Teachers as Scholars

Seminar 1: On-line Li(v)es: Everyday Autobiography & Social Media.
10/23/2026 & 11/13/2026

Social media has forever changed the way people document their lives. Digital platforms like Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and other interactive on-line platforms have become the standard for documenting, sharing, and searching for records of our public and private lives. This seminar explores how the online versions of everyday, functional autobiography – like resumes, professional biographies, dating profiles, and even selfies – can promote “selves” but also risk “losing” them. Participants will read and discuss debates about the effectiveness, security, and safety of old genres that learn new tricks with an eye toward educating the next generation of users. Discussions highlight questions of creative license and freedom of expression, as well as legal and ethical measures of privacy: Are online role-playing games and other seemingly “virtual” online personas as “real” as off-line identities? How do platforms for sharing biographical details open doors to “catfishing” and other on-line deceptions? Do the networking websites on which we scroll and swipe for professional connections encourage fraud? Are blogs and vlogs the 21st century’s preferred form of memoir?

Seminar Leader: Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle is a Professor of English at TCNJ. She specializes in 20th and 21st century Inter-American literature and autobiographical studies. She has published books, edited collections, and dozens of scholarly articles on life writing practice and theory and is currently at work on a book about functional forms of autobiography in everyday life, such as social media. She is Editor of the academic journal a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, an Executive Committee member of the International Auto/Biography Association, and Vice President of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.
 

Seminar 2: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work, Finance, and the Economy.
10/27/2026 & 11/10/2026

This two-day seminar introduces teachers to how artificial intelligence is transforming the modern economy, financial markets, and the future of work. Artificial intelligence has rapidly emerged as one of the most important technological developments of the twenty-first century. Advances in generative AI systems have demonstrated the ability of machines to perform cognitive tasks that were previously considered uniquely human. These changes are already reshaping how firms make decisions, how industries evolve, and how workers develop skills.

The seminar will provide teachers with a clear and accessible introduction to artificial intelligence from an economic perspective. Participants will learn how AI technologies function, why economists consider them general-purpose technologies, and how they influence economic growth and productivity. The seminar will explore how businesses respond to technological innovation, how financial markets evaluate technological disruption, and how these developments affect employment and skill demand across industries.

Participants will also examine real-world case studies that illustrate how firms respond to technological change. Recent research shows that exposure to generative artificial intelligence can influence corporate investment behavior and financial decision making. These examples help illustrate how new technologies create both opportunities and uncertainty in the economy.

The second day of the seminar will focus on practical classroom applications. Teachers will discuss ways to incorporate topics related to artificial intelligence, economic change, and financial literacy into middle school and high school curricula. Participants will receive classroom-ready discussion ideas, case examples, and teaching strategies that help students understand how technological innovation shapes the economy and society. The seminar is designed for teachers across disciplines who want to better understand the economic impact of emerging technologies and prepare students for a rapidly changing world.

Seminar Leader: Jasper Pan is an Assistant Professor of Finance at The College of New Jersey. His research focuses on financial markets, corporate finance, and the economic impact of technological change. His recent research examines how artificial intelligence affects corporate investment decisions and borrowing costs in financial markets. He received his PhD in Finance from Rutgers University, an MA in Economics from Vanderbilt University, and BA and BS degrees in Applied Mathematics and Economics from UCLA. His research has been presented at major academic conferences including the Financial Management Association and the American Finance Association mentoring program. At The College of New Jersey he teaches courses in Investments, Financial Management, and Financial Technology. He is also an instructor in Columbia University’s Pre-College Programs, where he teaches courses on business, finance, and economics to high school students.

Seminar 3: Fostering logic and multiplication skills through games.
11/16/2026 & 11/30/2026

In this workshop, we will learn, play, and discuss games that develop students’ reasoning ability and multiplication skills. These games give children an opportunity to discover connections using their own experiences. Playing is fun, it is a natural activity for children. Through play, students acquire and develop reasoning skills and numerous other abilities of the body and the mind.
We will look at recent research from neuroscience and motivation theory that explains the benefits of playing games. We will also discuss how to implement the use of puzzles and games effectively in the mathematics classroom.

Seminar Leader: Judit Kardos, Ph.D. Judit Kardos is an Associate Professor of Mathematics. I am fortunate to have grown up in Hungary that has a long tradition of superb Mathematics Education. My Mathematics teachers fostered my interest and enjoyment of the subject by making me see Mathematics as something people do instead of a set of skills that people possess. My teachers’ recipe was simple: the more I enjoy doing Mathematics, the more I will succeed. The recipe worked; I never stopped learning Math and received a Ph.D. in Mathematics with a focus on Real Analysis. As a teacher, I strive to deeply engage my students, fostering their own passion for mathematics through collaboration and the use of games and puzzles.

Seminar 4: The Science of Safety: Fostering Trauma-Informed Classrooms
12/4/2026 & 12/18/2026

In today’s classroom, academic achievement is inextricably linked to a student’s sense of safety and belonging. However, creating this environment is a complex challenge given that trauma is prevalent, impacting approximately 2 out of 3 children and adolescents before the age of 18. This two-day seminar invites educators to engage as intellectual leaders by exploring the latest scholarship on childhood trauma and the profound impact of adversity on the developing brain. We will examine how past trauma manifests in the classroom, from hyper-vigilance and emotional dysregulation to withdrawal and cognitive fatigue, challenging participants to reflect on their own teaching through a trauma-informed lens. Educators will engage in hands-on activities and leave with a toolkit of ready-to-use strategies for managing their classrooms and supporting students who have been impacted by trauma. This seminar will also empower participants to return to their districts with the scholarly insights and evidence-based tools necessary to advocate for and implement trauma-sensitive practices across their school communities.

Seminar Leader:  Lisa Cardello, PhD, LPC, NCC is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Online Counselor Education at The College of New Jersey. She is licensed as a clinical mental health counselor in New Jersey and runs a small private practice. Prior to her career in counseling, she was a K-5 teacher and school counselor. Dr. Cardello serves as an Editorial Reviewer for Trauma Counseling and Resilience, the peer-reviewed journal of International Association for Resilience and Trauma Counseling, and she has published research on trauma-informed care.  

Seminar 5: Cultivating Close Reading through Mindful Observation.
1/5/2027 & 1/19/2027

In this seminar, we will explore strategies for improving students’ ability to close read texts. We will begin with participatory, nature-related activities that address student focus, attention, and patience. Session attendees will then have the opportunity to consider the relationship between these dispositions and student engagement. Using photography, art, poetry from the edited collection The Wonder of Small Things, as well as Jacqueline Woodson’s novel Remember Us, we will demonstrate how mindful practices can be translated into deeper text analysis. . 

Seminar Leaders: Emily Meixner, Christina Maffa-Johnson. Emily Meixner is a professor of English and the Coordinator of the Secondary English Education Program. She regularly teaches courses on secondary reading and writing pedagogy as well as children’s and adolescent literature. Christina Maffa-Johnson is a clinical specialist in the English department. She is an experienced middle and high school teacher and supervises TCNJ student teachers in local schools. She also teaches topics courses in literature and film.

Seminar 6: Political Climate and Immigrant Students: How Teachers Can Support Immigrant Students.
2/5/2027 & 2/26/2027

This seminar is designed for P-12 teachers across all subject areas who work with immigrant students. This seminar will present the history of immigration policy in the U.S., how immigration policy impacts immigrants’ health and educational outcomes, and what teachers can do to support immigrant well-being. Teachers will be able to trace the evolution of key U.S. immigration policies and identify how these historical frameworks directly influence the physical and mental well-being of immigrant students today.

