Vantage College Bootstrap Grants

One time grants of up to $5,000 are available for pilot or incubator projects that seek to investigate new, innovative or experimental approaches to teaching and learning at Vantage College. These funds are available to Vantage College faculty and staff to develop and evaluate a trial implementation that could potentially bring significant benefit to Vantage College educational programming. A maximum of five grants will be awarded per year. 

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Previously funded projects 

Enhancing the Circumstances for Precision in Student Writing 

Jodie Martin & Jennifer Walsh Marr 

This project explores how instruction in a particular grammatical resource that articulates the contextual factors of actions can be useful in enhancing students’ linguistic precision across disciplinary courses in both Arts and Science. Through explicit instruction in VANT 140 courses, we will develop and expand an emphasis on what are known as ‘circumstances’ in Systemic Functional Linguistics for reading and understanding materials, as well as for students’ writing. This project deepens collaboration across the Vantage programs and also with disciplinary instructors, as we seek to investigate the impact of the Vantage Academic English Program through showing if and how students apply this useful grammatical resource in their assignments for other courses. Our plan is to develop further teaching materials aligned to our disciplinary colleagues’ texts and assignments that explicitly focus on the use of ‘probe questions’ to highlight contextual information in texts and of particular consequence to specific disciplines and writing assignments. We would then perform a textual analysis of students’ writing to see how they included such contextual information in their own writing, and to see if this benefited their disciplinary course grades. The Bootstrap grant is being used to hire an undergraduate research assistant to facilitate project management, data collection and to conduct initial analyses of texts. We anticipate this project will be a rich source of data and innovative both theoretically and pedagogically. 

Linking Problem-solving Skills and Language in VANT 140 Science 

Alfredo Ferreira & Georg Rieger 

This project follows-up on an OER project in PHYS117 involving the development of supplementary materials to the physics textbook with multilingual students in mind. For this, the PI has worked with a Vantage College alumnus on teaching, in VANT140, the links between key problem-solving skills in physics and the language and other communicative modalities involved in physics practice. We teach these links and reinforce a foundational problem-solving strategy introduced in the textbook by focusing on multiple competencies and collaborative problem-solving in small groups. Specifically, we use a script of a problem-solving group-work session between three fictional students, each with strengths and weaknesses associated with the learning aims of the physics textbook unit in question, and the respective modalities of language, figures, and mathematics (O’Halloran, 2004; Doran, 2017). The focus on language is expanded in a task in which the informal script is translated into a formal written solution, an area of known challenge for Vantage Science students. Through the grant, we plan to: (1) expand the materials to highlight students’ respective contributions and challenges, the corresponding roles of various communicative modalities, and the focal learning aims in physics (such as applying technical definitions for work and energy); (2) develop the quiz and survey tools to evaluate learning; (3) develop similar modules for two additional units in the physics textbook. We strongly believe that the modules created for VANT 140 will be beneficial for multilingual students – also beyond Vantage College and for all 1st year science students.