Learning Innovation and Bass Connections are pleased to welcome the first cohort of Collaborative Project Courses Faculty Fellows. Launched this fall, the Collaborative Project Courses Faculty Fellows Program supports faculty interested in designing courses in which student learning is driven by collaborative research on applied projects that extend across an entire semester.

In its inaugural year, the program includes faculty affiliated with six Duke schools and a wide array of university institutes and initiatives. Participants will spend the next year reimagining an existing course, or designing a new course, that includes project-based pedagogies in which students work together to create new knowledge, tangible works and/or creative or artistic projects. Through intensive workshops, Fellows will collaborate with their peers on course (re)design with guidance from pedagogy experts and lessons from other faculty at Duke with experience in this form of teaching.

Topics covered through the fellowship include writing achievable learning objectives and designing a syllabus; choosing and scoping projects; designing course/project milestones and deliverables; identifying and working with partners/clients for projects; creating, managing and mentoring student teams; and assessing student work; among others.

2019-2020 Faculty Fellows

Nicole Elizabeth Barnes
History, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences
Barnes plans to design a new undergraduate course on the history of modern China with a focus on the post-1949 communist state. Students in the course will work on teams to examine the relationship between the individual and social collective through analysis of The Memory Project films, a unique oral history collection of filmed interviews with survivors of the Great Leap Forward Famine (1958-61), created by renowned documentary filmmaker Wu Wenguang and his collaborators, and expertly curated at Duke Libraries by Luo Zhou.

Charlotte Clark
Nicholas School of the Environment
Clark plans to design a new course on environmental program evaluation for Master of Environmental Management students and upper level undergraduates. In the course, small teams of students will work with external clients to design program evaluation plans and implementation strategies tailored to their clients’ individual needs.

Aaron Dinin and Amanda Gould
Innovation & Entrepreneurship
Dinin and Gould plan to redesign Learning to Fail, an undergraduate course they co-teach through Duke Innovation & Entrepreneurship. In the course, small teams of undergraduates work together on a group research and product prototyping project.

Robert Duvall and Brandon Fain
Computer Science, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences
Duvall and Fain plan to design a new course for third- and fourth-year computer science majors that will explore the real-world components of being a computer scientist, including ethics, impacts on society, writing and communication, user-centered design and professional development. The course will include a collaborative project in which student teams will identify a current computer science problem, develop an application to address that problem, and test, analyze and iterate on their design.

Martin Eisner
Romance Studies, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences
Eisner plans to develop a new course that will explore the Henry Bellamann Collection of Dante Materials housed in Duke’s Rubenstein Library. Advanced undergraduates and graduate students will work on teams to develop a dynamic library exhibit and digital humanities projects that investigate Dante’s life and works and the persistence of the medieval in the modern age.

Luciana Fellin
Romance Studies, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences
Fellin plans to reimagine Food, Culture & Society, an undergraduate seminar that examines daily practices and rituals involving food and their cultural, social and political significance. The course is part of a four-course Duke Immerse cluster examining the future of food and will include collaborative projects in which students will pick a food, conduct a life cycle analysis to understand the environmental impact of that food and examine cultural artifacts and rituals around its production, distribution and consumption.

Crystal Grant and Scott Snider
School of Law; School of Medicine
Grant and Snider plan to develop The Child Advocacy Lab, an elective course for graduate students in Duke’s School of Medicine and Law School. Through the course, which will examine child welfare and advocacy from the perspectives of medicine, law and social work, students will work on teams to develop solutions to real-world challenges in child advocacy.

David Johnston and Jennifer Swenson
Nicholas School of the Environment
Johnston and Swenson plan to design a new integrative course focused on innovative technologies for remote sensing (e.g., drones) in ecology and conservation. Students in the course will be introduced to emerging environmental remote sensing tools, techniques and applications, and will work on teams to tackle challenging environmental problems using raw data they collect from the field.

Christina Leonard
School of Nursing
Leonard plans to design a new course on team-based approaches to the management of critically ill adults. Teams of graduate students studying to be nurse practitioners, doctors and physician’s assistants will work together in an interprofessional setting to examine, develop and deploy advanced critical care skills and promote spiritual, psychosocial and physical well-being to critically ill individuals and their families.

Cecilia Márquez
History, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences
Marquez plans to redesign an undergraduate course that examines the history of Latinx activism from the mid-19th century to the present. Using archival materials and oral histories, students will collaborate on small teams to create public-facing digital projects on the history of Latinx activism at Duke.

Emily Parks
Thompson Writing Program
Parks plans to redesign a Writing 101 course that explores the intersections of neuroscience, philosophy and law. First-year students will work on small teams to examine a research project currently being conducted at Duke and interview the scientific team leading the study. Students will then collaborate to synthesize the interview and related research into short written products aimed at academic and public audiences.

Corinna Sorenson
School of Medicine
Sorenson plans to design Health Policy Innovation Lab, a course for graduate students and advanced undergraduates that will focus on emerging issues in health policy (e.g., rural health, mental health, social determinants of health). In the course, small teams of students will work with external clients to tackle a current issue in health policy through a range of strategies and outputs, such as through policy briefs, pamphlets and infographics, educational campaigns, advocacy strategies and more.

Gavin Yamey
Duke Global Health Institute
Yamey plans to reimagine Global Health Policy and Systems: Transforming Evidence into Action, a masters-level course on global health policy and health systems frameworks. Students in the course will work on small teams to investigate a health systems/policy issue with a partnering NGO.

Learn More

• Browse opportunities for faculty through Bass Connections and faculty grants and funding through Learning Innovation.
• Explore Bass Connections courses, which incorporate team-based, applied learning around societal challenges into a semester-long course structure.
• Check out how faculty have described their Bass Connections experiences in their own words.