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The Provost’s Inclusive Teaching Fellowship is no longer active (as of Spring 2026). If you would like support in implementing inclusive teaching practices into your own courses, please consider applying for the new Provost’s Institute for Inclusive Teaching! The Institute is a 5-day program (instead of year-long) but does not come with a stipend. The Eberly Center is happy to also support you on an individual basis, for as long as you need. Contact eberly-assist@andrew.cmu.edu to get connected with a free, confidential consultant or explore our pages discussing inclusive teaching.

Sponsored by the Provost and administered by the Eberly Center, this program aims to  help Â鶹´å courses reach all students. Fellows participate in monthly cohort meetings and collaborate regularly with Eberly Center consultants to (re)design a Â鶹´å course to:

• diversify the representation of voices in their disciplines,
• increase the prevalence of inclusive teaching at Â鶹´å, 
• enhance students’ sense of community and belonging, 
• generate and disseminate transferable teaching strategies, and
• promote inclusivity and belonging in Â鶹´å educational experiences.

Each project also includes collecting data to study its impact and guide future refinements. Fellows receive a $5,000 fellowship and are selected through a competitive application process. 

We are pleased to announce the 2025-2026 Provost’s Inclusive Teaching Fellows. The Fellows represent a variety of colleges, departments, and undergraduate and graduate courses.

See also previous cohorts of Provost’s Inclusive Teaching Fellows

College of Fine Arts

Maryam Karimi

Special Faculty in Architectural Design
School of Architecture
Course: 48-119 Design Ethics & Social Justice in Architecture

Design Ethics & Social Justice in Architecture is a first-year foundational seminar that frames architecture as a form of ethical judgment shaped by climate crisis, structural inequality, and technological power. Through case studies, debate, and applied exercises, students build a working toolkit for ethical reasoning and use it to interrogate how design decisions distribute risk, access, and care across bodies, communities, and environments. My PITF project specifically aims to redesign the course into a more participatory learning environment where students from diverse cultural, linguistic, and educational backgrounds have meaningful opportunities to contribute and be heard. By restructuring discussion formats, feedback loops, and collaborative activities, the PITF project strengthens students’ agency and voice while sustaining rigorous engagement with course content. I’ll accomplish this by redesigning the course around scaffolded participation: short pre-class prompts, structured small-group discussions with rotating roles, and whole-class synthesis that makes multiple viewpoints visible without forcing students into high-stakes speaking. I’ll pair these formats with reflective short writings, transparent discussion protocols, and mid-semester feedback cycles so the structure continually adapts to students’ needs while maintaining rigorous engagement with the course material. I will assess the PITF project through anonymous pre-/mid-/post-term course surveys (tracking participation, confidence, and sense of belonging) and targeted one-on-one student conversations, using the findings to iteratively refine discussion structures and assignments. By treating the course as a structured space of reflection, equity, and synthesis—where students can enter through multiple modes of participation, receive transparent scaffolding and feedback, and translate theory through their own lived contexts—I make room for diverse voices to be heard, valued, and carried into rigorous architectural positions rather than filtered through a single disciplinary norm.

Alexa Woloshyn

Associate Professor of Musicology
School of Music
Course: 57-285 Music History 3

This course is a required music history survey focused on 20th- and 21st-century music, typically from the Euro-American classical tradition. My PITF project is designed to facilitate students' development of music research skills so they can more effectively embed research in multiple areas of their music studies and seek out funded opportunities to complete original research, likely within a research-creation framework. Students' individual research interests will feed back into our collective exploration,  creating more diverse course topics.  Research skills assessments help students practice some fundamental skills in reading analysis and communication. Course case studies, reading assignments, and special guests have been selected to provide students with diverse examples across four modalities of research-creation. To assess impact, students will complete a pre- and post-semester survey that asks them about their understanding of and capabilities in music research. All students will become agents within musicology as researchers and writers, and for students who would most benefit from funded research opportunities, refined research skills and a deeper understanding of music research's relevance to their studies can set them up for life-changing experiences. 

