Eu centers proposal submission guidelines

1. European Court Graduate Travel Stipend. The School of Law, currently ranked 14 in the US (US News World & Report, 2011), has made a major investment in the expansion and enhancement of its international and comparative law programs. In the core law faculty, five scholars concentrate significantly on Europe, and two are among the foremost leading authorities in their fields: Inga Markovits and Basil S. Markesinis. President Powers, previously dean of the Law School, has himself been an impressive leader in this regard. In 2009, President Powers was in fact appointed to the rank of Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur, the prestigious order created by Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte in 1804, for his work in establishing the French Judicial Visiting Fellowship program at UT. Thanks to President Powers’s efforts, UT law students now spend more time overseas than ever before in the school’s history as a result of an opening in exchanges around the world and new internship opportunities. The Graduate Travel Stipend program here proposed will intensify and deepen UT’s commitment to exposing law students to Europe through practical experiences by assisting one student each year to attend the European Court of Justice in Luxemburg.

2. EU Public Policy or EU-US Relations PhD Research Grant. The overall aim of this grant is to ensure that EU public policy ideas and best practices are widely understood in the US by both academia and policy makers alike. To this effect, this research grant will award graduate students at UT the opportunity to conduct field research in Europe and meet with key policy makers at the supranational and Member State national level.

4. EU Public Policy or EU-US Relations Faculty Research Grant. The overall aim of this grant is to ensure that EU public policy ideas and best practices are widely understood in the US by both academia and policy makers alike. To this effect, this research grant will award faculty at UT the opportunity to conduct field research in Europe and meet with key policy makers at the supranational and Member State national level.

4. Business Studies Stipend. Business School faculty, as well as faculty in other disciplines (such as Economics, Government, and LBJ) who are researching business-related topics, recognize that the US and EU share many economic and business interests. Nevertheless, researchers’ interests have shifted disproportionately toward Asia in the past decade, following the general drift of attention in the business media. CIBER, a program housed in the McCombs School of Business, understands this well, and to this end it will fund every year beginning next year two $4,000 faculty stipends for research on topics dedicated to the EU, or to support collaborative research between researchers at our university and their colleagues in the EU in an effort to promote increased dialogue about important topics of common interest. CES will be responsible for promoting, selecting, and administering the awards.

Fulfillment of Objectives for Faculty and Student Research Grants:

This program will fulfill the expected outcomes of Objective 1 (increasing the number of students researching the EU and acquiring practical hands-on experience, as well as increasing the numbers of university faculty and other scholars, including professional school faculty and graduate students, conducting research on issues of applied EU and EU-US public policies) and Objective 4 (embedding Center activities in ongoing University programs). We are also confident that it will meet the goals of Objective 1 by assisting students and faculty with research funds that will ultimately permit them to produce “Informed books, articles, and briefing papers devoted to issues of applied EU and EU-US public policies.”

