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The Mellon Foundation has awarded Southern Illinois University Edwardsville a grant of $1 million from their Higher Learning program. The award will support the expansion of CODES (Community Oriented Digital Engagement Scholars), a novel general education pathway grounded in community engagement, digital humanities, and social justice at a regional public university.

According to the Mellon Foundation, founded in 1969, the organization launched with the mission to “strengthen, promote, and defend the arts and humanities as essential to democratic societies.” Grant recipients demonstrate Mellon’s ideals of “critical thinking, where ideas and imagination can thrive.”

“I am incredibly excited that the generous support from the Mellon Foundation will catalyze SIUE’s efforts to expand and enhance opportunities through CODES.  Dr. DeSpain’s leadership along with the efforts of the SOAR team and our faculty colleagues created a strong foundation from which we can build.  We have seen successful retention outcomes that we can now extend to more students and leverage as we enhance opportunities for all students, particularly students historically underrepresented in higher education,” said Denise Cobb, PhD, Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs.

Jessica DeSpain, PhD, professor of English, who created the CODES concept, is the primary investigator of the Mellon grant, and the co-founder of IRIS (Interdisciplinary Research & Informatics Scholarship Center), a CODES partner. She launched IRIS in 2009 along with Kristine Hildebrandt, PhD, to support faculty and students who wanted to use digital tools in their study of literature, languages, art, history, and sociology.

CODES launched in 2017 with a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) planning grant designed to examine innovative humanities programming. The program was awarded an additional NEH implementation grant in 2021.

Based on the success of CODES’s earlier phases and recognizing its alignment with Mellon’s social justice and humanities strategies, Chancellor James T. Minor, PhD, approached the organization’s Higher Learning program with a request to consider supporting the growth of SIUE’s evolving digital humanities specialty as key part of the university’s general education offerings.

“It is a credit to our SIUE community that we come prepared to this opportunity having prioritized the humanities while incorporating technology-based workflows and culture,” said Chancellor James T. Minor, PhD. “The Mellon Foundation support is a further endorsement of a team that includes access and community in every digital design.”

With CODES, SIUE students enroll in two years of alternative general education coursework centered on a problem while embedded with a community partner to provide possible solutions through digital storytelling. For example, CODES was instrumental during a recent exploration into reparative justice with the Missouri Botanical Garden, which wanted to tell a more accurate, culturally sensitive story about the institution’s history of enslavement.

“We try to solve what we call a wicked problem,” said DeSpain.

CODES is a competitive scholarship program for incoming first-year students who are Pell-eligible, first generation or historically underrepresented in their major. They are chosen to participate based on their commitment to making a difference in their communities.

“One hundred percent of the students in CODES right now are in good academic standing,” said DeSpain. “And, we have retained 84% of our student population, compared to the University’s rate of 69% of students in the same demographic. The retention numbers are very strong, and the academic standing is especially strong.”

SOAR (Student Opportunities for Academic Results), a CODES partner, has played a vital role in students' academic and personal development by offering extensive support and coaching.

“SOAR supports CODES students who are under-resourced and who may struggle in their first-year transition,” said Earleen Patterson, PhD, Associate Vice Chancellor for Student Opportunities, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion and director of SOAR. “We work closely with the faculty teaching in the program by providing comprehensive academic advising and academic progress monitoring. In addition, SOAR offers personalized support and guidance to help students overcome academic challenges, set goals, and develop effective study habits. We will have an active role in the expansion of the CODES program and revising the current model based on assessment outcomes."

“I would like to thank the Mellon Foundation for their generosity and recognition of this innovative and transformative program,” said Jessica Harris, PhD, Vice Chancellor for Anti-racism, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. “The CODES program has not only had a positive impact on student retention, but it also advances SIUE’s mission to educate changemakers. I look forward to working closely with Dr. DeSpain and the team to expand CODES for even greater impact.”   

The Mellon grant expands the program in the following manner:

·      Increasing the number of enrolled students from each incoming class from 25 to 100 and boosting human resource capacity to accommodate them

·      Supporting 20 student interns per year to work with their community organization beyond their course time and develop their professional skills

·      Seeding three tenure-track faculty lines in humanities disciplines who specialize in interdisciplinary approaches

·      Maintaining the involvement of the IRIS Center with CODES by hiring a web developer to design a new community engagement platform titled LOCUS to publish community member and student stories

·      Offer this program as a model for SIUE faculty fellows and a three-day training for visiting fellows from other institutions such as University of Alaska Fairbanks, Metro State University - Saint Paul, Minnesota, and Florida Gulf Coast University

DeSpain notes that the program offers a new approach to general education coursework.

“A CODE Scholar might be majoring in biology, computer science or criminal justice, but we help them position their learning from a humanities perspective. That way a computer scientist might be more inclined to think about the social and cultural biases in their technological designs, for example,” said DeSpain. “Part of the grant is expanding the model, testing that expansion in general education more broadly, and then seeing what happens if we partner with other universities who have a similar profile to SIUE to try it out.”

The grant began August 1.

About The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is the nation’s largest supporter of the arts and humanities. Since 1969, the Foundation has been guided by its core belief that the humanities and arts are essential to human understanding. The Foundation believes that the arts and humanities are where we express our complex humanity, and that everyone deserves the beauty, transcendence, and freedom that can be found there. Through our grants, we seek to build just communities enriched by meaning and empowered by critical thinking, where ideas and imagination can thrive. Learn more at mellon.org.

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