Congratulations 2025-2026 Grantees!
Oeyvind Bjoeru
Germanic Studies
Language Pods: Shared Interests to Foster Language Learning
Lyn Hoare
Theater and Dance
Theatre for Dialogue: Exploring Meaningful Social Connection
Mina Kim
Asian Studies
Living Museums: Fostering Belonging and Artistic Engagement in Korean Education
Li-Chen Lin
Nursing
Promoting Professional Belonging Through Integrating Growth Mindset in Nursing Skills Development
Bindu Viswanathan
Statistics and Data Science
Boosting Engagement and Belonging with Collaborative Probability and Statistics
Veronica Walker
Nursing
Fostering Belonging and Caring Through Individualized Student Interviews
Sara Simons
Theater and Dance
Fighting Imposter Syndrome Among Preservice Teachers
Andrei Straumanis
Chemistry and Biochemistry
Fostering Connection in Large STEM Courses via Peer Plus a Year Mindset
INTRODUCTION
Teaching innovation grants are designed to give full time instructors time over the summer to develop something new in a course to be taught in Fall 2025. If selected, the grantee will be awarded $3,000 to work on their innovation over the summer semester, and implement the innovation in their course taught in Fall 2025. Innovations that can be utilized by other instructors are especially welcomed.
For the 2025-2026 academic year, the focus will be on fostering belonging.
Decades of social science and learning science research support student belongingness as central to maximizing student achievement (for more information, please see these resources). In support of creating a caring community, in which all of us are students, helping one another grow, the focus of the 2025-2026 Teaching Innovation Grants will be on fostering belongingness.
We encourage you to reflect on what student belonging might look like in your classroom and consider the resources or intentional experiences you would need to develop to create an environment where all students feel a sense of belonging—whether to one another, within the discipline, or to the university as a whole.
The grantees will be expected to:
- Attend a symposium on the UT campus in April 2025 to discuss student belonging
- Work over the summer on researching and developing resources that promote student belonging in the classroom
- Provide an end of summer report and examples of the resources
- Teach using the resources in the Fall 2025
- Reflect on the resources, how well they worked and plans for improvement
- Share results in Spring 2026.
HOW TO APPLY
Any UT instructor, individually or in teams, may submit a proposal. Applications must be submitted for review by Monday, March 17, 2025.
Access 2025-2026 the application here.
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