Seminar Leader: Dr. Raquel Sosa (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in Psychology at The College of New Jersey (TCNJ). She earned her PhD in Counseling Psychology from Lehigh University. Her research lab, the Latine Liberation lab, focuses on how culturally responsive methods like liberation psychology and critical consciousness, facilitate positive outcomes among Latinx people. Clinically, she has experience providing therapy in a variety of settings including college counseling, academic medical centers, and K-12 schools with children and adults.

Seminar 7: Makerspaces.
2/10/2027 & 2/24/2027

Makerspace’s offer a dynamic approach to teaching and learning by positioning students as active participants in inquiry, experimentation, and problem-solving through making. This seminar will examine how design thinking and digital fabrication can cultivate deeper learning by helping students break complex challenges into smaller, manageable parts and iteratively develop solutions. It will also cover practical guidance on designing and setting up a Makerspace, as well as strategies for effectively running and maintaining one to ensure long-term success. Participants will engage with strategies for integrating these approaches into classroom practice to foster creativity, collaboration, and critical thinking across disciplines.

Participants will engage in guided, hands-on exploration of digital fabrication tools including laser cutters, 3D printers, Textile machines, UV printing, vinyl cutting, and other Makerspace technologies. They will then use that knowledge to develop a project aligned with their own instructional contexts.

Seminar Leader: Brett Ratner manages and leads the TCNJ Makerspace in the AIMM Building, supporting interdisciplinary teaching, research, and creative processes across the campus community. He has taught a wide range of courses within the Department of Design and Creative Technology, as well as a course in the Integrative STEM Education program at The College of New Jersey. Over the past decade, Brett has developed the TCNJ Makerspace from a small, single classroom-based resource into a comprehensive facility serving students and faculty across disciplines. His research and professional interests include digital fabrication, physical computing, graphic and media production, and the role of makerspaces in fostering inquiry-based and experiential learning. He holds a Master’s degree in Integrative STEM Education from The College of New Jersey.

Seminar 8: Rethinking Holocaust Testimonies.
3/5/2027 & 3/19/2027

This seminar will explore how the Holocaust can be remembered and understood, especially now that most survivors have passed away. In the late 1970s, Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Dori Laub began recording testimonies of men and women who had lived through the genocide of European Jews. He believed that retelling their stories would help survivors process their memories and aid in their healing. Yale University acquired the interviews and founded the world’s first archive of Holocaust testimonies. Recently, historians and archivists have discussed how to make the archive more accessible to researchers and teachers. Our seminar will use excerpts of testimonies and readings about Holocaust memory to explore various questions: Why did survivors adopt legal language, such as witnessing and testifying? What can we learn from filmed testimonies compared to written texts? How do testimonies contribute to our understanding of trauma? How can teachers use these resources with students? (TCNJ has access to the Fortunoff Video Archive of Holocaust Testimonies through a partnership with Yale University.)

Seminar Leader: Cynthia Paces, Ph.D. is Professor of History at The College of New Jersey. A historian of modern Europe with a focus on Central and Eastern Europe, she teaches courses on urban history, gender and history, and the Holocaust and genocides. She has led study tours to countries including the Czech Republic, Poland, Germany, Austria, and Armenia. Her recent book, Prague: The Heart of Europe (Oxford University Press, 2025), offers a sweeping history of the city from the ninth century to the present day. She is also the author of Prague Panoramas: National Memory and Sacred Space in the Twentieth Century (Univ. of Pittsburgh, 2009) and co-editor of 1989: The End of the 20th Century (W.W. Norton, 2009).

Seminar 9:
Are they college ready? High school to college transitions and research readiness. 3/9/2027 & 3/23/2027 

The presenter will provide local data on college and research readiness based on a local NJ study. The participants will gain information on what academic tools and strategies to use to better prepare high schoolers to be successful college students.

Seminar Leader: Ewa Dziedzic-Elliott serves as the subject librarian for all departments in the School of Education. She has 10 years of experience as a K-12 librarian, including work in both elementary and high school settings. She holds an MLIS from Rutgers University and an MA in Polish Language and Literature with a minor in Speech Therapy from Jan Kochanowski University, Poland, EU. She also holds NJ supervisor and principal certifications. Her research interests include research skills of high school and first year college students; diversity and equity in collection management; and barriers to information, especially in the immigrant, multicultural, and bilingual communities. She has published in the Journal of Academic Librarianship and Library Connections. She is an executive board member for New Jersey Association of School Librarians (NJASL) and currently serves as NJASL Past President.

Seminar 10: Art as a Tool for Social Change: Graffiti, Public Art, and Community Voice.
4/9/2027 & 4/23/2027

This two-day seminar examines how art functions as a powerful tool for social change, with a focus on graffiti, street art, and community-based visual practices. Designed to support P–12 educators across disciplines, the seminar connects contemporary scholarship with classroom application, emphasizing art’s role in fostering critical thinking, civic engagement, and student voice.

Participants will explore how artists across cultures use public space to address issues of identity, resistance, and collective memory. Through guided discussion, visual analysis, and structured hands-on activities, educators will consider how visual language operates as a form of communication ranging from protest to public service messaging.
A central component of the seminar is the development of adaptable, classroom-ready strategies that translate socially engaged art practices into P–12 learning environments. Participants will leave with a framework for integrating interdisciplinary, process-based assignments that encourage students to engage thoughtfully with their communities and the world around them.

Drawing from both global perspectives and regionally relevant examples, this seminar supports ongoing dialogue between TCNJ faculty and partner school districts, contributing to sustained collaboration and shared pedagogical development.

Seminar Leader: Marchelo Vera-Lee

Marchelo Vera-Lee is an Associate Professor of Art and Visual Arts Program Coordinator at The College of New Jersey, where he provides leadership in curriculum development, program coordination, and interdisciplinary collaboration across the visual arts. His teaching and research focus on traditional printmaking, print media, ceramics, and socially engaged art practices that integrate digital and material processes.

Vera’s work explores themes of cultural identity, labor, and colonial histories, drawing from Puerto Rican heritage and global visual traditions. He has exhibited nationally and internationally, including participation in the 2026 International Print Biennale of India. Through his teaching, mentorship, and service, he is committed to building connections between higher education and P–12 learning communities. Supporting educators in developing inclusive, critically engaged classroom practices through hands-on, process-based learning that fosters creativity and student engagement.

Seminar 11: Storytelling and Self-Care.
4/12/2027 & 4/26/2027

So many teachers are feeling burnt out and in need of a boost. This job is tough, but the good news is that there are some simple steps that teachers can take to practice self-care and increase their job satisfaction. During this workshop, you will learn many of these steps, and you will have the opportunity to take a deep dive into engaging in storytelling as a form of self- care. Storytelling promotes introspection, sparks compassion, and deepens connection. We unite through story to consider what drives us and how we can work together to build on the positive in our world. Together, we will explore structures for developing and sharing stories that matter to us as educators and reflect on how storytelling in our schools can promote self-care for educators and students. Come for the insight, the laughs, and the connection. Take away practical steps that you can use in your schools.

Seminar Leader: Maureen Connolly, Ed.D. is a professor of secondary education at The College of New Jersey and coauthor of several books about teaching strategies, assessment, and standards. Prior to her work at the college level, she was an English teacher and service-learning grant coordinator in New York for fifteen years. Maureen believes in developing purposeful learning that opens students’ eyes to the potential for positive change in themselves and in their local, national, and global communities. As the parent of a middle schooler, this belief is personal as well as professional! In addition, Maureen is passionate about storytelling and self-care at school and beyond.

