Students will have a number of new courses and opportunities to choose from next year thanks to the recently announced Vision Fund grants from the Center for Support of Teaching and Learning.

Seven $5,000 grants were given out to fund new programs and classes for the upcoming academic year. The grants are given out to the proposals with the greatest potential to improve teaching and experimental or innovative learning.

Habitat for Humanity is one of the programs that received a Vision grant. Habitat will use its funding to begin a lunchtime lecture series for its volunteers for its upcoming house sponsorship, said senior Julia Rocchi, who wrote the grant for Habitat.

The series hopes to ‘expose students to the wide variety of academic and activist influences that shape their local communities,’ said Rocchi in an e-mail.

The lectures will start in August 2005 when Habitat starts its sponsorship on Syracuse’s West Side and will feature a different speaker each weekend.

The club ran another lecture series for its 2002-2003 sponsorship, but discontinued it because they did not sponsor their own house the following years.

‘Now that we’re in the midst of planning to renew the build for next year, we are ready to reinstall the lecture series as well,’ Rocchi said.

Francis Parks in the Students Offering Service office in Hendricks Chapel and Larry Elin, a professor of new media at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications submitted the proposal for the club.

While the Habitat program will educate students outside of the classroom, many of the Vision Fund grants help professors start new courses in the classroom.

Philip Arnold, professor of religion, will use his grant to fund ‘Religion and Sports,’ a 100-level religion course to be offered next semester.

‘If you were to think about the big ceremonial center of SU, it would have to be the Dome,’ said Arnold, whose course will focus on the religious and ceremonial history of athletics from the Olympics to Sumo wrestling to lacrosse.

Many popular sports have their origins in ancient religious ceremonies, which helps to explain the intensity and fervor and ‘miracles’ people feel about sports, he said.

Lacrosse, a major SU sport, has a particularly ceremonial history. The sport evolved from Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois games, said Arnold, whose wife and children are Iroquois.

Part of Arnold’s classes will be held at different athletic venues, including, he hopes, the Dome, to see how the fields are arranged as ceremonial spaces. Athletes and coaches will be featured speakers.

Another grant winner focuses on education of an entirely different type. Matt Kiechle,

Health Education and Wellness Coordinator for SU Health Services, and Sandra Faulkner, a professor of communication and rhetorical studies, won a grant to create a series of public service announcements to help educate students about HIV and safe sexual practices.

‘Instead of us going out and buying a poster or purchasing a PSA or airing a nationally produced PSA … we are going to use undergraduate students to learn from peers about what students need and want and create that for them,’ Kiechle said.

Students from Faulkner’s Communications and Rhetorical Studies 456 class, which teaches students research methods, will conduct focus groups of students and ask them a series of questions about safe sex and HIV, Kiechle said.

The class will work with students in the graphic design program and are also working with AIDS Community Resources in addition to Health Services.

‘We wanted collaboration across the university and downtown,’ Faulkner said.

The service announcements will emphasize the importance of knowing one’s HIV status, communicating with sexual partners and practicing safer sexuality, Kiechle said.

Kiechle said they were looking into funding the program by getting sponsorships from condom companies before the grant was awarded.

The remainder of the Vision grants will fund classes and community partnerships in the School of Architecture, the College of Human Services and Health Professions, the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs and the College of Visual and Performing Arts.

Published on February 23, 2005 at 12:00 pm