Religious Studies News

Assuming the course attracts students in sufficient numbers, we plan to offer it in regular rotation in alternating years. We believe that it will help our department meet the intellectual and professional needs of our current and future MA students, and will contribute to our redesigned MA program by offering students a unique intellectual and professional learning experience to complement the new areas of specialization. On a practical level, it will provide our MA students with possible arenas for their own future research, including possible thesis topics. By creating connections with new community partners, it will help extend the department’s commitment to experiential learning and to engagement with living faith communities — a commitment maintained in undergraduate courses through site visits and other projects — to our MA students.

Finally, the new grant writing course will also offer our students — whether they plan to continue on to doctoral work or seek employment in the public or private sector — a uniquely practical professional development opportunity. Many of our professionally focused MA students go on to work in community service organizations, nonprofits, or NGOs in various fields, where experience gained from this course will be an asset in their future grant writing and fundraising efforts. Similarly, our doctoral-track students will find their grant writing experience helpful when applying for grants and fellowships to support their doctoral research and dissertation writing.

As all who work in the humanities are aware, the past few years have been particularly challenging ones for our disciplines. We believe that our MA program redesign will make our stand-alone program not only more appealing to current and future students, but also that it will offer future graduates of our program a more solid foundation from which to successfully apply for doctoral study and professional positions. The grant writing course will be a crucial part of this process and will further connect our MA program to our departmental focus on experiential learning and engagement with our Denver community. Our current MA students have expressed enthusiastic interest in the course, and the groups we have approached in our initial discussions about community partnerships have welcomed our interest. As we continue implementing the various aspects of our program redesign, we look forward to the grant writing service learning course becoming a cornerstone of our program, and we look forward to sharing the fruits of our experience with those in the AAR community as well as those within our university.