Pathways Professional Development Grants
The Pathways professional development (PD) grants will fund registration and travel costs for Pathways instructors to attend conferences related to general education and/or teaching. These grants are available to instructors of any classification (grad students, adjunct faculty, tenure-track and tenured faculty, and non-tenure-track faculty) who are teaching a Pathways course currently or next semester.
Several eligible conferences are listed below, but other conferences related to teaching (either in general or in your field) will also be considered. Please note: we cannot fund travel to purely disciplinary, non-pedagogical conferences; the conference must be related to pedagogy, either in general or in your field.
- AGLS’s Annual General Education Constitute
- ACUE's National Higher Ed Teaching Conference
- Red Rock Great Teaching Retreat
- AACU's Conference on General Education, Pedagogy, and Assessment
- Lilly Conferences
- VT's Conference on Higher Education and Pedagogy (CHEP)
You can also use this grant to pay for online courses and certifications on effective teaching through the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE).
Goals of the Pathways Professional Development Grant Program
- To support Pathways instructors’ professional development goals in regards to teaching in Pathways General Education courses.
- To support innovations in teaching across the Pathways curriculum.
Eligibility
Professional development grants are available to instructors of any classification (grad students, adjunct faculty, tenure-track and tenured faculty, and non-tenure-track faculty) who are teaching a Pathways course currently or next semester.
Proposal Forms and Submission Process
Proposals can be submitted through this Google form. As part of your proposal, please download this Excel file, fill out your requested budget (see an example on the second page of the spreadsheet), and upload the file with your proposal.
There is no deadline for submission, as proposals will be reviewed on a rolling basis. You should submit your proposal at least sixty days prior to the conference to allow time for review and fiscal processing. Please also be mindful of the fiscal year cutoff of June 30. In order to receive funds for the current fiscal year and have time to spend them, your proposal must be received by March 1.
Your proposal will need to include a written confirmation of support from your chair or department head. This can either be a letter or a screenshot of an email that affirms that they support your travel to and participation in the conference. The correspondence can be short: one sentence is fine, along the lines of “The Department of X supports Dr. Y attending the ABC Conference in Miami, FL from DD/MM/YY to DD/MM/YY.”
Funding Details
Funding will be considered for expenses such as conference registration, transportation, lodging, per diem, and other travel-related expenses. We will transfer funds to your department, who will process your travel reimbursement, so please work with your department’s fiscal manager to ensure that you are following appropriate procedures and requesting the funds for the appropriate fiscal year(s).
Please note that if the conference falls around the fiscal year cutoff of June 30/July 1, you may need to receive some funds (e.g., plane tickets, registration) before fiscal year end and others (e.g., per diem, lodging) afterwards. Your fiscal manager can help you determine this.
Grantee Commitments
Awardees must commit to the following to receive funding:
- Submit a brief written or video reflection after the conference, describing one thing you learned at the conference that you will implement in your own teaching. Reflections will be posted to the Pathways Community of Practice Canvas site.