Course Design/Development

Reimagining Aging Initiative | The North Woods Project

Reimagining Aging Initiative

With generous support from alumna Trustee Emerita Terry Fulmer ’76, the Center for Leadership, Teaching, and Learning is excited to announce an initiative dedicated to exploring, learning, and building—or substantially revising—a course focused on gerontology, broadly construed.

Aging touches nearly every dimension of human experience: our bodies, relationships, communities, institutions, creative practices, political systems, economies, and ideas about what constitutes a meaningful life. The Reimagining Aging Initiative invites faculty from across the College to imagine how aging might become a meaningful site of inquiry within their own disciplinary and interdisciplinary work.

The goal of the program is not to prescribe what a course on gerontology should look like. Instead, we hope to support faculty as they develop intellectually ambitious courses that bring the questions, methods, theories, and practices of their disciplines into conversation with aging and older adulthood. A course might focus entirely on gerontology or integrate the study of aging as a substantial component of an existing course.

Program Structure:

There is no single training—or series of trainings—that can meet the needs of a disciplinarily diverse cohort of scholars participating in this program. Instead, each participant will identify a scholar in the United States who can serve as a mentor throughout the coming academic year. Your mentor should have expertise relevant to the course you hope to develop and must be available to meet with you at least five times (approximately five hours total) across the fall and spring semesters. These conversations might focus on foundational readings, emerging scholarship, disciplinary approaches to aging, course design, assignments, or other questions that arise as your course takes shape. At least one meeting should be devoted specifically to providing feedback on the course you have developed under your mentor’s guidance.

Both participants and mentors will be compensated for their time and expertise. Mentors will receive a $750 honorarium. Each faculty participant will receive a $500 stipend for participating in the program and an additional stipend when approved by the Curriculum Committee: $500 for substantially revising a course or $1,000 for a new course.

Participants will also gather periodically as a cohort—first to launch the program and establish goals, later to share ideas, questions, resources, and progress, and finally to share the courses and ideas that emerge from the project. These gatherings are intended to create opportunities for cross-disciplinary conversation while allowing each faculty member considerable independence in shaping their individual project. We will schedule those meetings based on mutual availability once the cohort is established.

Who is Eligible?

All faculty at Skidmore College are invited to apply! Gerontology is inherently interdisciplinary, and we encourage proposals from across the arts, humanities, sciences, social sciences, and professional programs. Nearly every discipline offers a way to investigate aging, later life, longevity, intergenerational relationships, or the social structures that shape the experiences and well-being of older adults.

You are not required to have prior experience, research, or formal education in gerontology. Curiosity is enough. This program is designed precisely to give faculty the time, resources, mentorship, and intellectual community necessary to develop expertise in an area that may be new to them.

How Do I Indicate Interest?

Please complete this form by Friday, September 18. Accepted participants will be notified shortly thereafter. The application will ask you to briefly describe the course you are imagining, the questions about aging that interest you, and how participation in the program might contribute to your teaching. You do not need to have identified a mentor before applying.

Not sure what aging might have to do with your field? Here are just a few possibilities:

• Theatre and Dance: How are aging bodies represented on stage? What roles are available to older performers? How might performance challenge cultural narratives about decline, beauty, memory, or physical ability?
• Studio Art and Art History: How have artists represented aging across cultures and historical periods? How does artistic practice change across the lifespan? What can portraiture, material culture, or visual representation reveal about attitudes toward older adulthood?
• English and World Languages and Literatures: How do novels, memoirs, poetry, and other literary forms represent aging, memory, mortality, caregiving, or intergenerational relationships? Whose stories of later life are preserved—and whose are absent?
• Sociology: How do race, class, gender, sexuality, family structure, geography, and social institutions shape the experience of aging? What can the study of older adulthood reveal about inequality across the life course?
• Social Work: What forms of care, advocacy, policy, and community support best promote the dignity and well-being of older adults? How are caregiving responsibilities distributed within families and communities?
• Psychology and Neuroscience: How do cognition, memory, identity, emotion, relationships, and well-being change across the lifespan? What assumptions about cognitive decline are supported—or challenged—by research?
• Biology: What happens biologically as organisms age? How do genetics, cellular processes, environment, evolution, nutrition, and disease interact with longevity?
• Chemistry: What chemical processes contribute to aging, disease, pharmaceuticals, metabolism, or changes in the body over time? How might chemistry contribute to questions about longevity and quality of life?
• Gender Studies: How is aging gendered? How do beauty standards, reproductive expectations, caregiving roles, sexuality, menopause, masculinity, and cultural ideas about desirability change across the lifespan?
• Black, Latinx, and Asian Studies: How do racism, health disparities, community, cultural traditions, wealth inequality, and histories of structural discrimination shape aging and longevity? What might the experiences of minority elders teach us about resilience, memory, activism, and community knowledge?
• Education: What does learning look like across the lifespan? How might colleges, schools, libraries, and community organizations better support older learners and intergenerational education?
• Political Science: How does an aging population shape elections, public policy, healthcare, Social Security, housing, and political participation? How do governments respond to demographic change?
• Economics and Business: What are the economic consequences of longer lifespans? How do retirement, employment, caregiving, wealth, consumption, and the so-called “longevity economy” change as populations age?
• History: How have definitions and experiences of old age changed over time? How have older adults participated in social movements, political life, family economies, and community formation?
• Philosophy and Religious Studies: What does it mean to age well? How have different philosophical and religious traditions understood mortality, wisdom, dependence, dignity, obligation, and the meaning of a long life?
• Environmental Studies and Geosciences: How do climate change, disasters, transportation, housing, and the built environment affect older adults differently? What makes a community genuinely livable across the lifespan?
• Computer Science: How might technologies support—or complicate—the lives of older adults? What questions of accessibility, surveillance, algorithmic bias, healthcare technology, social connection, or digital literacy emerge as populations age?
• Health and Human Physiological Sciences: How do movement, nutrition, exercise, rehabilitation, and preventive health contribute to quality of life across later adulthood?
• Music: How does musical participation affect memory, cognition, identity, and social connection in later life? What can the careers and creative practices of aging musicians tell us about artistic development across the lifespan?

