The Wally Cordes Teaching and Faculty Support Center is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2025-26 Teaching Improvement and Student Success Grants.

Teaching Improvement Grants are funded from the TFSC budget, while Student Success Grants are administered by the TFSC and funded by Global Campus. This year, eight different faculty were awarded teaching improvement grants totaling $14,415 and seven different faculty were awarded Student Success Grants totaling $34,900.

As a condition of the grants, recipients are required to share the results of their scholarly projects with faculty colleagues through TFSC programming, including Winter Teaching Symposium and Teaching Camp.

Teaching Improvement Grants

Su A. Chae, School of Art — materials for the School of Art's Mural Painting course ($2,500)

Ben Corbett, Theatre — a voice-over mobile recording studio and supporting equipment ($2,087)

Chris Estepp, Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences — campus-wide access to a webinar series on experiential learning by North American Colleges and Teachers of Agriculture (NACTA) ($375)

Leslie Massey, First-Year Engineering Program — the creation of a lending library for engineering students of influential books that inspire innovative thinking ($330)

Wendy McBride, English Language and Culture Program — the production of interactive digital modules that focus on grammar points required for writing in research, business and academia ($2,500)

Jinoh Park, Interior Architecture & Design — the purchase of hardware and software to implement a scalable robotics-based design pedagogy in the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design ($2,500)

Elizabeth Parke, Health, Human Performance and Recreation — attending the Lilly Conference on advancing teaching and learning ($1,740)

James Sinclair, Curriculum and Instruction — the purchase of transition assessments and curriculum to support learning and applied experiences in two special education courses ($2,483.50)

Student Success Grants:

Michael Anthony, History — the creation of an online archive on the Pryor Center website for the dissemination of student projects for the history course, Arkansas and the Southwest ($5,000)

Emily Baker, Architecture — materials support for a weeklong workshop that will result in the construction of truss structures at full scale that will become a temporary pavilion ($5,000)

Casandra Cox, Grace Vehige and Jill Rucker, Agricultural Education, Communications and Technology — the purchase of a photo booth that will support marketing skills and business plan development for students in the course Introduction to Agricultural Communications ($4,950)

Cengiz Koparan, Agricultural Education, Communications and Technology — the purchase of UAVs and related materials for a capstone course on site-specific precision agriculture applications; student travel to associated national competitions ($5,000)

Kathleen Paul, Anthropology — initiating a donation and curation effort to collect patient anonymized extracted teeth for instruction in dental science and dental anthropology ($5,000)

Manuel Rossetti, Industrial Engineering — the building of a large-language model based educational assistant for an established OER textbook; deployment, testing and usage of the LLM-based educational assistant in Industrial Engineering's Simulation course ($4,950)

Kelly Way, Nick Johnston, Lobat Siahmakoun, Betsy Garrison and Suzanne Rhoads, Human Environmental Sciences — the purchase of a service robot to facilitate instruction in hospitality and event management, with specific focus on student instruction in robotics and AI ($5,000)