 David Kinkela, Ph.D. |
SUNY Fredonia history professor David Kinkela has been selected to serve on the Tuning Project, a nationwide initiative of the American Historical Association that will articulate the value of learning history and the ways historical study equips students for life beyond the classroom.
Faculty members from more than 60 institutions across the country will be brought together to develop common language that conveys the significance and value of a history degree – what students majoring in History know and should be able to do after earning their degrees -- to a broad audience.
“The American Historical Association’s Tuning Project seemed like a wonderful opportunity to connect our department’s commitment to student learning with a national conversation geared towards better defining the learning objectives of the History major,” Kinkela said.
Tuning is a collaborative process in which experts in a discipline spell out the distinctive skills, methods and substantive range of an academic field. From there, participants proceed to harmonize or “tune” the core goals of their discipline and the curricula that support goals of the individual campuses.
Participants will attend two meetings in the Washington, D.C. area and, over the next 2-1/2 years, engage in a discipline-wide effort that will shape the terms of curricular reform and student-learning assessment at their own campuses as well as at colleges and universities across the country. They will work with colleagues in their home departments to develop core goals and the curricular changes needed to support them and also consider the larger institutional impacts.
In conjunction with AHA project staff, participants will conduct targeted research on the History major and curriculum at their home institutions and develop an awareness of student employment outcomes.
In addition to the benefit of working with historians from around the country, Kinkela’s participation in the project will serve to enrich the learning experiences of SUNY Fredonia students. “It was an honor to be selected,” said Kinkela, who is also coordinator of the SUNY Fredonia Honors Program.
Kinkela’s involvement in the Tuning project dovetails with the History Department’s ongoing discussions related to the Task Force for Baccalaureate Goals at SUNY Fredonia and its initiatives to strengthen the learning objectives for all of its majors.
More than 120 faculty members applied to the project, which is being funded by the Lumina Foundation, an Indianapolis-based private foundation committed to enrolling and graduating more students from college.