EU CENTERS 2011-14

Proposal Narrative Form

4.A.4. Activities: Curriculum Development. Indicate all faculty curriculum development grants or other curricular activities to be implemented during each academic year for the entire 2011-14 grant period. Describe likely course or program themes and the likely number of students impacted. Any faculty grants in this category must be made by competitive process and none can be awarded to EU Center staff (see section III of the Call for Proposals). Please also specify how these activities will further the program policy objectives and produce the related outcomes set out in section II of the Call for Proposals, and provide measurable criteria for evaluating their implementation. Attach additional page(s) if necessary.
All curriculum development grants for teaching at UT will be made available through a competitive process open to all UT Faculty. The Center staff, Director, and members of the Executive Board will not be allowed to participate.
We will evaluate the implementation of the program through feedback from the faculty member receiving the grant, a voluntary survey completed by the students enrolled in the developed courses, and a quantitative measure of the interest in the course in comparison to other courses at UT. All courses are regularly evaluated at UT, but, additionally, our external evaluator, CTL, will also oversee the measurement and evaluation process to help determine the efficacy of these new courses implemented and how we can improve upon them through continuous monitoring and adaptation.
Course Development Plans
CES is proposing three “course development” projects, and including information here about an important ongoing outreach project with a local institution of higher learning. We will be encouraging the faculty applying for the Curriculum Development grants to incorporate our Conferences, Workshops, and Colloquium Series in their syllabus (again pending that the research topics match).
What follows are details regarding the three course development projects and information about the fourth, which focuses on the EU and Europe:
Course Development I: We are committed to increasing the number of EU courses that bridge the business and humanities curriculum, as well as to making those courses available to both Liberal Arts majors and Business majors. To that end, we will be providing funds for competitive proposals for the development and instruction of writing-intensive courses related to commerce and business in the EU in the following five areas, with the aim of funding at least three of the best course proposals submitted: (1) The Commercial Environment in the EU; (2) Culture and the Fashion Industry in the EU; (3) The EU as a Single Market: Potential and Prospects; (4) Corporate Governance and Competitive Policy in the EU; and (5) The Euro and European Financial Markets.
Course Development II: The second objective is to allow one faculty member to create a new “Signature Course” on the topic of “leadership” in the EU widely construed. The signature course program provides all first-year students at UT with a course that helps them make the transition from promising high school students to worldly, knowledge-driven college students. As such it constitutes an important gateway course that can shape what students will study during their time at UT. By offering such a course, we aim to capture the attention of students early on, in their first year of study, and thereby foster interests for many in Europe and the EU throughout their entire college career.
Course Development III: CES has recently received an award valued at BLAH through LAITS (Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services) to radically develop, enrich, and revise during the grant period its core required introductory course for all European Studies majors (of which there are roughly 60 to 70 in any given year). The proposed revision of the Introduction to European Studies (EUS 305), which focuses primarily on the EU, offers an innovative approach to constructing an expanded, interdisciplinary gateway course at UT.
The broad aim of this grant, which will involve a team of faculty experts led by Dr. Katherine Arens in Germanic Studies, will help create a standard framework of teaching and learning for faculty coming to teach this course, with new appropriate introductory teaching materials made available to all instructors. Moreover, it will allow CES to meet the needs of a large group of students (we are planning to expand the course through these revisions to 100 students) while still remaining true to EUS 305’s essential function as a key gateway course for its majors with task-oriented, learning-based activities.
On the national scale, such course models do not exist for large class environments, for content-based and criterion-referenced learning scenarios, and for teaching assistant (TA) training. The data that can be produced in assessing this innovation will be without parallel and critically important for teaching models for the next generation of interdisciplinary work dedicated to European Studies and the EU. Our plan is to make these teaching and class materials available through the web as part of an Open Access Initiative. The instructional project will be evaluated through continuous feedback and adaptation and monitored by LAITS and our external evaluator, CTL.
Finally, by significantly enlarging the class, we aim to bring EU studies to a broader population of students at UT—not only to the 60 to 70 majors in European Studies, that is, but also to the roughly 1,650 majors in the Government Department and the roughly 500 majors in the newly implemented IRG (International Relations and Global Studies) major, which counts Europe as one of its fields for the major.
Course Development IV: As part of its overall outreach efforts as a National Resource Center, and in particular with an aim to forging connections with minority institutions in the community, CES will continue to develop a series of classes on European and EU-related topics at Huston-Tillotson University, a historically black college in the heart of Austin, Texas. Indeed, we feel it is central to our mission as not only a National Resource Center of European Studies but also as the flagship university of the state of Texas to actively bring our formidable resources—both monetary and pedagogical—to the less privileged and less well-endowed institutions of higher learning in our state. To this end, we anticipate funding as an NRC and teaching the following courses over the grant cycle at Huston-Tillotson:

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  Fall 2012 - International Politics with a focus on Europe and the EU
  
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  Spring 2012 - The European Union
  
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  Fall 2012 - Comparative Government with a focus on Europe and the EU
  
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  Spring 2013 - Modern European History and the EU
  
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  Fall 2013 - European Politics and the EU
  
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  Spring 2014 - War and Peace in Europe and the EU
  

Fulfillment of Objectives for Course Developments Projects:
Objective 1: Course development will fulfill the objective of developing centers of academic excellence in EU studies. It will also create new EU teaching materials, many of them adaptable for hybrid educational purposes, which will benefit programs invested in EU studies not only at UT but also nationwide. Furthermore, by increasing the size of the classes, the project will have a multiplying effect: it will increase opportunities for students from all over campus to take our core class and thus “allow access to EU courses not only to a small group of students focusing on EU studies, but also to a wider number of students who follow another main curriculum and have a more targeted interest in specific aspects of the EU.”
Objective 2: The course development with Huston-Tillotson will allow UT to bring knowledge about the EU to “regional universities and colleges (four year and two year).” It will also draw that local university into EU Center activities at UT.
Objective 3: The course development projects will markedly strengthen “people-to-people links” between university faculty, students and their host institutions in the EU and US.
Post-Baccalaureate Degree Development Plans
Creating a Masters of European Studies:
CES has approval from both the dean of the College of Liberal Arts (Randy Diehl) and the dean of LBJ (Ambassador Robert Hutchings) to move forward with the creation and implementation of a joint MA in European Studies that would concentrate on the EU. In fashioning this MA, we also intend to work closely with the Center for East European, Eurasian, and Russian Studies (CREEES), which already has an MA, and the UT School of Law. Our plan is to submit the MA proposal for review in fall 2012. Since it usually takes six months for the proposal to move through the university administrative channels and then receive final approval from the UT-wide system Coordinating Board, we expect that we can begin receiving applications by late 2013, with the plan of admitting our first group of students in fall 2014. 

