We’re excited to announce the newest iteration of AMICAL’s Digital Liberal Arts Cohort program!
This program is the cornerstone of our efforts to raise the faculty and staff capacities of member institutions for localized, digital approaches to liberal arts education. Previous iterations focused around coordinated attendance of onsite events. Given global events, the program has been overhauled to take advantage of online opportunities.
About the program
A learning community with training and resource support for faculty-staff teams working on digital liberal arts initiatives
Applications for the program are invited from teams engaged in digital liberal arts projects or initiatives that are anchored in some way in local teaching and learning, and that involve a partnership of local faculty and staff. Teams may have as few as two members and can include faculty, librarians, technologists and academic administrators.
The program will support these teams with access to third-party training and expertise, a peer community of practice, and a series of AMICAL-facilitated project showcase and peer consultation events.
We use “digital liberal arts” as an umbrella term covering digital approaches to pedagogy and scholarship in the liberal arts. Our use of this term includes digital humanities, digital literacies, and the use of technology to enable new forms of interdisciplinary scholarship or pedagogy. We are interested in supporting a wide range of initiatives: from individual digital projects, to course redesigns with elements of digital literacy or scholarship, to campus-wide curricular initiatives involving digital literacies, pedagogy or scholarship.
This program is part of our 2018-2021 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for “Building Leadership and Capacity for Digital Liberal Arts across AMICAL.” Our aims for it are:
(From the program website)
- to support initiatives that will contribute to capacity-building at the institutional and consortial level;
- to solidify AMICAL’s role as a cross-institutional network;
- and to develop sustainable consortial models for supporting the digital liberal arts.
How to apply as a team
Applications for the program are open from today until end of day on July 5. If your team isn’t able to submit an application during this period – don’t worry! There will be another call in September with a longer submission window.
Prospective applicants should read the “Cohort opportunities and support” for more details and then follow the steps in “Applying to the cohort”.
July 2020 event of possible interest to cohort teams: Digital Pedagogy Lab
For teams that are interested in applying to the cohort, we’d like to highlight an upcoming event: Digital Pedagogy Lab 2020 will be held 26 July – 2 August. Only the following courses are currently open (and have very few seats remaining):
- Intro
- Critical Digital Pedagogy
- Information Literacy
- Data, Code, Ethics
- Digital Identity
- Blended Maker Faire
- PreK-20 Recess: Play in the Time of the Pandemic
If you would like to receive funding to participate in any of the above courses, send us an email by 30 June (even if you haven’t submitted your application yet). In your email, list your team members’ names, the courses that they would like to participate in, and a sentence for each describing how the training relates to the project you have in mind. Do note that funding for training through this program is subject to certain requirements, and associated with certain expectations, as outlined on the cohort website. Your team will still need to submit a cohort application by July 5.
Remember that there will be opportunities for teams to apply for the cohort at the start of each semester for at least the coming year. For teams interested in attending Digital Pedagogy Lab 2020, we realize that time is short for teams to organize themselves, so don’t hesitate to reply to this email and ask us any questions you may have about your prospective application.
–Digital Liberal Arts Programs Committee
Najla Jarkas (American University of Beirut)
Maha Bali (American University in Cairo)
Jeff Gima (AMICAL / American University of Paris)
Alex Armstrong (AMICAL)