Cornerstone: Learning for Living Initiative (United States)

The Cornerstone: Learning for Living initiative aims to reinvigorate the role of the humanities in general education, and in doing so, expose a broad array of students to the power of the humanities.

Funding Information

• Implementation grants of varying amounts, up to $300,000 over 24 months, will be made to each funded project participating in this initiative.
• Planning grants up to $25,000 over 6-12 months are strongly encouraged to lay the groundwork for successful curricular reform and faculty professional development.

Eligibility Criteria

• This funding opportunity is available to regionally accredited private not-for-profit and public institutions of higher education. The Cornerstone: Learning for Living initiative welcomes the participation of a diverse array of institutions community colleges, liberal arts colleges, regional comprehensive institutions, and research universities.

Selection Criteria

• Selection criteria for both planning and implementation requests are described in further detail below:
  • A faculty-led and faculty-owned initiative: The success of the Cornerstone initiative depends on the level of commitment of a broad array of faculty coordinating their efforts across departments. Although the support of senior leadership is essential, it is the faculty’s responsibility to ensure that the curriculum is thoughtfully designed and well delivered, and to monitor the impact of curriculum and pedagogy on student learning.
  • A common intellectual experience anchored in transformative texts for incoming students: Participating institutions are expected to embed transformative texts in a gateway course (or courses) aimed at incoming undergraduate students that engage them in enduring human questions and cultivate their written and oral communication skills. Such gateway courses should build intellectual community among students of all backgrounds through a shared academic experience.
  • Coherent pathways through general education: Participating institutions are expected to create coherent pathways through general education that link the humanities to students’ professional aspirations and provide social, cultural, and ethical context for their thinking about the fields they will enter after college. This may be achieved through thematic clusters of courses, guided pathways, certificates, or other tactics.
  • Student reach, particularly for STEM and other pre-professional majors: Projects funded under this initiative should be designed to benefit a significant share of the undergraduate student body. The curricular components of the Cornerstone program model may be adapted and delivered in a variety of curricular formats: a certificate program that fulfills general education requirements; integrating core texts into existing courses that meet distribution requirements; mandatory first-year seminars or student success courses for incoming students coupled with intensive advising to develop tailored pathways through general education; or most ambitiously, using transformative texts and questions as a unifying mechanism to develop a coherent general education program for all students.
  • Sustainability: Major curricular redesign requires alignment with institutional priorities and strategic plans, attention to academic governance procedures, and reallocation of institutional resources. The factors that contribute to longer-term sustainability may vary campus to campus, but they are as important as the actual implementation of curricular redesign. For example, proposed curricula needs to be designed in such a way that it will meet internal standards for academic review and can be delivered by the prevailing configuration of tenure-track faculty.
  • Assessment: Successful proposals will include clearly articulated goals and appropriate means of assessment. They will seek to evaluate effects of curricular redesign both on student learning and faculty practices, and to use what they learn to inform ongoing improvement. There may be a follow-up study three to five years after the conclusion of the grant period in order to assess the longer-term outcomes of the funded project.
  • Dissemination: Active dissemination efforts will be important in order to spread the effects of the knowledge gained by grantees and practices to interested and influential audiences. Project leaders and participants will be expected to join periodic grantee convenings and other professional development workshops sponsored under the initiative to share lessons learned with their peers and to support each other in the challenging work of curricular redesign that brings the humanities from the periphery to the center of general education. These convenings are conceived not as burdensome obligations but as opportunities for intellectual and professional renewal.

For more information, visit The Teagle Foundation.