Penn Global awards grants to four Penn GSE faculty projects targeting underserved communities around the world

Four projects led by Penn GSE faculty members are among those receiving grants from the Penn Global Research and Engagement Grant Program this year.

The grant program prioritizes projects that bring together leading scholars and practitioners across the University community and around the world to develop new insight on significant global issues, a core pillar of Penn’s global strategic framework. GSE faculty receiving grants for their projects include A. Brooks Bowden, Bodong Chen, Zachary Herrmann, and Dan Wagner.

After the grants were announced, grant winners presented their projects at Penn Global’s annual launch symposium April 27 at Perry World House. The program awarded a total of $1.7 million in research and engagement awards to 19 projects led by faculty from throughout the university.

Grants were awarded to the following Penn GSE faculty projects:

• Cost-Effectiveness Studies of Early Childhood Interventions Serving Refugees: This project, led by A. Brooks Bowden, aims to address the needs of children in early childhood in humanitarian contexts through “low-cost” approaches that can be scaled quickly to serve as many children and families as possible. The project will estimate the cost-effectiveness of five early childhood development interventions for children living in exceptional circumstances in Jordan, Lebanon, Bangladesh, and Colombia.
• Knowledge Building Innovation Network in Greater China: Education Towards a Sustainable Future: Bodong Chen’s project aims to launch a knowledge building innovation network to support K–12 teachers in Greater China to create innovative ways to integrate the UN Sustainable Development Goals in school curriculum following the knowledge building pedagogy.
• Project-Based Learning for Global Climate Justice: Zachary Herrmann leads this program, which aims to support educators in designing transformative experiences that engage students in exploring critical climate justice issues. It does this by developing and enacting meaningful and contextually relevant global climate justice educational projects in educator-participants’ local communities.
• Impact of Tech-based Teaching on Learning in India: Towards UN SDG4: Dan Wagner heads this project focused on improving foundational literacy and numeracy, especially in the world’s poorest communities, by determining how teacher training impacted student learning during the pandemic, ways in which improving teachers’ classroom practices can increase student achievement, and how to identify factors in “marginalized” populations (e.g., by mother-tongue) that are obstacles for children’s learning.

Learn more about all of the projects awarded grants from the program here and read more about the symposium here.