Faculty Awarded Experiential Learning Grant for Unique Project

LECTURER ROBERT CHOFLET, Assistant Professor Angel Dunbar, and Associate Professor Sharon Harley received an Experiential Learning Grant from UMD’s Teaching and Learning Transformation Center (TLTC). This support allowed them to design unique projects for students in ASP202: Black Culture in the United States. It also allowed the instructors to create resources for future sections of the course.

Students in the course worked with various historical cultural archives and visited the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and applied lessons they learned to fashion their own virtual exhibit of Black cultural artifacts as a final project.

“We encouraged students to take what they have learned about cultural traditions and what they have learned from studying historical cultural archives and apply that to a study of contemporary culture. They thought critically about the kinds of cultural traditions they interact with and value,” Choflet said.

The grant covered the salary of a faculty research assistant, Erica Puentes, who helped to build a database that documents more than 100 sites important to Black cultural life in the areas surrounding Baltimore, College Park, and Washington,

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D.C. This database will be used by the instructors in future student projects.

“The work we were able to do and the resources we were able to organize with the help of the TLTC grant has been a great success for the course, and for the department in general,” Choflet said. •