Wheaton wins $150,000 grant for infusion program from Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation
July 14, 2005
Wheaton College has recently been awarded a three-year, $150,000 grant from the Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation to fund the college's Infusions Program, a key piece of the innovative Wheaton Curriculum.
The grant will provide support for a full-time faculty member to work with professors in order to further develop the content and educational tools necessary to integrate scholarship about race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, religion and technology in courses across the curriculum-from the arts and humanities to the social and natural sciences.
The Infusions Program is an integral part of the Wheaton Curriculum, which was designed to provide Wheaton students with a liberal arts education for the 21st century. The curriculum was approved by faculty by a 91 to 3 vote in December 2001 and introduced in fall 2003.
The main goal of the Infusions Program is to enable students to participate effectively in a global community by emphasizing the study of race and ethnicity and its intersections with gender, class, sexuality, religion, and technology in the United States and worldwide.
Since the program's inception, numerous courses have been reworked, and others created, to address these pertinent issues. These ''infused'' courses include ''Theatre and Social Change,'' ''Issues in Adolescent Development,'' and ''Race and Racism in U.S. Cinema.'' This was done with support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
The Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation's support ensures that Wheaton will maintain its momentum in realizing course transformations, according to Derek Price, associate professor of psychology and coordinator of the effort to infuse race and ethnicity across the curriculum.
''With much more work yet to do over several years just to achieve a functioning infusion program across all major courses of study, the Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation grant is exactly the support we need,'' Price said.
For many years, Wheaton has recognized the importance of the inherent relationships between identity categories such as gender and race. In the early 1980s, the institution initiated its ''gender-balanced'' curriculum, which introduced scholarship by and about women into courses across the disciplines. The Infusions Program is a continuation of this ongoing understanding.
While the Infusions Program seeks to incorporate issues of difference from outside the classroom into traditional academic subjects, another aspect of the Wheaton Curriculum, the Connections program, provides students with
interdisciplinary links that enrich the liberal arts education provided by Wheaton.
The Connections program combines two or more courses linked across disciplines, giving students the opportunity to approach the same topic from different academic perspectives. Included in the new curriculum are courses
such as ''Communication through Art and Mathematics,'' which combines Graphic Design and mathematics, as well as ''The Darwin Connection: Evolution, Race and Culture,'' the product of a link between Biology and English courses.
Wheaton College, located in Norton, Mass., is a highly selective college of the liberal arts and sciences with a student body of 1,500. The college produced 19 national scholars in 2005, including its second Rhodes Scholar
in four years, two Truman Scholars, two Watson Fellows, and six Fulbright Scholars. They represent a range of disciplines and aspire to study myriad topics-from the use of electronic drums in music from around the world to
the fate of aging dairy farmers in Europe who decline to modernize their businesses.
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