Seminar 12: Lessons that Afrodescendants Teach Us About Hispanic Heritage Month.
5/3/2027 & 5/17/2027

In 1968 Congressman California Congressman George E. Brown established Hispanic Heritage week, which later evolved to Hispanic Heritage Month. The aim has been to celebrate Latino traditions and contributions to the US and global society at large. Its commemorative timeline of September 15-October 15 honors the dates that a number of Latin American countries earned their independence from Spain. This seminar delves into how institutions like K-12 settings and higher education have used this month to center Indigenous and mestizaje experiences, often at the exclusion of Afrodescendants or Afro-Latinx people within Latin America, and the Caribbean. It endeavors to serve as a corrective intervention for this curricular and historical erasure. Participants will explore key historical contexts of Afrodescendants in places like Mexico, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, and Brazil using scholarship from Afrodescendants of the Americas and student group projects from TCNJ. They will then have an opportunity to workshop their own syllabus, school-wide celebrations, student group activities, etc. and apply the lessons that Afrodescendants teach us all about Hispanic Heritage Month.

Seminar Leader: E Morales-Williams, Ph.D. (they/them) has over twenty years of experience teaching and creating Social Studies curriculum in K-12 schools, having served as both a classroom teacher and high school administrator. Dr. E also taught at the College of Education at Temple University for six years, earning an Excellence in Teaching Award in 2010, while completing their doctoral degree. Their dissertation focused on Black and Latinx youth workers’ public pedagogy of dismantling rape culture in youth settings, and won the Myra Sadker Foundation Dissertation Award in 2012. Their first book, “Turn Up for Freedom: Notes for All the Tough Girls Awakening to Their Collective Power,” is a non-fiction YA which archives the stories, tools, and lessons learned at an intergenerational organizing collective they founded based on the implications of their doctoral work. “Turn Up for Freedom” was published by Common Notions in 2023 and was developed with middle and HS teachers in mind.

They are currently an adjunct professor at TCNJ in the department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies where they teach an upper level seminar entitled, “Bruja and Blackness: Transnational Feminist Perspectives of AfroLatinidad.” They have their Masters and Ph.D. in Urban Education from Temple University where they also teach a course on tweens/teens out of the department of Educational Psychology.

Seminar 1: Words and Days: the History of the English Language for Grades 6-12 – October 6 & 13, 2023

Many texts that are part of the standard high school curriculum were written in different periods of the English language: the poem Beowulf (often taught in translation) was written in Old English; Chaucer wrote in Middle English; Shakespeare wrote in Early Modern English. But one need not teach texts in Middle English to see a benefit to instruction in talking specifically, clearly, and accurately about the history of the English language. The History of the English Language, which is often only a part of the college curriculum, has a great deal to offer students in secondary education, whether or not they are reading texts written in earlier stages of the language. This two day professional development seminar is built around considerations of one important fact: all language changes all the time in all cultures. The first day of the seminar will consider important changes across the history of the English language from the early medieval period (before Beowulf) to 1950 that will help teachers as they discuss contemporary linguistics. Topics will include changes to the English pronoun system in Middle and Early Modern English (relevant for our understanding of the adoption of singular they), language contact between English and numerous other languages across its history (relevant for our understanding of vocabulary development), and grammatical and lexical variations present in Shakespeare’s works and that of other Early Modern writers (relevant to the teaching of Shakespeare particularly and to discussions of dialect and slang in contemporary literature). The second day will focus exclusively on change in American English from 1800 to our current moment and address issues of dialect variation, standard language ideology, and anxiety about language standards. Participants will leave the seminar with classroom-ready activities that are fun, engaging, and articulated to state standards around language and that support literature and writing instruction.

Seminar Leader: Felicia Jean Steele, Ph.D.

Felicia Jean Steele is an associate professor in the English department at The College of New Jersey. She teaches courses in introductory linguistics and the global history of the English language, as well as courses in early literatures and medievalism in British literature. Professor Steele’s main research is in historical linguistics, specifically auxiliary verb change over the history of the English language. She has also published essays in historical phonology and the uses of linguistic analysis in discussions of literary influence and the influence of Tolkien on Seamus Heaney. She is currently writing a book about the History of the English Language.

Seminar 2: Book Banning, Classroom Challenged Materials, Intellectual Freedom and New Information Literacy State Standard – October 18 & 25, 2023

In this seminar we will look at the state and local laws, regulations and policies that set requirements for specific materials to be taught and used at schools. I will share strategies on what to do if the challenge occurs, how to find support and defend the right to read. We will also talk about the new state standard that is being worked on in the state of New Jersey. Upon this new law it will be mandatory to teach information literacy, critical thinking and understanding of given materials in various formats and their sources.

Seminar Leader: Ewa Dziedzic-Elliott
Ewa Dziedzic-Elliott serves as the subject librarian for all departments in the School of Education. She has 10 years of experience as a K-12 librarian, including work in both elementary and high school settings. She holds an MLIS from Rutgers University and an MA in Polish Language and Literature with a minor in Speech Therapy from Jan Kochanowski University, Poland, EU. She also holds NJ supervisor and principal certifications. Her research interests include research skills of high school and first year college students; diversity and equity in collection management; and barriers to information, especially in the immigrant, multicultural, and bilingual communities. She has published in the Journal of Academic Librarianship and Library Connections. She is an executive board member for New Jersey Association of School Librarians (NJASL) and currently serves as NJASL Past President.

Seminar 3: Makerspaces – November 6 & 13, 2023

Makerspaces: A recent infographic from the Educational Advisory Board describes the importance and role of a makerspace to “allow students to convert their ideas into physical objects, supporting hands-on learning and cross-discipline collaboration.” In this hands-on workshop, you will explore ways to incorporate digital fabrication and design thinking into your curriculum. Specifically, you will learn to use laser cutters, 3D printers, CNC machines, and other digital fabrication tools. Participants will have ample workshop time to use these tools to build a project of their choice.

Seminar Leader: Brett Ratner

Brett Ratner the Arts/Interactive Multi Media Technical Coordinator and an adjunct professor in the Department of Interactive Multimedia Arts He received his B.A in Interactive Multimedia with a minor in Computer science and  Engineering Masters in i-STEM education from TCNJ. His interests include 3D printing, laser cutting, and other Makerspace technologies, along with web development and physical computing.

Seminar 4: Teaching Science through Issues to Increase Engagement, Meet the NGSS, and Prepare Citizens – November 20 & 27, 2023

Traditionally, the goal of science courses has been to teach students the important concepts in the discipline, often leaving students wondering about the relevance of the material to their lives (i.e., why do I need to know this?). By engaging students in relevant and current societal issues (e.g., climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic) or personal decisions (How much water should I drink in a day? Do I need to take all my antibiotics?), we give students a reason and a desire to learn scientific concepts. In addition to increasing student interest, the issues approach allows teachers to meet all three dimensions of the NGSS. Thoughtful choice of the issues explored in a course is all that is required to ensure coverage of the essential concepts in a discipline. The issues approach also prepares our students to use science in their everyday lives. Nationally, only 6% of high-school graduates go on to earn a bachelor’s or higher in STEM and are employed as STEM professionals, yet all students need to incorporate high-quality scientific information into the decisions they make in their personal, professional, and civic lives. As the pandemic has demonstrated, all persons, not just practicing scientists, need a high-quality science education if they are to engage effectively with our most pressing societal issues, and the issues approach trains students to do just that. At the conclusion of Teaching Science through Issues, you will have a thorough understanding of the issues approach and its benefits. You will identify an issue and the disciplinary content relevant to that issue for one of your classes, develop activities that connect the issue to NGSS standards and disciplinary content, and identify real-world scenarios to which students will apply the content knowledge related to the issue. You will leave the seminar with all the skills necessary to implement the issues-based approach in your classes.

Seminar Leader: Christopher Murphy, Ph.D.

Christopher Murphy is the Associate Provost for Curriculum and Liberal Learning and a Professor of Biology at The College of New Jersey. He taught his first class of general education biology 30 years ago as a post-doctoral associate, and since then, over 95% of his teaching has been with this population. For much of this time, he has used an issues-based approach to help students become interested in science and develop into empowered citizens capable of using reliable scientific information to make reasoned decisions. He conducts research in both biology and college education.

