Pedagogical Innovation
Integrating Extended Travel into Amherst Courses
Courses that Integrate extended travel connect scholarship to the world beyond the classroom and offer students a chance to see performances, visit archives, or to undertake field work. Funding is available to integrate extended travel abroad and/or to domestic locations some distance from the college into a small number of courses. Learn more about Funding for Courses that Integrate Extended Travel.
Research Tutorials
Research Tutorials in the humanities and "humanistic" social sciences offer faculty and students the opportunity to collaborate on shared research projects. The enrollment for each tutorial is limited to six students. Learn more about Research Tutorials.
Point/Counter Point Seminars
Amherst courses regularly feature the exploration of competing ideas in ways that model the norms of civility and reasoned analysis that are necessary for constructive public discourse. Funding is available to support the development and teaching of seminars that center on this approach. Learn more about Point/Counter Point Seminars.
Support for Faculty in Less Quantitative Fields to Integrate Quantiative/Computational Analysis into Courses
This program enables faculty to offer one or two classes, or “modules,” in which quantitative reasoning could shed light on a topic that is relevant to the course. Examples of possible modules include measuring poverty and inequality; applications in digital humanities such as text analytics; data visualization; how to make sense of numbers and figures that get tossed around in popular media; understanding graphs; understanding educational achievement gaps; using quantitative measures to understand the importance of place, residential segregation, environmental exposures; interpreting quantitative studies on women and financial independence; analyzing housing data or police shooting statistics by race or gender or other variables; understanding election polls and results in a history or political science class; and integrating environmental science and statistics such as climate warming data into the more humanities focused environmental studies courses. To support the development of these “modules,” less quantitative subject matter instructors are matched with quantitative faculty who will offer assistance. During the first iteration of the course, both faculty teach the module. In future iterations, subject matter instructors are able to do so alone. In addition, if needed, the Moss Quantitative Center ("Q Center") works with the Center for Teaching and Learning to provide additional assistance with designing and developing the modules. Some of these modules could be used in other courses and/or could be repurposed and made available online to students, possibly somewhat separately from the core content of the course. Each participant receives a summer honorarium of $2,500 to support the creation and deployment of the modules. Interested faculty should submit via email to Adam Honig a brief proposal outlining the topic of the module and how it fits into the course. The Q Center is available to match instructors with quantitative faculty. Depending on faculty availability and when the course is offered, modules could be deployed in the spring of 2022 or during the 2022–2023 academic year, after which the faculty who worked together on each module will submit a brief joint report on how the module worked, lessons learned, and suggestions for the future. Interested faculty should submit via email to Adam Honig by January 31, 2022, a brief proposal outlining the topic of the module and how it fits into the course.