Spencer RTG - Program Information . . . . The MSU Spencer RTG Fellowships will be available to students beginning in their middle years of doctoral study in the period after they have completed a major part of their doctoral coursework and begun to develop a research agenda but before they have started work on a dissertation. This year we will award 15 or 16 fellowships, which will be split between new students who are applying for a first year of support and first-year fellows seeking a second year of support. They are also permitted to take on a research or teaching assistantship of no more than time in the fall and spring semesters.
Fellows are free to take on additional assistantships during the summer.
The MSU COE faculty have a history of self-examination concerning the teaching of research. The improvement of educational practice requires sustained attention to learning, teaching, and the relationships between the two. Still others look at institutional, structural, and contextual variables and how they shape what is learned and taught. These streams of work have not been woven together in any systematic way. Yet lessons learned about learning absent an eye on the kind of teaching or on the context in which the learning took place do little to provide the situated, contextualized knowledge that educational practice requires.