These questions are intended as provocations rather than prescriptions. We hope applicants will surprise us with approaches we have not imagined.

The North Woods Project: Call for Proposals

A sustainability faculty development program at Skidmore College 

 

The Office of the Dean of the Faculty, Sustainability Office, and the Center for Leadership, Teaching, and Learning (CLTL) are excited to launch a new program dedicated to sustainability across the curriculum at Skidmore College. The North Woods Project takes its name from Skidmore’s approximately 150 acre on-campus woods used for recreation, education, and research. The North Woods Project (modeled after the seminal Ponderosa Project at Northern Arizona University and Piedmont Project at Emory University) is a sustainability faculty development program offering a teaching workshop and small grants to advance the Skidmore College Strategic Plan, 2025-2030 commitment to sustainability literacy.  

 

The program seeks to support the integration of social, economic, and environmental sustainability teaching in all disciplines, while emphasizing sustainability knowledge, pedagogical exploration, curricular innovation, and place-based experiential education. 

 

Why sustainability in the curriculum? 

Sustainability literacy is the knowledge, skills, and mindsets required to understand the interconnected relationships between society, economics, and the environment. Prioritizing sustainability teaching and learning fosters an engaged and informed citizenry capable of understanding sustainability problems, identifying responsible innovative solutions, and supporting long-term ecological balance and social equity. 

 

Sustainability Course Development Grants 

Any faculty from any discipline interested in incorporating sustainability concepts, problems or solutions into new or existing courses is welcome to apply. A cohort of up to 15 fellows will explore sustainability teaching and learning together. The program training will include an examination of sustainability concepts, strategies and resources to develop and enhance sustainability content in courses, and connections to campus, community, and place-based learning. 

 

Modifying an existing course could include new readings, units, and assignments and may consider enhancing interdisciplinary and experiential learning. The stipend for an existing course modification or developing a sustainability-related new course is $1,000. New sustainability-focused course designs will receive a $1,500 stipend.  

 

Skidmore Faculty Participant Agreement: 

As a course development grant-receiving participant fellows agree to: 

• Read pre-workshop materials provided electronically. 

• Attend the December mixer (2 hours), January workshop (all-day), and April luncheon/presentations (2 hours). 

• Develop a new course or modify an existing course during the spring 2027 semester. 

• Provide a 250–300-word project summary (for use on the website), new/revised course syllabus, and electronic versions of related course documents (e.g., readings, assignments, etc.). 

• Submit the modified or new course proposal to the Curriculum Committee by the fall 2027 deadlines (September 30 for the spring term or December 15 for the fall term). 

• Serve as a resource to future North Woods Project participants and faculty at Skidmore. 

 

Grants will be disbursed in two parts. Participating faculty will receive $500 of the stipend at the completion of the program after presenting at the spring luncheon and turning in their final products (project summary, syllabi, and related documents). The remainder of the grant ($500 for modifying an existing course or developing a sustainability-related new course or $1,000 for sustainability-focused new courses) will be disbursed after the course proposal has received Curriculum Committee approval. Failure to successfully complete the elements of the participant agreement may result in a loss of some or all of the grant. 

 

Timeline 

September 10, 2026    Call for proposals 

October 9, 2026           Proposals due 

Mid-late October         Fellows announced 

December 11, 2026      Afternoon mixer 

January 21, 2027          All-day sustainability across the curriculum workshop 

April TBD                      Luncheon presentations 

 

How to Apply 

Applicants will be asked to describe their motivation and interest in becoming a North Woods Project fellow and will need to share a “project” proposal (modification of an existing course or creation of a new course). The course development project idea does not have to be fully fleshed out as you will be exploring options and developing ideas during the program. Applicants should complete the proposal form by Friday, October 9, 2026. Accepted participants will be notified shortly thereafter. 

 

2026 North Woods Project Online Application Form 

 

Steering Group 

• Kurt Smemo, Associate Professor of Environmental Studies and Sciences 

• Tarah Rowse, Director of Sustainability and Environmental Initiatives 

• Beck Krefting, Director, Center for Leadership, Teaching and Learning and Professor of American Studies 

 

Contact Tarah Rowse at trowse@skidmore.edu or Kurt Smemo at ksmemo@skidmore.edu with any questions, comments, or ideas. 

 

Sustainability Research Grants (future distinct program element, not currently offered) 

Additional funding may be available in the future for sustainability research. Faculty wishing to incorporate sustainability into existing research, expand sustainability research, or conduct new sustainability research may apply for $1,500 sustainability research grants. Any research that explicitly addresses the concept of sustainability, focuses on a sustainability challenge, or furthers our understanding of the interdependence of ecological and social/cultural/economic systems will be considered. Faculty interested in a sustainability research grant will complete a separate proposal and are not required to participate in the workshop. Sustainability research grant recipients will be required to provide a research project and final outcomes summary (including electronic versions of publications/products). 

 

A few Sustainability Literacy Resources (to pique your interest and spark ideas) 

 

Teaching Sustainability Competencies across the Disciplines: A Guide for Instructors by the Association for Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (2025). 

 

Liberal Education for Sustainability from the Association of American Colleges and Universities, Liberal Education (Volume 98, No. 4, Fall 2012). 

 

Education for Sustainable Development Goals: Learning Objectives by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (2017).