Norfolk State University has received a $225,000 grant from The Teagle Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The grant seeks to create a common intellectual experience through anchor texts that will reach 25 percent of the incoming class through participating sections of ENG 101 and ENG 102 and will launch a certificate in African American Studies.
NSU proposed the project that will assist with engaging faculty leadership and transforming curricula through a coordinated “Our HBCU Cornerstone” project that is a joint venture with the Southern Education and Teagle Foundations. During the Planning Grant phase, the NSU grant developers learned how to engage faculty members across the campus who are interested in the project that promises to break down the discipline-specific silos with a much more robust and comprehensive approach. Moreover, this collaboration goes beyond the NSU campus to include faculty at Clark Atlanta, Dillard, Tuskegee, and Virginia Union universities. Building on the African American canon, the project coordinators at each university decided to feature seven transformative texts in all their initiatives.
In addition to requiring the use of this core of texts in specific General Education classes, this two-year project engages faculty members across the university to integrate the teaching of transformative texts into specific General Education classes. One of the project coordinators, who is the Director of Composition, will ensure that a selection of the introductory English classes will integrate transformative texts into the curricula and that transformative texts will be added to the list of options for the second course in the sequence (ENG 102). Because all first- and second-year students at NSU are required to take these classes, there is confidence that many students will have an opportunity to understand the texts from a humanities perspective. In addition to these English courses, selected faculty who teach other classes in the General Education core will offer options to first- and second-year students that use the same or complementary texts. This will enable students to relate the texts to different contexts and to develop plural meanings for texts and identities.