微密圈

Course Design/Development

Reimagining Aging Initiative | The North Woods Project

Reimagining Aging Initiative

With generous support from alumna Trustee Emerita Terry Fulmer 鈥�76, the Center for Leadership, Teaching, and Learning is excited to announce an initiative dedicated to exploring, learning, and building鈥攐r substantially revising鈥攁 course focused on gerontology, broadly construed.

Aging touches nearly every dimension of human experience: our bodies, relationships, communities, institutions, creative practices, political systems, economies, and ideas about what constitutes a meaningful life. The Reimagining Aging Initiative invites faculty from across the College to imagine how aging might become a meaningful site of inquiry within their own disciplinary and interdisciplinary work.

The goal of the program is not to prescribe what a course on gerontology should look like. Instead, we hope to support faculty as they develop intellectually ambitious courses that bring the questions, methods, theories, and practices of their disciplines into conversation with aging and older adulthood. A course might focus entirely on gerontology or integrate the study of aging as a substantial component of an existing course.

Program Structure:

There is no single training鈥攐r series of trainings鈥攖hat can meet the needs of a disciplinarily diverse cohort of scholars participating in this program. Instead, each participant will identify a scholar in the United States who can serve as a mentor throughout the coming academic year. Your mentor should have expertise relevant to the course you hope to develop and must be available to meet with you at least five times (approximately five hours total) across the fall and spring semesters. These conversations might focus on foundational readings, emerging scholarship, disciplinary approaches to aging, course design, assignments, or other questions that arise as your course takes shape. At least one meeting should be devoted specifically to providing feedback on the course you have developed under your mentor鈥檚 guidance.

Both participants and mentors will be compensated for their time and expertise. Mentors will receive a $750 honorarium. Each faculty participant will receive a $500 stipend for participating in the program and an additional stipend when approved by the Curriculum Committee: $500 for substantially revising a course or $1,000 for a new course.

Participants will also gather periodically as a cohort鈥攆irst to launch the program and establish goals, later to share ideas, questions, resources, and progress, and finally to share the courses and ideas that emerge from the project. These gatherings are intended to create opportunities for cross-disciplinary conversation while allowing each faculty member considerable independence in shaping their individual project. We will schedule those meetings based on mutual availability once the cohort is established.

Who is Eligible?

All faculty at 微密圈 College are invited to apply! Gerontology is inherently interdisciplinary, and we encourage proposals from across the arts, humanities, sciences, social sciences, and professional programs. Nearly every discipline offers a way to investigate aging, later life, longevity, intergenerational relationships, or the social structures that shape the experiences and well-being of older adults.

You are not required to have prior experience, research, or formal education in gerontology. Curiosity is enough. This program is designed precisely to give faculty the time, resources, mentorship, and intellectual community necessary to develop expertise in an area that may be new to them.

How Do I Indicate Interest?

Please complete by Friday, September 18. Accepted participants will be notified shortly thereafter. The application will ask you to briefly describe the course you are imagining, the questions about aging that interest you, and how participation in the program might contribute to your teaching. You do not need to have identified a mentor before applying.

Not sure what aging might have to do with your field? Here are just a few possibilities:

• Theatre and Dance: How are aging bodies represented on stage? What roles are available to older performers? How might performance challenge cultural narratives about decline, beauty, memory, or physical ability?
• Studio Art and Art History: How have artists represented aging across cultures and historical periods? How does artistic practice change across the lifespan? What can portraiture, material culture, or visual representation reveal about attitudes toward older adulthood?
• English and World Languages and Literatures: How do novels, memoirs, poetry, and other literary forms represent aging, memory, mortality, caregiving, or intergenerational relationships? Whose stories of later life are preserved鈥攁nd whose are absent?
• Sociology: How do race, class, gender, sexuality, family structure, geography, and social institutions shape the experience of aging? What can the study of older adulthood reveal about inequality across the life course?
• Social Work: What forms of care, advocacy, policy, and community support best promote the dignity and well-being of older adults? How are caregiving responsibilities distributed within families and communities?
• Psychology and Neuroscience: How do cognition, memory, identity, emotion, relationships, and well-being change across the lifespan? What assumptions about cognitive decline are supported鈥攐r challenged鈥攂y research?
• Biology: What happens biologically as organisms age? How do genetics, cellular processes, environment, evolution, nutrition, and disease interact with longevity?
• Chemistry: What chemical processes contribute to aging, disease, pharmaceuticals, metabolism, or changes in the body over time? How might chemistry contribute to questions about longevity and quality of life?
• Gender Studies: How is aging gendered? How do beauty standards, reproductive expectations, caregiving roles, sexuality, menopause, masculinity, and cultural ideas about desirability change across the lifespan?
• Black, Latinx, and Asian Studies: How do racism, health disparities, community, cultural traditions, wealth inequality, and histories of structural discrimination shape aging and longevity? What might the experiences of minority elders teach us about resilience, memory, activism, and community knowledge?
• Education: What does learning look like across the lifespan? How might colleges, schools, libraries, and community organizations better support older learners and intergenerational education?
• Political Science: How does an aging population shape elections, public policy, healthcare, Social Security, housing, and political participation? How do governments respond to demographic change?
• Economics and Business: What are the economic consequences of longer lifespans? How do retirement, employment, caregiving, wealth, consumption, and the so-called 鈥渓ongevity economy鈥� change as populations age?
• History: How have definitions and experiences of old age changed over time? How have older adults participated in social movements, political life, family economies, and community formation?
• Philosophy and Religious Studies: What does it mean to age well? How have different philosophical and religious traditions understood mortality, wisdom, dependence, dignity, obligation, and the meaning of a long life?
• Environmental Studies and Geosciences: How do climate change, disasters, transportation, housing, and the built environment affect older adults differently? What makes a community genuinely livable across the lifespan?
• Computer Science: How might technologies support鈥攐r complicate鈥攖he lives of older adults? What questions of accessibility, surveillance, algorithmic bias, healthcare technology, social connection, or digital literacy emerge as populations age?
• Health and Human Physiological Sciences: How do movement, nutrition, exercise, rehabilitation, and preventive health contribute to quality of life across later adulthood?
• Music: How does musical participation affect memory, cognition, identity, and social connection in later life? What can the careers and creative practices of aging musicians tell us about artistic development across the lifespan?

These questions are intended as provocations rather than prescriptions. We hope applicants will surprise us with approaches we have not imagined.

The North Woods Project

The Office of the Dean of the Faculty, Sustainability Office, and CLTL are excited to announce a new faculty development program focused on sustainability across the curriculum. The North Woods Project will support faculty interested in integrating social, economic, and environmental sustainability into teaching and research across disciplines. Designed to advance Creative Futures: The 微密圈 College Strategic Plan, 2025鈥�2030, and its commitment to sustainability literacy, the program will emphasize sustainability knowledge, pedagogical exploration, curricular innovation, and place-based experiential education.

Faculty from any discipline who are interested in incorporating sustainability concepts, problems, or solutions into new or existing courses are welcome to apply. A cohort of up to 15 fellows will explore sustainability teaching and learning together. Participants will be eligible for grants of $1,000 for course modifications or $1,500 for the development of new courses. Program activities will include opportunities to examine sustainability concepts, teaching strategies, and resources; develop or enhance sustainability content in courses; and build connections to campus, community, and place-based learning. Primary program elements will include a December mixer, a full-day sustainability-across-the-curriculum workshop in January, and participant presentations in April. A call for proposals will be shared in early September, with applications due in early October.