Seminar 5: Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design – December 1 & 8, 2023

“The world told is a different world to the world shown,” according to scholar Gunther Kress. Digital technologies and social media have made the shown world a dominant modality in the ways we share stories, learn information, and go about the minutiae of our daily lives. It has never been easier in human history for an individual to record an image; the ease with which we can capture a picture of a blooming flower might fool us into thinking that the skill of reading an image is as innate and intuitive as learning language. The complexity of design that goes into crafting a picture book illustration or poster layout, however, is as intricate and intentional as any sentence. Learning to understand the grammar of visual design gives readers new tools with which to construct meaning, meanings which are often hidden from our youngest students all the way through adolescent and adult readers. This seminar will introduce participants to the conceptual framework of Gunther Kress. We will also study Scott McCloud’s theories of sequential art and the illustration principles that artist Molly Bang laid out in her seminal text, “How Pictures Work.” The presenter will model how these ideas can be simplified for elementary-aged children and offer them a toolkit for analyzing picture books and graphic novels. We will also consider how the grammar of visual design can support middle and high school readers to engage in deep comprehension work with visual texts, even when students may have difficulty with decoding and fluency in traditional linguistic text. In addition to studying lots of different kinds of visual texts that can be used in the classroom, we will also consider how studying an image can help students design their own complex visual text and discuss the transfer of skills across written and visual composition tasks. Finally, all the participants will be invited to practice some simple visual design tasks that are accessible to everyone. No drawing skills required!

Seminar Leader: Anne Peel, Ph.D.
Anne is an Associate Professor of Literacy Education in the Special Education, Language & Literacy Department and the coordinator of the Secondary Special Education Program. She teaches a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses that focus on the foundations of reading instruction and assessment, disciplinary literacy in secondary schools, writing instruction in inclusive classrooms, and children’s literature. As a former high school English teacher, she continues to maintain collaborations with multiple districts across New Jersey, providing professional development support in literacy instruction. Her scholarship has been published in English Journal, Journal of Language and Literacy Education, Literacy, and The Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy among others; she has presented her research at numerous national and international conferences.

Seminar 6: Graffiti in the Arab World: Narratives of Resistance About Seminar – January 24 & 31,2024

This seminar is grounded in transnational feminist anti-war ideology and speaks against the Western and US constructions of Arabs as terrorists. In the seminar, we spend our time looking at and analyzing graffiti created by individuals and groups from across the Arab World in order to see the different forms of resistance to state violence and US and European wars and imperialism in the region. We explore how graffiti is used to critique and resist power, is a site of public debate, and a form of cultural production that gives us insight into possible alternative futures. This is a critical topic to engage in because it gives us insights into social and political movements across the Arab World and it challenges hegemonic views of Arabs. This seminar provides participants a critical perspective of Arabs to help their own students critique dominant narratives and create empathy toward the other.

Seminar Leader: Alma Khasawnih, Ph.D.
Alma Khasawnih is an Assistant Professor in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The College of New Jersey. She received her Ph.D. in Feminist Studies from the University of Washington-Seattle, an MA in Community Art Education from Rhode Island School of Design, and a BS in Environmental Policy and Behavior from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, and an AA from Santa Fe Community College in Gainesville, Florida. alma’s work is invested in undoing the nation-state as a site of collectivity and reorienting our understanding of citizenship outside of nation-state borders by focusing on ephemeral visual culture as primary sites of analysis.

Seminar 7: Teaching Grammar without Fear – January 26 & February 2, 2024

Does teaching comma rules give you an anxiety attack? Do you get a twist in your stomach when you have to explain to students in a clear and non-judgmental way why they might not want to say “me and my friend did something” in an academic paper? Do you rely on your own grammatical intuitions when you respond to student writing? Do you have names to describe these grammatical intuitions that you can share confidently with your students? Are you able to provide your students with grammatical and stylistic explanations for why some sentences are “awkward” or do you just rely on “AWK” to get the message across? Are you confident in how to explain conventions of usage to your students and do you consistently model how to find the best answers related to usage and style? Or do you avoid discussions of grammar altogether because they make you and your students too uncomfortable for words? If any of these statements describe your experience talking about grammar and addressing linguistic diversity in your classroom, you might benefit from a two-day professional development seminar that provides a refresher course about linguistics and grammar. This seminar will provide participants with tools to incorporate rich discussions of grammar and language throughout the curriculum and help them to move beyond dry-as-dust (and punitive) grammatical seatwork and problematic editing tasks that might marginalize speakers of non-mainstream dialects of English or English-language learners in the classroom. The most significant goal of the sessions will be to help teachers learn to model answer-seeking behaviors that focus on minimizing anxiety around grammar and that help to clarify the differences between grammar, usage, mechanics, style, and register. Participants will leave the seminar with classroom-ready activities that are fun, engaging, and articulated to state standards around language.

Seminar Leader: Felicia Jean Steele, Ph.D.
Felicia Jean Steele, Ph.D. is an associate professor in the English department at The College of New Jersey. She teaches courses in introductory linguistics and the global history of the English language, as well as courses in early literatures and medievalism in British literature. Professor Steele’s main research is in historical linguistics, specifically auxiliary verb change over the history of the English language. She has also published essays in historical phonology and the uses of linguistic analysis in discussions of literary influence and the influence of Tolkien on Seamus Heaney. She is currently writing a book about the History of the English Language.

Seminar 8: Inclusion and Inquiry: Fostering Student Belonging and a Passion for Mathematics – February 8 & 15, 2024

How do we create rich mathematical learning environments that support all students in becoming collaborative and creative mathematical practitioners? Active and student-centered inquiry-based mathematics instruction can be key to responding to this question, but if we don’t intentionally attend to social interactions in our mathematics classrooms, we risk creating environments where broader societal biases and positioning can harm our students. Participants and facilitators will work together as a community of educators to reflect on our teaching practices and develop teaching strategies that empower all of our students to find mathematical success.

Seminar Leader: Judit Kardos, Ph.D.
Judit Kardos is an Associate Professor of Mathematics. I am fortunate to have grown up in Hungary that has a long tradition of superb Mathematics Education. My Mathematics teachers fostered my interest and enjoyment of the subject by making me see Mathematics as something people do instead of a set of skills that people possess. My teachers’ recipe was simple: the more I enjoy doing Mathematics, the more I will succeed. The recipe worked, I have never stopped learning Math and received a Ph.D. in Mathematics with a focus on Real Analysis. As a teacher, I strive to deeply engage my students, fostering their own passion for mathematics through collaboration and the use of games and puzzles.

Seminar 9: Racism in the Poverty-to-Prison Cycle: African Americans, Mass Incarceration and Everyday White Supremacy – March 8 & 15, 2024

US government data shows that white people commit most crimes and yet the majority of people in jails and prisons are people of color. And while white men commit most violent crimes and do so at disproportionately high rates, most prisoners are men of color. Why? What explains this racial disparity? How are Black students academically impacted by racist criminalization and hyperpolicing? How would a transformative justice approach end racism in the legal system? Today, African Americans comprise 13% of the United States’ total population, yet they represent approximately 40% of the country’s incarcerated people. This high incarceration rate reflects a long history of Black people’s disproportionate arrests, convictions, and confinement in the US prison system—a domain of systemic racist-classism. In this workshop, participants will acquire or strengthen the ability to intersectionally analyze policing and prisons from a racial justice perspective. Widespread fictions of blackness as criminal and violent and whiteness as innocent and under siege fuel the poverty-to-prison cycle that ensnares and obliterates Black lives. We will examine the ways in which racist beliefs and discriminatory policing drive the mass incarceration crisis in poor African American communities. This workshop supports personal, professional and collective efforts to understand white supremacy as an intersectional, normalized set of systemic beliefs and practices that justify the police occupation of poor Black communities and over-incarceration of Black people. In addition to considering the ways in which Black students’ academic lives are impacted by racist conceptions of crime and racist carceral practices, participants will explore concrete, workable, antiracist transformative justice alternatives to policing and incarceration.

