2020 News

Year 2020 marked the debut of the themed Spanning Boundaries Challenge grant competition. The awarded team will tackle a promising multidisciplinary project: Developing Socially-Aware Quantitative Intuition.  Overall, this year's selected projects reflect the University of Arizona's goal of inclusive excellence at a critical time:

"Long-standing inequities exacerbated by the current pandemic and civic unrest have more widely crystallized the need for an intentional focus on equity," CUES director Guada Lozano, said. "I am proud that, in various ways, this year's CUES grantees are poised to enhance equity and diversity through three CUES Distinguished Fellowships and the first-ever CUES Spanning Boundaries Challenge grant."

In Bryan Carter’s virtual classroom, online education is moving toward a more immersive and interactive future.

This semester, Carter, director of the University of Arizona’s Center for Digital Humanities and an associate professor of Africana Studies, is launching a three-phase project to transform online teaching and learning, using 360-degree video broadcasting to give students an immersive virtual experience that brings the curriculum to life.  

What that means for students in Carter’s Introduction to African-American Literature class (AFAS 160) is a range of experiences, from a virtual office-hours conversation, to walking through Paris in the footsteps of expatriate writers like James Baldwin and Richard Wright, or stepping inside virtually recreated landmarks of the Harlem Renaissance.

Developing 21st century skills, enhancing students' quantitative intuition and building students' capacity for public scholarship are examples of overarching themes in education, "grand challenges" if you will. Such themes cut across disciplinary boundaries and attention to them can critically enhance the value of today's university education. But how exactly might such themes contribute to particular institutional goals or support faculty pursuits at the University of Arizona? How might they enable novel insights of value in the quickly evolving landscape of higher education?