Grant program: Student Learning Experience Grant Program (SLE)

Grant recipient: Paul Crowe, Department of Humanities

Project team: Caedyn Lennox and Maggie Tsang, research assistants

Timeframe: September 2018 to August 2021

Funding: $4,400

Course addressed: Series of events hosted by the Department of Humanities

Description: For this project, Humanities MA students will be given financial and administrative support to develop a series of informal departmental research-sharing events that would be open to cross-campus departments of interest. The proposed series would enable graduate students and faculty to share their current research in an informal, professional setting. The events aim to foster collegiality between graduate students and faculty beyond student-advisor connections, as well as nurture professionalization among cohorts where students learn to talk about their research informally. Students will be in charge of inviting peers and faculty to sign up to share their research. This experience will not only give students a sense of agency, it will also prepare them to lead similar initiatives in their professional lives, such as organizing conferences and other events, and informal networking.

Measuring Effectiveness:

• The effectiveness of the project will in part be measured by faculty and student attendance, but also by our students’ increased confidence in professional settings, new opportunities through meeting faculty and students both within and beyond the department. 
• An analysis of the surveys, as well as the RAs ongoing observations and reflections reported at the monthly meetings, will serve as measures and inform projected changes to the event series. 
• An informal RA report, based on an analysis of the survey results, as well as their reflections and observations, will form the basis of the monthly check-in meetings that will serve to tweak the format where necessary and continue planning for subsequent events. 
• A final survey, created by the RAs in consultation with the other members of the project team, will allow for deeper inquiry into the effects of the series on the graduate student experience, as well as on departmental cohesion. An analysis of this survey will form the basis of a brief final report that also looks to the future.  

Knowledge sharing: We will circulate posters and fliers, post event dates on all applicable SFU media, including our website, Department and Institute for the Humanities Facebook and Twitter accounts (these reach 5,000 followers), and the graduate calendar. We will encourage the RAs to share their experience in formal and informal on-campus fora. The Chair will share the initiative during the Global Humanities Conference that the department is organizing at SFU in the spring of 2019. This international conference explores the institutional organization of Humanities departments, and the focal points of this present project (i.e., enhancing the graduate student experience, and building community in an interdisciplinary department) will be key considerations to the conference participants.

Keywords: Humanities, graduate student experience, informal networking, building connections, community-building, developing professional skills, student learning experience, sharing of graduate research