Seminar Leader: Dr. Leigh-Anne Francis, Ph.D.
Dr. Leigh-Anne Francis is an Associate Professor with a dual appointment in the departments of African American Studies and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at The College of New Jersey. She has a Ph.D. in United States and African American History, a Masters in U.S. and World History, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting and Illustration. Her scholarly publications analyzing the intersections of sexism, racism, poverty, crime and work and situates Black women in the history of mass incarceration appear in Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, Journal of Women’s History, and more. As a Rutgers graduate student, she was a volunteer instructor at Mountainvew Youth Correctional Facility for Men in New Jersey. At TCNJ, she teaches courses on the history of mass incarceration, African American women, and queer & trans people of color in the United States.

Seminar 10: Talking Back to the Canon: Old Stories Retold and Unplugged – March 12 & 19, 2024

Literary and cinematic retellings are revisions of works considered “canonical” are flourishing at the very time the notion of a canon is called into question. Similarly, the scholarly discourse on adaptation, appropriation, and intertextuality is dynamic and contentious. In this seminar, we will consider how works such as The Odyssey, Beowulf, Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and others have been re-imagined and re-written into novels, short stories, screenplays, and television scripts–and how this process asks us to question notions of authorship, canonicity, and literary history. Participants will read one short novel and various excerpts in preparation for our discussion.

Seminar Leader: Jo Carney Ph.D.
Professor Jo Carney’s most recent book is Women Talk Back to Shakespeare: Contemporary Adaptations and Appropriations. She has also edited and co-authored several collections of essays and written articles on early modern literature, fairy tales, queenship, and Shakespeare.

Seminar 11: Exploring Ethics and Justice through Games and Fiction! – April 9 & 16, 2024

The post-2008 bailouts of Big Banking and Big Business, the recent moves to impose a $15 minimum wage, the criticisms of the elite “1%”, and the moves by the Trump administration to “protect” American jobs and American workers by imposing tariffs on foreign goods and restricting immigration, and the perception that while the rich are getting richer the poor are getting poorer have all led to increasing interest in the question of what a just society should look like. This question is not just of theoretical interest for it encompasses issues whose outcomes can be affected by engaged citizens. Does justice require that businesses be required to pay their workers a minimum wage? Should a just society provide its citizens with access to healthcare? Does justice require that off-shoring be limited—or does it require open immigration? Can serious economic inequality ever be just—and, if so, under what conditions? In this seminar we will first explore the underlying question of what a just society should look like, drawing on the opposing views of the welfare liberal philosopher John Rawls, and the free market philosopher Robert Nozick. We will then explore the implications of both of these views for contemporary debates over practical matters, including (but not limited to) the issue of the justice of the minimum wage, the justice of universal healthcare, and the justice of laws prohibiting price-gouging in the wake of natural disasters like Hurricane Sandy. But we will not limit ourselves to exploring these issues through philosophical theory. We will also explore them through simple (but extremely enjoyable and engaging!) economics experiments (i.e., games!) that will shed insight as to how different ways of approaching these issues will actually play out in the real world, and we’ll also draw on works of both film and fiction that address these issues. These will include Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, the science fiction of Robert A. Heinlein, and the films Other Peoples’ Money, Wall Street, and It’s a Wonderful Life. We will engage with them, identifying both the explicit and implicit messages that they convey…. And seeing whether on reflection (and in the light of the results of the games we played) we agree with them.

Seminar Leader: James Stacey Taylor, Ph.D.
James Stacey Taylor is a Professor of philosophy at TCNJ. An Anglo-Scot, he holds an MA and and M.Litt degrees from St Andrews University, Scotland, and an MA and a Ph.D. from Bowling Green State University, OH. He is the editor of Personal Autonomy: New essays and The Ethics and Metaphysics of Death, and the author of Stakes and Kidneys, Practical Autonomy and Bioethics, and Death, Posthumous Harm and Bioethics. His award-winning Op-Eds on issues of ethics, justice, and economics have appeared in many publications ranging from USA Today to the Los Angeles Times, as well as Forbes.com. He has also been quoted in The New York Times and is a contributor to NPR.

Seminar 12: Exploring Economic Justice through Games, Film, and Fiction! – James Stacey Taylor, October 5 & 12, 2022

It is imperative to increase K-12 students’ intercultural awareness and enhance their intercultural communication competence in a diverse world. What better way to achieve this goal than immersing oneself in a culture that is different from his/her own? This workshop will creatively teach participants how to use and apply the ethnographic approach to get a deep understanding of a unique culture in a relatively short period of time. The first day will focus on learning ethnographic methods through lectures, case studies, practices, and discussions. Participants will take home a small-scale ethnographic assignment to complete. When they come back on the second day, they will be guided to synthesize field notes, identify cultural patterns, draw conclusions, and share findings through presentations. These exercises, though a bit time and effort consuming will be rewarding, fulfilling, and enlightening. In addition to opening up to new cultures and improving intercultural communication skills, participants may see their own cultures in a new light. Participants taking this course should have an open-mind, a commitment to required assignments, and be willing to step out of their comfort zones. The pedagogy can be applied to advanced elementary students as well as middle and high schoolers.

Seminar Leader: James Stacey Taylor, PhDJames Stacey Taylor is a professor of philosophy at TCNJ. He is frequently invited to lecture both nationally and internationally on how to improve classroom teaching; he is also frequently invited by industry groups and policy think tanks to speak on critical-thinking pitfalls that should be avoided in making public policy. An Anglo-Scot, he holds an MA and MLitt degree from St. Andrews University, Scotland, and an MA and a PhD from Bowling Green State University, Ohio. He is the editor of Personal Autonomy: New Essays and The Ethics and Metaphysics of Death, and the author of Stakes and Kidneys, Practical Autonomy and Bioethics, and Death, Posthumous Harm and Bioethics. His Op-Eds have appeared in many publications ranging from USA Today to the Los Angeles Times, as well as Forbes.com. He has also been quoted in The New York Times and is a contributor to NPR.

Seminar 13: Hard Truths: Supporting Social and Emotional Learning through Children’s Literature – Anne Peel, October 14 & 21 2022

Educational professionals are deeply concerned about the effects that the pandemic has had not only on academic skills, but also on students’ mental health and social development. Social and emotional learning (SEL) programs and supports have become an essential component of school efforts to care for the needs of young people. In this seminar, we will dive into the history of didactic storytelling for children and consider the recent research around pedagogical SEL and bibliotherapy approaches. We will also examine the consequences for youth when storytelling gets politicized and even weaponized. The majority of the seminar will be spent looking at challenging picture books, chapter books and graphic novels that help students build greater empathy and problem-solving skills. The primary focus of the first session will be studying picture book collections that can be used at the elementary or middle level. During our second session we will narrow our focus to consider a multidisciplinary middle grade humanities unit on immigrant, refugee, and displaced persons’ experiences.

Seminar Leader: Anne Peel, EdD
Anne is an Associate Professor of Literacy Education in the Special Education, Language & Literacy Department and the coordinator of the Secondary Special Education Program. She teaches a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses that focus on the foundations of reading instruction and assessment, disciplinary literacy in secondary schools, writing instruction in inclusive classrooms, and children’s literature. As a former high school English teacher, she continues to maintain collaborations with multiple districts across New Jersey, providing professional development support in literacy instruction. Her scholarship has been published in English Journal, Journal of Language and Literacy Education, Literacy, and The Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy among others; she has presented her research at numerous national and international conferences.

