Engaging Difference: Doyle Faculty Fellows

The Doyle Faculty Fellowships support and challenge Georgetown faculty seeking to foster active student engagement with difference and the diversity of human experience. Fellows create transformational pedagogies that push students to reflect critically on the ethical and social responsibilities of global citizenship; to recognize the intellectual and personal challenges often implicit in cultural misunderstandings; to engage in debate and disagreement with respect; and to build empathy and open-mindedness. Through innovative and inclusive teaching approaches, faculty can integrate on-going discussions of diversity and inclusion with the intellectual themes of their courses.

Fall 2009 marked the beginning of the pilot year of the Doyle Faculty Fellowships, a campus-wide teaching initiative focused on infusing themes of tolerance and understanding into the disciplinary content of undergraduate courses, and funded by a generous gift from alumnus and Board of Directors member William J. Doyle (C’72). Building on Georgetown’s experience with the curriculum infusion approach used in the highly successful Engelhard Project, Doyle Fellows bring real-life issues of tolerance, empathy, and cultural understanding into their classrooms through readings, guest speakers, class discussions, and carefully designed projects and assignments. Through curriculum infusion, students have the opportunity to reflect on how such topics connect with the academic content of a course and intersect directly with their own personal lives outside the classroom.

These fellowships, a significant component of the Doyle Building Tolerance Initiative, offer the opportunity for a select group of faculty from a variety of disciplines to redesign and teach courses that integrally relate course themes to issues of tolerance and the engagement of difference. 

To learn more and apply please visit: doyleinitiative.georgetown.edu