well-rounded medical school applicants.

“Cultivating Honest Hearts and Knowing Heads: An Experiential Learning Plan to Increase Campus Wide Levels of Trust and Responsibility Through a Student-Led Campaign”
Lisa Lyon Payne, Assistant Professor of Communication

Utilizing an experiential learning model, Payne’s proposal supports a student-led communication campaign designed to promote honor, trust and personal responsibility among our students. Students implement a public communication campaign directed at educating the campus community about academic integrity and increasing awareness of, and adherence to, the existing University honor code at Virginia Wesleyan University.