EU CENTERS 2011-14

Proposal Narrative Form

4.A.5. Activities: Working Papers, Newsletters, and Other Publications. Indicate all working papers, newsletters and any other publications not described under ‘Conferences and Workshops’ to be implemented during each academic year of the 2011-14 grant period. Be sure to include targeted audience(s), likely number of recipients, and planned means of dissemination. Please also specify how these activities will further the program policy objectives and produce the related outcomes set out in section II of the Call for Proposals, and provide measurable criteria for evaluating their implementation. Attach additional page(s) if necessary.
Newsletter
The Center will have a monthly newsletter through which we intend to disseminate the following:

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  A list of the upcoming EU Center events, as well as European related events put on by other schools and departments both at UT and our partner educational institutions in the region,
  
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  To provide the upcoming deadlines for funding and grants from the EU Center, as well as funding opportunities from other schools and departments within UT,
  
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  To list the upcoming deadlines for funding and grants from non-University of Texas entities (EU, US State Department, Council for European Studies, etc.), and
  
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  To provide links to the news sources about issues in the EU (such as the EU’s Press Room: http://europa.eu/press_room/index_en.htm).
  

To disseminate our newsletter, the Center will create an extensive email list compiled from participants to our events, interested students, and partners in professional schools and academic departments. We will also work closely with our partners in the Texas State government and local businesses to increase our email list and thus the readership of our newsletter. We will have a user-friendly portal for outreach access, with links to Hemispheres, the international outreach consortium at UT, of which CES is a vital member, along with the Center for East European, Eurasian, and Russian Studies (CREEES).

We will also use our newsletter to advertise our fellow US and Canadian Centers of EU Excellence. We will have links to their websites embedded in the newsletter and will inform our readership of their upcoming events.
To assess the success of our newsletter we will primarily look at the statistics of our readership. We will also have an email link in our newsletter for suggestions on how we can improve it.

With the newsletter we hope to fulfill the expected outcomes of all the proposed Objectives. We hope that it will increase awareness of our educational events, that it will constitute an important strategy in our public outreach, that it will strengthen “people-to-people” links, that it will consolidate and enhance the effectiveness of the network of EU Centers of excellence, and that it will center our activities in ongoing UT programs through increased visibility and advertising.

EU CENTERS 2011-14

Proposal Narrative Form
4.A.6. Activities: Website. Describe the likely content and design of your proposed EU Center of Excellence web site, or any planned modifications to the current structure and/or content of an existing EUCE web site. Please also specify how these activities will further the program policy objectives and produce the related outcomes set out in section II of the Call for Proposals, and provide measurable criteria for evaluating their implementation. Attach additional page(s) if necessary.
The website will provide the Center with an outreach and informative capacity. We intend to put all of our events and programs on the website. We will also create direct links to the existing EUCE website as well as to all other American and Canadian EU Centers of Excellence. We will also provide links to research grants and funds available through non-UT external institutions.
The Center will also use the website as a portal for EU related information and news in the broadest sense. It will maintain an overview of open source information on the EU, both in terms of links to EU institutional websites and in terms of the best media, blogs, and academic sites that are useful to researchers and policy makers.
We will place all of our conferences and major events on the website in a video format, available for either download or viewing through streaming “tube” technology.
All the conference reports and papers will be available for download through the website.
As such, we believe that our website will fulfill all of the expected outcomes listed in Objectives section of the Call for Proposals. EU CENTERS 2011-14

Proposal Narrative Form
4.A.7. Any Other Activity Costs Not Listed Above. Describe and explain the timing and impact of any additional activities to be included in your planned activities, for each academic year of the 2011-14 grant period. Please also specify how these activities will further the program policy objectives and produce the related outcomes set out in section II of the Call for Proposals, and provide measurable criteria for evaluating their implementation. Attach additional page(s) if necessary.
Measurement and Evaluation

To ensure objectively that CES is meeting its stated objects and continuously improving on the quality of its project plan, the Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) will serve as the external program evaluator and develop the evaluation plan for the 2011-2014 grant application for the EU Center for Excellence (EUCE) grant.