Seminar 14: The Witches of Salem 1692 – Michelle Tartar, October 18 & 25, 2022

This seminar will focus on the most notorious witch hunt of America: Salem 1692. Looking at a plethora of archival and literary sources—ranging from pamphlets of “Wonders” and “Strange Occurrences,” sermons and court trial records, accusations and confessions, and many perplexing, fascinating manuscript diaries and letters—we will explore the multiple meanings of witchcraft in this early American village. Our class will delve into the primary texts preserved from this cultural phenomenon, and then review the ever-growing interdisciplinary scholarship that theorizes and illuminates this colonial community’s hysteria, rooted in its own beliefs about gender, sexuality, race and class. 

Seminar Leader: Michele Lise Tarter, PhD
Michele Lise Tarter received her B.A. from Roanoke College and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Colorado/Boulder. She teaches courses on Early American Literature, The Witch in Literature, Literature of the Prison, and Women’s Autobiographies, Diaries, and Letters. She has established a memoir-writing program in New Jersey’s only maximum-security prison for women, working with TCNJ students in co-teaching aninmates’ writing workshop behind bars. For the past 16 consecutive years, Dr. Tarter has led study-abroad courses in England and Europe, taking students to numerous “Literary Landscapes” to bring literature to life.  Professor Tarter’s research interests include transatlantic Quaker women’s prophesying and writing, the body and cultural studies in early American literature, and women’s prison literature.

Seminar 15: Psychology of Happiness – June Kim, November 3 & 17, 2022

Is happiness a box of chocolates?  Would you really be happy if only you could earn a little more money?   Lose a little weight?  In this course, we will review the scientific evidence regarding the antecedents and consequences of happiness.  We will also engage in the scientific study of human strengths and flourishing and closely examine the latest research on the science of happiness and positive psychology, including topics such as flow states, self-determination, goal achievement, and affect balance.  

Participants in this seminar should be conversant with research methodologies used in social sciences.  During the first session, we will begin our learning about the predictors and consequences of happiness.  Participants will be encouraged to choose a topic for experiential self-investigation (e.g., positive thinking, managing stress, practicing gratitude, etc.).  The second session will include in-depth consideration of the research evidence on the participant-chosen topics and experiential learning.  

Seminar Leader: June Kim, PhD
June Kim is a professor of psychology at The College of New Jersey, receiving her Ph.D. in Psychology at  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has published scholarly articles on happiness and positive psychology and is the editor of a  scholarly book on religion and happiness across cultures.  She also teaches courses on psychology of emotion, prejudice, happiness, as well as psychological research methods.

Seminar 16: The Meaning of Life – Pierre Le Morvan. November 7 & 14, 2022

Do our lives have a meaning or purpose? Or are they merely meaningless or purposeless? If our lives do have a meaning, what is it and what is its source? If they do not, then why not? These are among the oldest and most profound questions humans have wrestled with for over 3000 years, questions we will explore in this seminar.

In doing so, we will critically examine seven philosophically and religiously important approaches to answering these questions: Nihilism (our lives have no meaning), Buddhism (the meaning of our lives is to seek the extinction of the self), Hinduism (the meaning of our lives is to realize our oneness with the source of all being), Epicureanism (the meaning of lives is to seek the highest forms of pleasure in this world), Stoicism (the meaning of life is to seek peace of mind) Existentialism (we create ourselves the meanings of our lives), and a Judeo-Christian perspective (the meaning of our lives is to love our Creator and to love our neighbors as ourselves).The seminar will also discuss ways of motivating students to engage with these issue and a number of learning activities related to meaning exploration.

Seminar Leader: Pierre Le Morvan, PhD
Pierre is Professor of Philosophy and Coordinator of Religious Studies in the Department of Philosophy, Religion and Classical Studies at TCNJ. He has taught epistemology, philosophy of religion, philosophy of science, aesthetics, and ethics, and has published articles on such topics as the problem of suffering, the nature of knowledge, the nature of truth, the nature of ignorance, the nature of perception, and how to distinguish healthy from unhealthy skepticism.

Seminar 17: Teaching Science Through Issues – Christopher Murphy, December 9 & 16, 2022

Science plays a critical role in society, providing us with the knowledge we need to understand the universe and to better our lives.  All persons, not just practicing scientists, need a great science education, and this education must provide students with the ability to use science in their everyday lives.  This seminar will help teacher’s structure science courses around current issues of importance to students and society to simultaneously increase student interest and meet science curricular standards. Participants will apply the issues approach to their own courses and leave the seminar with a module that they can take back to their classrooms.

Seminar Leader: Christopher Murphy, PhD
Christopher Murphy is the Associate Provost for Curriculum and Liberal Learning and a Professor of Biology at TCNJ.  He taught his first class of non-majors biology 28 years ago as a post-doctoral associate, and since then, over 95% of his teaching has been with this population.  For much of this time, he has used an issues-based approach to help non-majors become interested in science and develop as educated citizens capable of using reliable scientific information to make reasoned decisions.  He conducts research in both biology and college education.

Seminar 18: Learning by Doing: Empowering Students and Communities through Experiential Education He Len Chung – January 3 & 10, 2023

Experiential education, a “learning by doing” approach, relies on experience as the source material and thoughtful reflection to facilitate learning. Multiple examples – internships, service learning, community-engaged research – are considered “high-impact practices” (HIPs), as they are linked to significant educational benefits (e.g., students more engaged in their learning and equipped to face the demands of a 21st Century global society). These findings are especially true for those from demographic groups historically underserved by colleges and universities.
A growing number of K-12 and higher education institutions are making commitments to experiential education in their curricula and strategic plans. This interactive workshop will address strategies to support these commitments, with a particular focus on guidelines outlined by the National Society for Experiential Education (NSEE) and other organizations. Workshop topics will highlight fundamentals of experiential education (e.g., definitions and models of engagement), research on learning (e.g., learning and the brain), and implementation strategies to create high-quality equitable learning and engagement (e.g., diversity and inclusion in experiential education). We will review examples of experiential learning from different education settings – middle school, high school, college classrooms – and workshop participants will have opportunities to apply workshop content to learning in their own settings.

Seminar Leader: He Len Chung, PhD
He Len is a Professor of Psychology and Director of the REACH (Research on Engagement, Adjustment, and Community Health) Lab at TCNJ. Her teaching and research target psychological health and have been recognized by the National Institute of Mental Health and American Psychological Association. She earned her PhD in Clinical Psychology and is committed to advancing knowledge on risk and resilience, trauma informed and healing-centered approaches, community-engaged learning, and the power of partnerships to promote well-being, particularly in low-resource communities.
Alice Bateman has been a middle school educator for over 20 years. She works at the William Penn Charter School, an independent Quaker school in Philadelphia. In addition to teaching social studies to middle school students, she leads training workshops for educators on topics around learning and the brain. She has a Masters degree from Temple University where she focused her studies on educational neuroscience and its applications for classroom teachers. She works to infuse outdoor and experiential education philosophies into her classes.

Seminar 19: Understanding Recessions – Michele Naples January 11 & 18, 2023

The current macroeconomy poses a challenge for our understanding of how the economy works as well as for appropriate policy interventions. In August 2019, a “liquidity crunch” signaled the New York Fed that a recession was likely within the ensuing 1-2 years, perhaps within sight of our seminar.

This seminar will review basic macroeconomic ideas on what determines GDP, particularly the effects of government expenditure and tax policy (i.e., Fiscal Policy), and Federal Reserve Monetary Policy. We will also review macro principles of how the Fed and banks create and contract the money supply. We will use data series available from the St. Louis Federal Reserve Board to assess where the US economy was a year ago, how things have changed over the last year, and where it seems to be headed now. And we will explore the limitations and constraints on Federal-Reserve and government fiscal policies in our low-interest rate high-deficit current context.

Participants will learn how to shape data supplied by the St. Louis Fed to create user-friendly, easy-to-interpret graphs of business-cycle fluctuations. They will also learn how to download the data into Excel files to share with students, or to teach students how to access directly for their own projects on the state of the US or NJ macroeconomy.

