Three creative teaching grants for 2006 have been distributed by the Creative Teaching Committee and the Office of Teaching and Learning Advancement (OTLA).   Recipients of the grants are Craig Priebe, associate professor of music performance, and Carla Maltas, assistant professor of music education; Christine Satory, associate professor of art; and Paul Gestwicki, assistant professor of computer science.

Creative teaching grants are available each year for faculty members holding tenure track or academic-year contract appointments. The grants support intensive development of pedagogical resources for a course, program or curriculum component.

Priebe and Maltas were awarded a grant for their ongoing work with the Opera Outreach program, which has staged operas at elementary schools throughout East Central Indiana for five years.

The grant will allow them literally to take the show on the road. The Opera Outreach program has been invited to attend an international conference in Omaha, Neb. There, Ball State music faculty and students will offer three performances, two for conference attendees and one in the Omaha community schools.

Satory's summer grant is being used to finish designing and developing materials for her course "Social History of Visual Communications." The finished materials, which will include a Web site and study guide, will be resources for a number of disciplines, Satory said.

Gestwicki is using his grant to further research into students' understanding of computer science through a project that utilizes Java Interactive Visualization Environment (JIVE). JIVE is a research tool developed at Ball State and the University of Buffalo that allows programmers to see how computer programs are executed. The visualizations of JIVE clarify the meaning of program execution, which makes it useful as a visual debugger as well as a teaching tool.

Beth Messner, associate professor of communication studies and secretary of the Creative Teaching Committee, said the grant recipients all provided thoughtful and thoroughly developed proposals.

"Their ideas were innovative and promised to contribute substantially to the education of the students in their programs or to the education of students across the university," Messner said.

For Priebe and Maltas, the educational benefits of the grant are multifaceted. Not only will the student performers benefit from the additional experience of attending and performing at an international conference of music educators, but elementary students in Omaha will also benefit from their introduction to opera. In addition, the grant will allow the opera to be filmed, creating an archive for educators to reference in the future.

Satory noted that her class was unique in its integration of primary sources from key historical events as well as from creative fields such as visual arts, film, comics, animation, music, architecture, technology and other areas.

"My goals are to use multimedia to develop cultural, historical and ethical awareness in students and also to develop a solid foundation in aesthetics and critical thinking so they may become leaders in the visual communication field," Satory said.

The two major goals of Gestwicki's project are to enhance the understanding of students in introductory computer science courses and to increase student interest in the computer science field. The grant will allow him to generate resources for the course, including the creation of support materials, including lab exercises, lecture notes, a JIVE manual and a revision of the JIVE Web site.

Messner encourages other Ball State faculty to apply for creative teaching grants in the future.  

"This is an excellent opportunity to develop innovative pedagogical practices, one that more faculty should take advantage of," she said. "I encourage faculty to develop projects that are transformative in nature. Such projects might challenge students to examine content from new perspectives, provide for experiential learning opportunities or advance new teaching technologies."

For more information on creative teaching grants for 2006-07, contact OTLA at 285-1763 or tla@bsu.edu.