Plymouth State University has received a significant grant to support its efforts to remake instructional design, teaching and learning on its campus.
The Davis Educational Foundation has awarded PSU $231,985 over the next three years to support “Designing Forward: Reimagining Instructional Design for Cluster Learning,” the next phase of the university’s innovative Cluster Learning Model. This is the second grant from the Davis Foundation to PSU since 2018.
“We’re deeply grateful for the continuing support of the Davis Foundation which has helped us spearhead an innovative education,” said PSU President Donald L. Birx, PhD. “This latest grant acknowledges what we’ve known for some time: that our faculty, staff and students are innovators, committed to creating new ways of teaching and sharing knowledge that benefit the community and businesses around us.”
PSU’s Cluster Learning Model reshapes how programs are structured at the University into a learner-centered experience that exposes students to other disciplines and encourages them to work on real-world issues, ideas, and challenges. It further strives to make the University’s knowledge and expertise accessible to anyone who needs it.
Trustees of the Davis Educational Foundation described the PSU team as “impressive in its leadership, its collaborative spirit, and in the sophistication of its thinking about instructional design.”
President Birx articulated his innovative vision for transforming higher education soon after his arrival on the Plymouth State campus in 2015, as outlined in his 2020 book, Redesigning Higher Education. Cluster Learning, the teaching and learning approach that powers the University’s unique academic environment, has been developed through collaboration with and research by PSU’s faculty. It is centered on interdisciplinary inquiry and research, open educational practices that remove barriers and empower students to contribute to the knowledge commons, and project-based learning that extends past the classroom walls.
“Cluster Learning is oriented around preparing our students to work in a changing world, in all types of different contexts that are exciting but unpredictable, and where they need to be prepared to engage with people and ideas they’ve never encountered before,” noted Martha Burtis, director of PSU’s Open Learning and Teaching Collaborative (CoLab). “Similarly, this latest grant from the Davis Foundation will help our faculty develop new models for teaching that can tackle unpredictable, emergent, and transformational class experiences. Our work now is to blend our Cluster Learning expertise with new approaches to designing education, at every level of the curriculum.”
The Davis Foundation previously awarded PSU a $214,000 grant in 2018. That grant provided professional development to prepare PSU faculty to understand and use the Cluster Learning Model in their classes successfully. It also enabled a change in campus culture so that Cluster teaching and learning became more widespread across the university and helped students develop the four Habits of Mind—purposeful communication, problem solving, integrated perspectives, and self-regulated learning—while participating in the Plymouth State’s General Education program.
The Davis Educational Foundation, established as a public charitable foundation in 1985, supports the undergraduate programs of public and private, regionally accredited, baccalaureate degree granting colleges and universities throughout the six New England states. Elisabeth K. Davis and Stanton W. Davis co-founded the foundation after Mr. Davis’s retirement as chairman of Shaw’s Supermarkets, Inc. The foundation is an expression of the couple’s shared support and value for higher education and has provided more than $130 million in grants to more than 175 institutions. Learn more at www.davisfoundations.org.
