Two proposals submitted by faculty based at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs were among those selected to receive awards from Princeton’s 250th Anniversary Fund for Innovation in Undergraduate Education.

Established in 1996 in conjunction with Princeton’s 250th anniversary, the Fund for Innovation supports the University’s “central and enduring commitment to outstanding undergraduate teaching.” Each year, the fund supports initiatives that allow faculty to explore new pedagogical methods to enhance student learning, foster interdisciplinary connections and redefine teaching and assessment practices.

Charles M. Cameron, professor of politics and public affairs at the Wilson School, specializes in the analysis of political institutions, particularly courts and law, the American presidency and legislatures. He is the author of “Veto Bargaining: Presidents and the Politics of Negative Power.”

Cameron will utilize the Fund for Innovation award to introduce multiple innovations to the course Policy Making in America. He will “flip” ten lectures by moving the material online and develop new interactive mini-case studies and problem sets to replace those lectures. Precepts will be modified to incorporate active exercises to develop specific student skills, and online material will be created to support the precept-based skill exercises. In addition, the evaluation of student performance will be revamped using online tools.

Alison Isenberg, associated faculty member at the Wilson School and professor of history at Princeton University, writes and teaches about 19th- and 20th-century American society, with a particular focus on the transformation of cities and to the intersections of culture, the economy and place. Isenberg is co-project investigator of the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism and the Humanities.

Isenberg will utilize the Fund for Innovation award to create new course material along with Purcell Carson, documentary film specialist at the Wilson School. They will explore the unrest that occurred in Trenton, New Jersey, in the 1960s, including events surrounding the death of a black college student who was fatally shot in April 1968 by a young white police officer. Isenberg’s historical perspective brings a new focus to Carson’s course Documentary Film and the City. Working with students, community members, Princeton’s Community-Based Learning Initiative and McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning, the two will build an archive from which they will produce a work of historical scholarship and a film. This collaboration presents a hands-on opportunity to integrate the disciplines of history and documentary cinema; students will produce their own research papers and video sketches, in addition to the collective projects.

A full list of this year’s 250th Anniversary Innovation Fund awardees can be found here.