Call for Proposals: 2022 Community-initiated Summer Institutes

Pandemic as Portal:
Collectively Reimagining Evergreen’s Future

Ready to submit your proposal? Skip ahead to Submission Guidelines & Criteria
Submission Deadline: March 10, 2022

Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. 

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. 

We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

Roy, Arundhati. “The Pandemic Is a Portal.” Financial Times, April 3, 2020.

The experience of teaching and learning through a pandemic for nearly two years has exacerbated the persistent inequities students experience in and out of the classroom. The 2022 Evergreen Summer Institutes provide an opportunity to contend with the simple yet formidable proposition of walking through the portal lightly with only what we need to build a more equitable enterprise.

How will we, collectively, imagine our world anew?

In accordance with article 17.2 of the Collective Bargaining Agreement with the United Faculty of Evergreen, the Learning and Teaching Commons invites proposals for community-initiated summer institutes related to the following themes. First-time conveners are especially encouraged to submit proposals.

Summer Institute Themes

I. Teaching at Evergreen: Culturally Affirming and Inclusive Pedagogical Practices

Summer institutes in this category will explore pedagogical practices that engage and support Evergreen students equitably. 

As a learning organization that emphasizes collaborative, interdisciplinary learning across significant differences, Evergreen is uniquely positioned as a leader in culturally affirming and inclusive pedagogical practices.  In particular, students at Evergreen experience

  • immersive, relationship-rich learning communities.
  • transparent interdisciplinary pathways of study that are easy to navigate.
  • flexible approaches to learning and evaluation that promote self-efficacy.
  • engaging with complex, contested, and capacious issues and questions in the classroom
  • learning that incorporates their cultural identities and histories as assets.

[Potential topics include addressing the needs of students with minoritized identities (race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, undocumented, unhoused, neurodiversity); facilitating equitable seminars; culturally-sustaining assessment; inclusive program design; developing syllabi & community agreements; transparent assignments; etc.]

II. Our Greener Community: Leadership and Organizational Change

Summer Institutes in this category will offer strategies and approaches to meeting the challenges of institutional change and/or developing equity-minded student, faculty and staff leaders who engage in community care by building a warm, supportive, curious, and resilient Evergreen community where all of us want to come to learn and work.

Our community has embarked on an ambitious project to attract and graduate hundreds of new students, while continuing to maintain and innovate our existing curriculum and services. The onset of a global pandemic presented immense challenges yet also an opportunity to rethink the way we work, and how we work together.

[Potential topics include understanding the nature of institutional change; challenges of leadership; institutional approaches for managing conflict and building trust; learning outcome assessment; using evidence to guide continuous improvement; anti-racist organizations; equity-minded leadership development; partnering across divisions; program evaluation; etc.]

Submission Guidelines

Please submit proposals using the online form no later than March 10th. Upon submission of a proposal, the lead convener should receive an automatic message confirming receipt of the proposal. If you do not receive this message within 24 hours of submission please contact us at learningandteaching@evergreen.edu. Selection notifications will be sent by email no later than April 15th.


I. CONVENER INFORMATION

  • Contact: Name and email address for each convener
  • Convener Experience: First-time conveners are encouraged!

II. THEME, TITLE, & DESCRIPTION
Please keep in mind that what you submit in this section will be read by potential participants.

  • Institute theme: choose from above
  • Institute title: 10 word limit
  • Institute description: 150-word limit

III. ACTIVITIES & GOALS

  • Participant learning goals: What concepts and content do you anticipate participants will learn from this institute? What take-always can they expect?
  • Plan for participant engagement: Reflect on the institute you planned and describe how you will engage participants in their own learning.  What activities will you offer to guide participants towards the goals you articulated above?
  • Equity goals: How will the institute you have planned address the following equity goals?  What activities will you offer to support meeting these goals?
    1. Closing opportunity gaps for students historically underserved in higher education (BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, undocumented, immigrant, living with disabilities, first in family to attend college, housing insecure). 
    2. Promoting equitable learning communities through culturally-affirming/anti-racist pedagogies and/or inclusive teaching strategies. 
    3. Redressing systemic inequities at Evergreen such as institutional racism, gender-based discrimination and violence, and ableist structures.

IV. LOGISTICS

  • Institute length: 0.5-2 days
  • Scheduling preferences: identify preferred weeks during summer session
  • Preferred number of participants: 10-40 people
  • Additional Information: Support needs or other relevant information

Review Criteria

Once a proposal is submitted, it is reviewed by members of the Commons Advisory Council using a blind peer review protocol that masks the identities of the proposers and the reviewers. Each proposal is scored by at least two reviewers according to the Evergreen Summer Institute Proposal Review Rubric.  Proposals are ranked according to their average scores.

CriteriaDescription
Curriculum Developmentadvances institutional capacities to build and sustain curricular coherence and stability.
Theme Alignmentaligns with themes articulated in the call for proposals.
Student Learning and Successcenters student success and has a high potential to yield improvements in student retention and graduation or increase enrollments.
Participant Engagementcontains a clear and convincing plan for engaging participants in their own learning through a variety of activities and assignments that support multimodal learning.
Equity-producingProposed institute aligns with one or more of the articulated equity-producing goals 
**Closing opportunity gaps …
**Promoting equitable learning communities …
**Redressing systemic inequities …
** See rubric **

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