Seminar Leader: Michele Naples, PhD.
Michele Naples is a professor of Economics in the School of Business at  TCNJ. Michele received her PhD in Economics at University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She regularly teaches introductory economics courses, senior thesis, and independent studies. Dr. Naples’ scholarship has been published in a variety of scholarly journals such as Journal of Economic Education, Journal of Information Systems Education and the American Journal of Economics and Sociology.

Seminar 20: “’Tis a word too great for any mouth”: Shakespeare’s Language – Felicia Steele, February 1 & 8, 2023

Shakespeare has been dead for 406 years, but he’s still one of the most frequently taught authors in American high schools. Any teacher asked “Why still teach Shakespeare?” will have a number of ready answers.  Shakespeare’s plays continue to be cultural capital referred to at every turn, from Faulkner’s Sound and the Fury to The Lion King. Shakespeare’s plays illuminate the tragedies and joys of the human condition. Shakespeare’s stories are beautiful.

But few of us ever answer, “Shakespeare teaches us all something important about the English language.” Even fewer of our students will answer, “I understand every word Shakespeare writes.” For many of our students, Shakespeare’s language is an impediment rather than a joy. Lessons about Shakespeare’s poetry and plays often side-step his language, instead inviting students to reframe the action of the plays in contemporary settings with contemporary dialogue. In effect, many of us teach students to do what Shakespeare did to his own sources: to recast the stories in our own times without reference to the original language of the texts. Such lessons teach students important tools in translation or provide opportunities for performance, but they rarely improve students’ long-term comprehension of Shakespeare’s language.

This seminar will focus on Shakespeare’s language, using Love’s Labour’s Lost, as the point of departure. We will also discuss sections of Macbeth, Midsummer Night’s Dream and Hamlet. Participants will learn to use the lexical and linguistic tools necessary to discuss Shakespeare’s language and learn how to develop lessons to bring those resources into the classroom to improve student reading comprehension

Seminar Leader: Felicia Jean Steele, PhD
Felicia Steele, Ph.D. is an associate professor in the English department at The College of New Jersey.  She teaches courses in introductory linguistics and the global history of the English language, as well as courses in early literatures and medievalism in British literature. Professor Steele’s main research is in historical linguistics, specifically auxiliary verb change over the history of the English language. She has also published essays in historical phonology and the uses of linguistic analysis in discussions of literary influence and the influence of Tolkien on Seamus Heaney. She is currently writing a book about the History of the English Language.

Seminar 21: The Representation of Women in Ancient Greek Art – Lee Ann Riccardi, March 7 & 14, 2023

Women have been greatly underrepresented in the literary and historical studies of ancient Greece, but there is an abundance of evidence about their lives available in the art historical and archaeological record. This course will help to illuminate the lives of Greek women by using a comparative and interdisciplinary approach that includes the evidence from art and architecture as well as literature. We will examine not only what women actually did and did not do in ancient Greece, but also how they were perceived by their male contemporaries and what value to society they were believed to have. By studying how women were represented in vase-painting, sculpture, and other arts and examining the arrangement of the houses where they lived, we will explore the complexities and ambiguities of women’s lives in ancient Greece and help to create a fuller, more rounded, and more accurate picture of women’s lives in ancient Greece than we get when we only study the literature. Key issues/questions to be explored:

• How were women represented in the visual and material cultures of ancient Greece?
• What messages about women were the images meant to express?
• How does the way a woman is represented change with age, status, identity, geography?
• What is the point of studying women in ancient Greece? Why does their history matter to us today?

Seminar Leader: Lee Ann Riccardi, PhD
Lee Ann Riccardi is a Professor of Art History and Classical Studies. Her main area of research focuses on portraiture, with a special emphasis on sculptural and coin portraits produced in the Greek world under the Romans, and she has written several articles on various aspects of these topics. She has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a year as a Fulbright scholar in Greece, and regularly leads study abroad trips to Greece and Rome.

Seminar 22: Navigating the New Reading Wars: Implications for teacher knowledge, instruction and assessment in lower elementary classrooms – Helene Anthony, April 17 & 24, 2023

This seminar will explore both classic and current research in reading in an attempt to lay the reading wars to rest, and permit teachers to move forward with sound, research-aligned classroom practice. Topics will include models of reading, phonology, sound-symbol associations and syllable types, vocabulary, morphology, syntax and comprehension. Reflections and insights from a group of local K-2 teachers who spent a year examining their literacy instruction will provide an important lens for discussion. Participants will leave the seminar with practical strategies for incorporating research findings into their own teaching.

Seminar Leader: Helene Anthony, PhD
Helene is an assistant professor in the Department of Special Education, Language and Literacy. She received her MA in Curriculum Studies from the University of MA, and her PhD in Educational Psychology from Michigan State University. She is a passionate about literacy education, and recently presented a paper on preparing preservice teachers to close opportunity gaps through evidence-based reading instruction in urban classrooms. Dr. Anthony is currently part of a TCNJ professional development partnership with the Trenton Public Schools.

Seminar 23: Lessons Learned from Pandemics – Rita King, April 19 & 26, 2023

Throughout history, humans have encountered countless infectious diseases. Some of these have become legendary, owing to their lethality or their insidious spread. We will examine the societal impact of history’s most significant Pandemics: Bubonic Plague, Spanish Flu, and COVID-19.  We will explore the effects of each disease on two levels: the biological (microbiology, pharmacology, and immunology) and the societal (epidemiology and sociology).  The biology of each disease will be explained. We will become familiar with the state of global public health over time. We will see how art, music, and literature have been influenced by diseases. The ethics of infectious disease monitoring and control will be discussed, including quarantines, mandatory health department notification, use of vaccines and experimental drugs.

The many positive outcomes of pandemics are teaching moments across the ages and can be incorporated into interdisciplinary curricula. This seminar will answer these questions:

• How do the impacts of Bubonic Plague, Spanish Flu, and COVID-19 compare?
• Were we ready for COVID-19?
• Will we be ready for the next pandemic? 
• How should we prepare?

Seminar Leader: Rita M. King, PhD

Rita has taught in the TCNJ Biology Department for over 25 years and was the Coordinator in the Tutoring Center for 11 years. Prior to her teaching career Rita did cancer research at Sloan-Kettering Cancer Institute in New York. She has taught many courses to biology and nursing majors, as well as non-majors. She has taught The History of Disease and Principles of Microbiology. Her specialty is emerging and reemerging infectious diseases. ” It is easy to find the negative and disastrous outcomes of disease but I enjoy focusing on the positive outcomes and changes to society, economy, art, literature, and music. The resilience of our species never ceases to amaze me.”

Seminar 24: “Life sentences: Teaching the Literature of the Prison” – Michelle Tarter, April 21 & 28, 2023

America has become known as the “Incarceration Nation,” imprisoning more people than any other country in the world. Interdisciplinary in nature, this seminar will explore literature by and about prisoners, and address such themes as confinement, slavery and oppression, and most importantly, the power of the written word. We will consider many disciplines as we approach these materials: gender, criminology, psychology, sociology, and, most notably, literary analysis. Together, we will turn to this groundbreaking, provocative material written by one of the most neglected, silenced, but all-too-critical sectors of our population– the incarcerate

Seminar Leader: Michele Lise Tarter, PhD
Michele is a professor of English at TCNJ. She has published and presented extensively on early American women’s writing as well as on 17th– and 18th-century transatlantic Quaker literature. She is co-editor of New Critical Studies on Early Quaker Women, 1650- 1800 (Oxford UP, 2018), Buried Lives: Incarcerated in Early America (University of Georgia Press, 2012) and “A Centre of Wonders “: The Body in Early America (Cornell UP, 2001). Her most recent research project is based on her volunteer work teaching a memoir-writing class to prisoners in the  maximum-security wing of the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women in New Jersey.

