The GTU has been awarded two separate grants to support mentorship of doctoral students and the piloting of a Learning and Teaching Academy (LTA) for Future Faculty. The Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion in Crawfordsville, Indiana has awarded the GTU $70,000 to pilot the LTA over the next two years. A grant of $100,000 from the New York-based Teagle Foundation will support a two-year project entitled Engaging Meaning through Mentorship: Strengthening Post-Secondary Liberal Education through Vocation-Based Mentoring of Future Faculty. 

“Future faculty in religious studies and theology—in all of the liberal arts, we believe—simply must be better prepared to engage questions of meaning and teach in a reflective, critical, interdisciplinary way,” said GTU President James A. Donahue. “These grants strengthen the GTU’s ability to have broad impact in this vital area.”

In funding the Learning and Teaching Academy, the Wabash grant helps to provide doctoral students with pedagogical background, classroom teaching skills, and experience designing and teaching courses in ways that respond to the culturally diverse, religiously pluralistic realities of the 21^st century academy. The Teagle Foundation grant supports faculty mentors of doctoral students as they prepare these future teachers to consider the “Big Questions” of value and meaning, to foster critical thinking and ethical reflection among postsecondary students. President Donahue will facilitate a series of forums with faculty members from GTU member schools, the Center for Jewish Studies, the University of California, Berkeley, and other institutions to develop a mentorship model that can be adapted to a range of liberal arts disciplines outside religious studies and theology.

Doctoral student Elizabeth Drescher worked with Dean Maureen Maloney to develop the Teagle and Wabash grant proposals and will serve as lead research associate. Calls for doctoral student and faculty mentor participation will be issued in fall 2006.