DE Oracle @ UMUC

Writing a Grant and Working on it as Part of the Teaching/Learning Experience at UMUC

Sabrina Fu

Collegiate Professor

Other

Published: March-April 2009

Category: » University-showcase » Awards

This past semester, UMUC students worked on a small grant project ($10,000) for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's "People, Prosperity and the Planet" competition. Visit the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Web site for more information on this grant and to see the winners of the 2008–2009 competition.

The main focus of the grant project is to educate the public through the Internet to induce behavioral changes that are consistent with a more sustainable society. Hence, we studied communications and human behavior related to environmental sustainability as well as the basics of sustainability. Students then implemented their new knowledge base into providing an educational resource related to the topics of this first phase of the grant—materials and water use. Please check out what the students have accomplished with the support of UMUC staff and faculty by visiting our Web site, "Think Globally, Act Locally: Pathways to Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle ."

Once you see the work done by our students, you will wonder how they had the time to create it all. We all know that UMUC students are very busy citizens with families, work, and often travel at the last minute. We recognized this reality during the grant-writing process, when five students worked with Dr. Fu and Dr. McLaughlin in the fall of 2007. Hence, we developed a new course called BEHS398O: Individuals, Society, and Environmental Sustainability. Not only was a new course offered, but new route was also paved as the UMUC community worked on its first student-faculty grant. A team of dedicated undergraduate faculty (Sabrina Fu from Science and Environmental Management, Ahalya Hejmadi from Psychology, Wendy McDonough from English and Communications, and Robert Miller from Information and Library Services) worked with students in the BEHS398O classroom online, while dedicated staff from Marketing and Communications provided the technical support for this site through academic director Dr. Debra McLaughlin, and Heloisa Siffert from the Center for Support of Instruction worked with the students to produce two Flash videos for the site. Michael Smith of UMUC's Video Production Services group kindly provided his professional voice to one of our videos. What a team!  

Grant work takes time to think about and plan. Luckily, we had a dozen students who knew during the summer that they wanted to be a part of this endeavor. Dr. Fu had met all of these students online. We had various e-mail communications prior to the beginning of BEHS398O class (which was open for all to enroll in and did not require that their final project be targeted for our Web site). During a lazy summer afternoon, we had a face-to-face gathering in Dr. Fu's home and then we talked to our student stationed in England via speakerphone in between lunch and dessert. This communication helped to establish an even greater sense of community among all the team members prior to the beginning of the grant work.

This grant work was a learning experience for everyone, and one that we hope you will join us in. Check out the educational resources on our Web site now, and then send us your ideas and local resources through the links provided on the site. We hope that this project will be a learning experience for as many people as we can reach through the World Wide Web so that we can truly "think globally" and "act locally."