What is the Virginia B. Ball Center for Creative Inquiry?
Since its launch in 2000, Ball State’s Virginia B. Ball Center for Creative Inquiry has served as a site for semester-long student-driven projects that transcend disciplinary boundaries. Fall 2023 marked the launch of a new partnership offering the hallmark VBC experiences to all undergraduates under the umbrella of Ball State’s celebrated Honors College.
Our Mission
The Virginia B. Ball Center for Creative Inquiry provides distinctive, rigorous, and transformative immersive learning experiences. These experiences enable members of the Ball State University community to participate in open inquiry, creative investigations, collaborative research, innovative problem solving, and active learning outside the confines of the conventional classroom. Each experience is designed so that faculty and students can:
- explore the connections among the arts, humanities, science, and technology
- create a product that illustrates collaborative research and interdisciplinary study
- present their product to the community in a public forum
Each year, Ball State University faculty members are chosen to lead student teams in these interdisciplinary, immersive seminars. The students are chosen by application or audition. Working together with community partners, each group of faculty and students creates a product to engage the community in public dialogue.
The center provides time and support for each faculty fellow to prepare and teach the seminar. Students enrolled in each seminar receive up to a full semester’s credit for their work. To help facilitate that work, the center provides each seminar with a significant budget to produce its project.