Resources For Faculty

Smith faculty are deeply committed to student learning. To increase the environmental literacy of all Smith students, the college supports the faculty in bringing environmental concepts and context to a wide variety of courses through curricular enhancement grants, fellowships, and providing environmental data for teaching and research.

Faculty Research Fellowships

The CEEDS Faculty Research Fellowship program invests in faculty and connects their research to our campus and community challenges. The premise of this investment is that research can bridge theory and practice, and enhance student learning for many years to come.

Each year, CEEDS appoints 1–2 Smith faculty as CEEDS Faculty Research Fellows. These fellows join a community of engaged faculty who use Smith’s distinctive campus resources and the “campus as classroom” model to advance our understanding of climate change and climate impacts. In the summer of their appointment, faculty are provided with summer support, student summer undergraduate research fellows and research funds to support the dissemination of their research findings on and off campus.

Please contact Andrew Berke to discuss your ideas and questions.

In the Spotlight

Side Effects of Salt

Professor Amy Rhodes and Frances Li ’23J worked to study the impact of campus de-icing protocols.

  • July 8, 2024
Amy Rhodes

A Mission to Save Species

Associate Professor Jesse Bellemare aims to preserve plant life threatened by climate change.

  • July 10, 2024

Curricular Enhancement Grants

Each year CEEDS invites proposals from faculty and teams of faculty who want to develop a new course or modify, revise or enhance an existing course. The program supports activities like new course development, new lectures or discussion topics, design of new assignments and projects, and incorporation of field trips and experiences. CEEDS can provide expertise, infrastructure, supplemental course funds and course development funding in support of these efforts.

We are particularly interested in proposals that highlight/examine the sustainability of our campus operations, that support our environmental concentration, that make use of the MacLeish Field Station or that connect to the college’s current strategic initiatives.

Previously Funded Projects Through 2024 (PDF)

CEEDS Curricular Enhancement Program 

The Center for the Environment, Ecological Design and Sustainability (CEEDS) invites proposals from faculty (and teams of faculty) in any discipline for development of new courses or modification and enhancement of existing courses that will support our mission—to graduate women who excel at integrating knowledge across disciplines in support of environmental decisions and actions—and our programmatic outcomes:

  • Students make connections – Students bring together knowledge and data from different fields within the unifying context of the environment.
  • Students see multiple perspectives – Students learn to see environmental issues from multiple perspectives by interacting with faculty, staff, alumnae, other students, and community members with different backgrounds, experiences, and knowledge.
  • Students get outside – Students learn from the communities and built and natural landscapes in which they live and study.
  • Students take action – Students take on environmental projects inside and outside of the curriculum and draw upon their liberal arts education in pursuit of these projects.
Activities Supported 

The intent of this program is to support faculty who wish to develop a new course or modify, revise, or enhance existing courses. The program supports activities like new course development, new lectures or discussion topics, design of new assignments and projects, and incorporation of field trips and experiences. CEEDS can provide expertise, infrastructure, supplemental course funds, and summer stipend in support of these efforts. Faculty stipends are offered at three scales: 4 credit course ($2000), 2 credit course ($1000), or substantial component of 3-4 class sessions ($500). CEEDS can also coordinate access to equipment, instrumentation, and transportation. Supplemental course funds can be used for the purchase of books, materials, supplies and field trip expenses.

We are particularly interested in proposals that explore aspects of sustainable communities in policy and practice, support our environmental concentration, that make use of the MacLeish Field Station or connect to the college's current strategic initiatives.

How to Apply 

We invite you to contact Andrew Berke (aberke@smith.edu x3637) or Joanne Benkley (jbenkley@smith.edu x3951) to discuss your ideas and questions. Please submit your proposal via the application form on our website (smith.edu/about-smith/sustainable-smith/for-faculty). Individual and joint proposals are welcome. All proposals must include an articulation of anticipated educational outcomes (see above), and recipients of funded proposals will be asked to report back on results. The normal application cycle is in the spring semester for courses in the coming academic year. Applications submitted outside this cycle will be considered as funding allows.