College of Engineering

Trevor Jones

Assistant Professor
Mechanical Engineering
Course: 24-751: Solid Mechanics and Elasticity

This is a graduate level theory course focused on describing the mechanical response of solids. My PITF project is to improve cohesion between the learning goals and the assessments of the course to put formative learning at the forefront of the course. To do this, I am implementing a specifications grading scheme that gives authority and ownership of the grade to the student. Additionally, the assessment structure allows for revision and growth in assignments to allow for learning to occur on the timeline of each student individually. We are using pre- and post surveys to assess student's self reported confidence in the learning objectives with this new grading system. This will include more students by increasing transparency of the expectations for each individual assignment as well as how meeting these expectations in both quantity and quality directly relate to the course.

Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences

Erin Dean

Associate Teaching Professor
History and Environmental and Sustainability Studies
Course: 79-283 Anthropology of Energy

This course introduces students to anthropological perspectives on energy and considers how different energy resources have structured social and ecological relationships over time and in different cultural and political contexts. My PITF project is intended to make an energy humanities approach accessible and legible to students from various academic backgrounds by demonstrating the connections between the technical work of energy development or energy transition and the experiential and ethical aspects of energy ecosystems.  We are using a range of anthropological case studies and group and individual assignments to provide students with opportunities to practice reading, comparing, presenting and also collecting their own ethnographic research data.  Students will complete pre- and post-semester surveys and write in-class assignment reflections to assess project outcomes.  By considering the experiences of people positioned differently in relation to various energy projects and resources, students will develop a more holistic understanding of how "energy" can create, sustain, transform, and destroy social worlds.

Kiyono Fujinaga-Gordon

Assistant Teaching Professor
Languages, Cultures & Applied Linguistics
Course: 82-175 Elementary Japanese 1 Online

Project description TBA.

Giuseppina Gemboni

Assistant Teaching Professor
Languages, Cultures & Applied Linguistics
Course: 82-260 Black Italy

Project description TBA.

Course Grand Challenge First-Year Seminar: Equity and the Environment: Exploring Global Challenges and Local Solutions

This seminar course taught by an interdisciplinary team focuses on student understanding and problem-solving complex environmental topics. Students in the class focus on critical thinking, collaboration, and communication. In our PITF project, we aimed to understand and support students’ sense of belonging in their own disciplines, student understanding of complex problems through many disciplinary lenses, and to support student agency to contribute to meaning-making about complex issues through research problem-solving. As part of our PITF project, we are intentional about scaffolding inquiry about interdisciplinary problem solving by encouraging student analysis and reflection of authentic environmental texts, spaces and individuals who are engaged in current environmental advocacy. In each assignment, we ask students to reflect on their emerging understanding of their own discipline as they begin to problem-solve across disciplines to collaborate with each other to contribute to research about the environment. We plan to compare early-semester and late semester reflections to understand student emerging sense of belonging in a discipline and student understanding of interdisciplinary problem-solving for complex issues. By encouraging students to have agency within their discipline and to reflect about and collaborate with each other about problem solving across disciplines, we encourage strategies for more inclusive complex problem-solving.

Bo Zhan

Lecturer of Japanese Studies
Languages, Cultures & Applied Linguistics
Course: 76-278/82-278 Japanese Film and Literature: The Art of Storytelling

In the target course, students explore Japanese traditional values, cultural concepts, and the process of modernization through the lens of Japanese modern literature and post-war film, examining their artistic, historical, and social contexts. My PITF project will enhance cross-cultural student understanding and foster empathy toward diverse cultures and perspectives.  We are incorporating works that highlight marginalized voices within Japan and global perspectives on Japanese culture, while facilitating both intra- and intercultural group discussions to encourage meaningful cross-cultural dialogue. We also redesigned the final project to have students compare a work from their own cultural background that engages with Japanese themes to a Japanese-authored text from class, fostering deeper empathy and critical understanding. To assess impacts, we are using a survey to ask about students' sense of belonging at the beginning and end of the semester. The course challenges homogenous depictions of Japan by incorporating marginalized voices and student-centered assignments that foster personal connection, critical thinking, and deeper engagement.