SHASS Education Innovation Fund Projects

The SHASS Education Innovation Fund supports new educational approaches in SHASS fields. Proposals must be led by SHASS and group proposals are encouraged. The fund awards $500k per year across all projects.

Learn more about the 2025 awardees, including a brief summary of the projects and the principal investigators, below.

Fluid Language Pedagogy (FlaP)

Current language classes at MIT and throughout higher education group students with similar proficiency levels, providing uniform instruction. This ‘one-size-fits-all’ model necessarily deemphasizes individual differences in developmental domains crucial for language learning. Students with similar proficiency may vary widely in vocabulary, grammar, speaking, and listening competencies, and even the most effective instructors often sacrifice individual progress and engagement for the overall progress of the class. Instructors have long been challenged to facilitate personalized learning environments in this context.This project’s goal is to investigate how AI, in the form of large language models, can address long-standing issues in language education.

Takako Aikawa, Senior Lecturer in Japanese, Global Languages

The Making of Roman Pompeii: Materials and meaning in the ancient city 

The Making of Roman Pompeii: Materials and Meaning in the Ancient City” will use its exploratory grant to develop a subject integrating hands-on archaeological fieldwork with interdisciplinary academic inquiry across history, engineering, and materials science, offering students an immersive educational experience working directly with archaeological materials at one of the world’s most iconic historical sites. In Pompeii, students will explore the multifaceted “making” of the ancient city – cultural, political, physical – learning about Roman technologies, materials, and methods, and about the ancient Pompeian society that both produced and was significantly impacted by them.

Will Broadhead, Associate Professor, History

Resilient Urbanism: Green Commons in the City

We propose two courses to be co-taught by instructors in STS and Architecture in spring 2025 and spring 2026 in collaboration with the Common Good Urban Farm, a BIPOC co-operative in South Boston. In the first semester, students will work with community members and the City of Boston to change the zoning status of the urban farm. In the second semester, students will design and build garden infrastructure for Common Good. The outcome of the student projects will be to secure a designation for the urban farm as green space so it cannot be turned over to developers. 

Kathryn Brown, Thomas M. Siebel Distinguished Professor in History of Science, Science, Technology, and Society; Interim Department Head

WCC Public Speaking Certificate Program 

A 2023 survey by the MIT Writing and Communication Center (WCC) and the English Language Program revealed that 47% of 995 MIT graduate students experience anxiety about oral communication. To address this need, the WCC will develop a Public Speaking Certificate Program for graduate students. This program will include a six-session course, public speaking clinics, individual consultations, and practice at the public speaking studio. Facilitated by WCC lecturers, it will enhance students’ oral communication skills and provide professional development. With thorough pre- and post-program assessments, we aim to make this a regular resource for MIT students.

Elena Kallestinova, Director, Writing and Communication Center; Lecturer, Comparative Media Studies/Writing

Holistic STEM Education @ MIT: Preparing Empathetic, Resilient Designers and Innovators 

We will convene teaching staff across MIT to design new curriculum modules, tools, active-learning-in-community projects, and transformative experiences to holistically prepare MIT students with human skills and human-centric mindsets, so that they can be effective collaborators, compelling communicators, values-oriented solvers, responsible makers, empathetic designers, and resilient change-makers. We call this holistic STEM education. We are running early experiments in two identified courses. By the end of this 12-month planning period, we will write a full proposal to implement these innovations in two courses and articulate a plan where these will be measurable, sharable, transferable, and sustainable.

Eric Klopfer, Professor, Comparative Media Studies/Writing; Director, Scheller Teacher Education Program and The Education Arcade; co-faculty director for MIT’s J-WEL World Education Lab

Teaching-Oriented Corpus Interface

Analyzing exemplar student texts is a best practice in writing instruction, but it is difficult to accomplish given the logistics of acquiring student texts that are free, easy to find, and appropriate for a writing lesson. To address this problem, the Teaching-Oriented Corpus Interface (TOCI) aims to provide writing instructors access to a corpus of college student writing–namely, the British Academic Written English corpus–through a simple web interface that enables easy search and downloading of student texts based on discipline, genre, and grade level. Analyzing these texts can help students learn effective writing in many disciplines and genres. 

Michael Maune, Lecturer II, Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication (WRAP)​ program, Comparative Media Studies/Writing

From Lab to Land: Summer Field School for Climate Justice Program Pilot

Our pilot for a Summer Field School for Climate Justice will include a ten day field trip to the Pacific Northwest (PNW) together with two UROPS. Following a route from the Columbia River Basin to the Salish Sea in Washington, we will meet with community partners from Indigenous-led nonprofits, as well as scientists and engineers to a) discuss the connections between climate change, ocean and river ecosystems, the energy transition, and Indigenous sovereignty in the region, and b) confirm locations, develop program activities with local leaders and UROP student participants, and work out program logistics and the full curriculum.

Bettina Stoetzer, Associate Professor, Anthropology

Compass Initiative

Compass is an exciting new initiative led by faculty across ten units in SHASS. We have designed teaching resources and a foundational “compass” class that introduces students to how the humanities and social sciences enable us to grapple with the fundamental questions about moral and social life that affect us all. Our first pilot subject, 21.01: Love, Death, and Taxes will be taught in Spring 2025. Through active debate, multidisciplinary conversation, and collective engagement with historical and contemporary work across disciplines, the class is focused on group discussion and experiential learning.

Lily Tsai, Director/Founder; MIT Governance Lab; Ford Professor of Political Science