Examples

A professor of American studies may wish to incorporate the cultural and industrial history of the Mill River and its role in the development of Smith and Northampton. Proposed activities may include meeting with faculty in economics and water resources, development of two new lectures, and design of a half-­‐day field trip to walk the hidden Mill River through town. Educational outcomes may be that

  • students better understand the connections between culture, economics, hydropower, and other aspects of the Mill River
  • students develop a deeper sense of the city of Northampton and the Pioneer Valley

A course in plant ecology may wish to partner with a statistics course to determine how the microclimate of a hemlock grove differs from a stand of sugar maples. The proposed enhancement may include discussions between the faculty, a field trip to MacLeish during which the plant ecology students introduce the students in the stats course to the ecology of the sites, presentations by the statistics students to the plant ecology class, development of a webpage by the ecology students to present the results of the project to a broader community. Intended educational outcomes may be that

  • the statistics students gain a deeper understanding of the ecology of a New England forest
  • the plant ecology students will gain skill in communicating ecological concepts to those outside of their discipline

A professor in the theatre department may wish to engage with a local composer and students to develop a site-specific music-theatre piece at the Ada and Archibald MacLeish Field Station that will investigate the local environment, its ecology, indigenous stories of the land, and its connection to our history (recent and geological). Proposed activities may include interviewing experts, considering data collected at the field station, research of the history of the region from an ecological perspective, trips to the field station, investigation of traditional theatre operations, and performances of the piece both on site and on campus open to the broader community. Educational outcomes may be that

  • the students experience a more meaningful connection (local/historical/ecological) to the landscapes in which they live and perform
  • the students deepen their understanding of environmental issues, and bring this perspective into theatre work by, for example, developing low energy lighting solutions
  • the students will gain skill in communicating complex, interdisciplinary concepts to the public.

More examples are in our Previously Funded Projects file on our webpage:

https://www.smith.edu/about-smith/sustainable-smith/for-faculty

How to Apply

Please contact Joanne Benkley to discuss your ideas and questions. All proposals should include an articulation of anticipated educational outcomes, and recipients of funded proposals will be asked to report back on results. Submit applications by February 28, 2025. Applications after this date are also welcome and will be considered pending funding.

Apply for a Curricular Enhancement grant

Read more about how faculty have used their grants in the past.

Elisa Kim

Elisa Kim

Elisa Kim is an Assistant Professor of Art + Architecture and leads Smith’s architecture curriculum at both introductory and advanced levels.

As part of the 2019/2020 Year on Climate Change Professor Kim was awarded a CEEDS Curricular Enhancement Grant (CEG) to support her Advanced Architecture Design Studio: Transient Spaces—Terrestrial Bodies. While Kim’s fall advanced architecture studio always looks at the built environment through the lens of transient populations, in the fall of 2019, the studio aimed to specifically engage issues of migration and mobility in the face of sea level rise along coastal Massachusetts.

Students in Kim's class performed research and analysis to develop physical models and drawings that they installed and presented at the Year on Climate Change’s conference centered on “Climate Equity and Justice: Solutions in Action”. Through the course students were given the opportunity to visit coastal Massachusetts to bear witness and imagine, and then develop skills in applied design research, analysis, and techniques to synthesize information from disparate fields.

More About Professor Kim

Environmental Monitoring

To support research in the environmental sciences and to improve quantitative literacy among all students at Smith College, CEEDS supports an environmental monitoring program. Data on the environments around Smith are made available to faculty and students for use in courses and projects. Several sites exist for continuous and past collections of local environmental data including weather and seismic conditions at the MacLeish Field Station, along with weather data on the roof of McConnell Hall. A number of live webcams are available, some of which can be used for studying birds. Additionally, periodic monitoring equipment along the Mill River has measured and recorded water chemistry.

The Smith College Spatial Analysis Lab (SAL) supports all geographic information systems (GIS) for geospatial analysis of environmental data.

If you know of additional environmental or sustainability focused data that exist for our local area, please let us know!

We can support your work to identify, procure, install and monitor environmental monitoring equipment. Contact Paul Wetzel, Manager of the MacLeish Field Station, with specific questions regarding your environmental monitoring needs.