STATEN ISLAND, N.Y., April 21, 2010 — Wagner College was named yesterday as one of six schools to receive part of a $1 million matching grant from the Association of American Colleges and Universities.
The five other institutions chosen from among 50 proposals for the grant were Otterbein College, SUNY Cortland, Tufts University, the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and Georgetown University.
The grant, part of AAC&U’s “Bringing Theory to Practice” project, will provide Wagner College with $100,000 over the next two years “to develop transformative educational experiences,” according to an AAC&U spokeswoman.
Dr. Cassia Freedland, director of Wagner’s Center for Leadership and Service, said that the college would use the AAC&U grant to measure the impact of its innovative signature curriculum, the Wagner Plan for the Practical Liberal Arts, on the educational experience of its students.
The grant application says that Wagner College will “seek to identify and assess the relationships between different models of experiential learning, civic engagement, psychosocial well-being and persistence toward graduation while further developing the transformative educational experience within the Wagner Plan.”
“Wagner College engages in such a rich array of experiential learning and civic engagement models,” Freedland said. “This grant will help us investigate the assertion that student retention persistence to graduation is directly linked with ‘feelings of connectedness’ to the institution. Does civic engagement keep students excited about learning, all the way through to graduation? Does the civic engagement component of our curriculum actually enhance our students’ overall well-being, and does this feeling of connectedness extend past graduation? Those are the kind of questions we will be asking.”
For additional information about the “Bringing Theory to Practice” project and specific summaries of all six winning institutions’ proposed project activities, go to www.bringingtheorytopractice.org.
AAC&U grant supports study of Wagner Plan
April 21, 2010
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