About the Curriculum Transformation Project

The University of Washington Curriculum Transformation Project is located in the Dean's Office of the College of Arts & Sciences but serves faculty members throughout the University. The was initiated in 1991 through Ford Foundation funding and in-kind support from the Department of American Ethnic Studies and the Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Education. The project built upon significant expertise in curriculum transformation at the University that had developed as a result of previous Ford Foundation grants and the hiring of faculty members with special expertise in this area.

Curriculum transformation is supported at the University of Washington by a faculty senate resolution.

The concept of curriculum transformation emerged in higher education in the 1970s from projects to incorporate women studies scholarship across the curriculum. Two Ford Foundation grants to the Northwest Center for Research on Women in the late 1980s, the Different Voices Project and the Evaluation Project for the Foundation's Mainstreaming Minority Women's Studies Project, developed the university's expertise in curriculum transformation.

Subsequent grants from the Ford Foundation to the Department of American Ethnic Studies expanded the impact of curriculum transformation: a UW companion grant (to the statewide UW/Washington Center Cultural Pluralism Project) which created the curriculum transformation project, a grant to host the Foundation's Campus Diversity Initiative Conference in October 1993, and a grant to develop courses and curriculum exploring intersections of race, gender, ethnicity and other constructs of difference. The National Endowment for the Humanities also awarded UW a grant to integrate American pluralism into selected humanities curricula. Click on Projects below for more information about these individual projects.

Role and Purpose

The Curriculum Transformation Project is located in the College of Arts and Sciences. Its primary responsibilities are assisting both individual faculty and academic departments with curriculum change:

The purposes of the Project are to:

Consolidate and build upon expertise and activities at the University of Washington in the area of curriculum transformation to include the study of race, gender, ethnicity, nation and nationhood, class, disability and sexuality into postsecondary liberal arts and professional education;

 

Provide assistance to departments, schools, and colleges with developing both faculty development and curriculum development projects and seeking funding to support them;

 

Disseminate research on curriculum transformation and pedagogical innovation;

Collaborate with other units that focus on curricular and institutional change in the area of gender and cultural pluralism content and inclusive pedagogy.

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