Advice from FAC on Preparing Applications/Proposals for Faculty Development Funds
Place your project in the context of scholarship or creative work in your discipline. Indicate how the project challenges or complements previous perspectives and/or what is original or significant about your project. Explain how the project is related to your scholarly, artistic, or pedagogical work. Make a case, wherever possible, for the importance of your work to Kenyon College. Make a rhetorically effective central claim that engages, even excites, committee members. Try to write a proposal that teaches something to non-specialists, enabling them to appreciate the significance of the work for which funding is being requested. Try to anticipate objections or questions that evaluators will have. Typically, successful proposals will have a high degree of detail.
Make your application accessible to non-specialists. Thus, to the extent that it is possible, write your proposal using non-specialized terminology. Where specialized terminology is necessary, try to explain essential terms and provide sufficient background so that the proposal will be comprehensible to the evaluators.
Explain your qualifications for successfully completing the project. Do you have competence in the necessary foreign languages, research methodologies, or artistic techniques? "The qualifications of the member" is a criterion that also leads evaluators to consider the strength of the curriculum vitae--evidence of past scholarship or creative work (appropriate to the faculty member's rank and years in the profession), past funding for research or creative projects (especially from sources outside the college), awards and prizes.
Make clear what will be the result of the project, and what the faculty development funds will make possible. Are your goals clearly stated, and are they feasible given the timetable for the project? Will the project result in publication, public performance, or exhibition? Given the special importance (according to the criteria for faculty evaluation) of publication, performance, and exhibition, if you are seeking funds for conference travel, it may strengthen a proposal if there is a second reason for travel--for example, archival research or collaboration with a colleague in another laboratory. (Publication, performance, or exhibition is not a criterion for Teaching Initiative grants.)
If you are requesting money for travel, is the travel essential to the project? Provide a full explanation of the resources and research facilities that the travel and/or funds will make available. If you are traveling to archives, why have you chosen to search the particular archives that you have? Provide the committee with a sense of what you expect or hope to discover in the archives to which you presently have no other access. If you are requesting money for equipment, hardware, or software, how will these things be used? In general, strive for specificity, and avoid vagueness.
