Dates for SES 2024: May 20-24
Location: Graduate Research Center 201.B
Applications for SES 2024 are due April 22, 2024 (deadline extended)
Overview
The Summer Ethics Seminar is designed to cultivate increased ethical literacy across the Baylor campus. Through a partnership between the Academy for Teaching & Learning and the Baylor Ethics Initiative, this 1-week summer seminar invites faculty into an interdisciplinary conversation that illuminates how ethics is already present within and yet might further shape their teaching and research. Through collaboration with peers and input from colleagues specializing in ethics, the seminar will provide faculty with the necessary tools to further develop the role of ethics in their teaching and research. Each year, the seminar will gather around a unique theme to illuminate the multiple ways ethics is present in our preparation, in our classrooms, and in our research.
Participants will meet a few hours each day to discuss readings, share lunch, and work on individual SES projects.
A seminar-related project is a requirement of participation in SES. For example, the outcome could be an ethics-related course module to complement an existing course, a new ethics-related course proposal, or a preliminary proposal for an ethics-related research project.
2024 Theme: Engaged Learning for Local Food and Environmental Justice
Facilitators:
Josh King (English; Director, Environmental Humanities; Affiliated Faculty, Baylor Ethics Initiative)
Paul Martens (Religion; Director of Interdisciplinary Programs, College of Arts & Sciences; Director, Baylor Ethics Initiative)
Waco’s diverse and vibrant communities face poverty and food insecurity rates that significantly exceed that of the state and nation, as excess healthcare costs associated with local food insecurity rise to $53,594,339 annually. Many of these neighborhoods are also in the most vulnerable categories for nutritional and environmental threats driven by climate change, itself exacerbated by methane emissions from wasted food rotting in our landfill. How can Baylor classes engage students in transdisciplinary research and service learning to cocreate a just local food ecosystem that nourishes communities and their environments? This Summer Ethics Seminar will equip instructors from diverse disciplines to ask and find answers to this challenge, encouraging (but not limited to) development of learning opportunities that contribute to Baylor’s new Environmental Humanities Minor and the Engaged Learning Distribution List in the Common Core. Sessions will involve ethical and theoretical reflection, practical workshops, and site visits, including discussions with Baylor faculty and community leaders involved in a grant-funded effort, the SCRAP Collective (Sustainable Community and Regenerative Agriculture Project).
This seminar is generously sponsored by the Academy for Teaching and Learning, the Baylor Ethics Initiative, and funders of the SCRAP Collective (the Funders Network and the Cooper Foundation).
Additional Information
- Eligibility: SES is available to permanent, full-time faculty members with an appointment for the upcoming academic year and the expectation of continued employment beyond the upcoming academic year. There are other circumstances that preclude participation in SES. For example, certification of fulltime work on an external research grant is mutually exclusive from participation in SES.
- Funding: Eligible participants receive a $1,000 stipend. Stipends are paid to faculty with a 10-month contract. SES is available to those on 12-month contracts; faculty in that situation simply continue to receive their regular pay while participating in SES. Eligibility for participation and eligibility for funding are determined for each SES applicant in collaboration with University administrators and college/school business officers.
- Number of Fellowships: 10
- Contact: Applications may be obtained by following the link at the top of this page.
- Deadline: Applications are due by 5:00 p.m. on the designated due date. SES applications may be submitted via hard copy, but we prefer and encourage electronic submission to atl@baylor.edu. (Supervisory endorsements should be scanned and emailed or may be provided to atl@baylor.edu via email from the endorsers.)