Seminar 25: Incorporating Virtual Reality (VR) in the Classroom – Yifeng Hu, May 8 & 15, 2023

It is imperative to upskill students for the 21st century high demand careers in a diverse world and increase their culturally competent compassion as teachers prepare them to be global citizens. To this end, this seminar will introduce how immersive technology such as Virtual Reality (VR) can be used in teaching and learning and showcase recent student engagement with VR and projects designed to have social/cultural/health impact. Built in this seminar are guided hands-on VR sessions where participants will have the opportunity to interact with and critique a range of impactful programs. Participants will learn how VR is revolutionizing teaching and learning, and explore ideas on leveraging it to innovate within their own field. Further training and funding opportunities will be provided.

Seminar Leader: Yifeng Hu, PhD
Hu is an associate professor of Communication Studies at TCNJ. Her research and teaching are transdisciplinary, which include emerging communication technology, health communication, and intercultural/racial communication. She has led her students to research and design virtual reality-based projects that have the potential to make social changes. Hu is eager to share her expertise and passion in emerging communication technology and its social impact, and hopes to excite her peers with a vision of teaching and learning for the 21st century.

Seminar 26:  Social Justice, Music, Education – October 26 and November 2, 2021

It is imperative to increase K-12 students’ intercultural awareness and enhance their intercultural communication competence in a diverse world. What better way to achieve this goal than immersing oneself in a culture that is different from his/her own? This workshop will creatively teach participants how to use and apply the ethnographic approach to get a deep understanding of a unique culture in a relatively short period of time. The first day will focus on learning ethnographic methods through lectures, case studies, practices, and discussions. Participants will take home a small-scale ethnographic assignment to complete. When they come back on the second day, they will be guided to synthesize field notes, identify cultural patterns, draw conclusions, and share findings through presentations. These exercises, though a bit time and effort consuming will be rewarding, fulfilling, and enlightening. In addition to opening up to new cultures and improving intercultural communication skills, participants may see their own cultures in a new light. Participants taking this course should have an open-mind, a commitment to required assignments, and be willing to step out of their comfort zones. The pedagogy can be applied to advanced elementary students as well as middle and high schoolers.

Seminar Leader: Colleen Sears, EdD
Colleen Sears is an associate professor of music and the coordinator of music education. She also leads curriculum development and interdisciplinary programming for the Institute for Social Justice in the Arts at TCNJ. Sears spent 10 years as a music educator in New Jersey’s public schools and enjoys exploring her research interests through innovative collaborations with K–12 music educators and students. Her current projects engage students and educators with issues of social justice through music performance and interdisciplinary aesthetic experiences. Sears frequently guest lectures, coordinates professional development sessions for educators, and presents her work at regional and national conferences.

Seminar 27:  Makerspaces – November 3 and November 10, 2021

A recent infographic from the Educational Advisory Board describes the importance and role of a makerspace to “allow students to convert their ideas into physical objects, supporting hands-on learning and cross-discipline collaboration.” In this hands-on workshop, you will explore ways to incorporate digital fabrication and design thinking into your curriculum. Specifically, you will learn how to use laser cutters, 3D printers, CNC machines and other digital fabrication tools and will have ample workshop time to use these tools to build a project of your choice.

Seminar Leader: John Kuiphoff
John Kuiphoff is an Associate Professor in the Department of Interactive Multimedia at TCNJ. His research interests include digital fabrication, creative coding and design. He is a graduate of the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University. John spends a lot of his time making products for clients (and for fun) in his fabrication studio. 

Seminar 28: Teaching for Critical Thinking through Activities & Games – Dec. 3 & 10, 2021

We live in an era of “fake news” and increasing ideological division.  It is now common for people to rush to judge the actions of actions of strangers based on posts on social media, to see political discussion in terms of “us” and “them,” and to reduce complex social and political issues to one-sentence memes. Since the majority of people in America now get their news from social media — sources that are poorly designed for conveying information or presenting issues fairly — it is thus more critical than ever for people to know how to critically assess claims that are presented to them.

Unfortunately, the structure of news delivery today provides people with little incentive for critically engaging with the information that is presented to them, with the increasingly short news cycles pressing forward to the next outrage almost as soon as the most recent one has been introduced. In this seminar we will explore some practical techniques that could be used to assess both empirical claims (e.g., “The American middle class is shrinking”) and prescriptive claims (e.g., “We should raise tariffs on imported goods to protect the middle class”). These techniques will range from outlining and identifying informal fallacies that are often used to persuade people, to learning how to verify empirical claims by working back to the sources from which they are claimed to have originated.

Engaging in such critical thinking takes time and effort — and so does exploring how to engage in this. We’ll also explore ways to motivate students (and others) to use critical thinking techniques when they are faced with either empirical or prescriptive claims. To this end we’ll explore some methods that have proved successful in the past in motivating students to engage critically with material presented to them on social media. These will include activities and games, including “The Myth Busting Scavenger Hunt,” “Would This Be True If Your Mother Wrote It?” and “Why Believe THAT?”

Seminar Leader: James Stacey Taylor, PhD
James Stacey Taylor is a professor of philosophy at TCNJ. He is frequently invited to lecture both nationally and internationally on how to improve classroom teaching; he is also frequently invited by industry groups and policy think tanks to speak on critical-thinking pitfalls that should be avoided in making public policy. An Anglo-Scot, he holds an MA and MLitt degree from St. Andrews University, Scotland, and an MA and a PhD from Bowling Green State University, Ohio. He is the editor of Personal Autonomy: New Essays and The Ethics and Metaphysics of Death, and the author of Stakes and Kidneys, Practical Autonomy and Bioethics, and Death, Posthumous Harm and Bioethics. His Op-Eds have appeared in many publications ranging from USA Today to the Los Angeles Times, as well as Forbes.com. He has also been quoted in The New York Times and is a contributor to NPR.

Seminar 29: Understanding Recessions – January 24 and 31, 2022

The current macroeconomic poses a challenge for our understanding of how the economy works as well as for appropriate policy interventions. In August 2019, a “liquidity crunch” signaled the New York Fed that a recession was likely within the ensuing 1-2 years, perhaps within sight of our seminar. This course will review basic macroeconomic ideas on what determines GDP, particularly the effects of government expenditure and tax policy (i.e., Fiscal Policy), and Federal Reserve Monetary Policy. We will also review macro principles of how the Fed and banks create and contract the money supply. We will use data series available from the St. Louis Federal Reserve Board to assess where the US economy was a year ago, how things have changed over the last year, and where it seems to be headed now. And we will explore the limitations and constraints on Federal-Reserve and government fiscal policies in our low-interest rate high-deficit current context. Participants will learn how to shape data supplied by the St. Louis Fed to create user-friendly, easy-to-interpret graphs of business-cycle fluctuations. They will also learn how to download the data into Excel files to share with students, or to teach students how to access directly for their own projects on the state of the US or NJ macroeconomy.

Seminar Leader: Michele I. Naples, PhD
Michele Naples is Professor of Economics in the School of Business at TCNJ. Her research interests include financialization and income inequality, and the costs and benefits of decriminalizing drug use. She has published on strategic competition and its implications for wages, profits and employment over the business cycle, the theory of the profit rate, cost and price theory, unions, labor-management conflict and productivity growth, and economics pedagogy, including for the visually-impaired.

Seminar 30:  Teaching Science Through Issues – March 4 and 11, 2022

Science plays a critical role in society, providing us with the knowledge we need to understand the universe and to better our lives.  All persons, not just practicing scientists, need a great science education, and this education must provide students with the ability to use science in their everyday lives.  This seminar will help teacher’s structure science courses around current issues of importance to students and society to simultaneously increase student interest and meet science curricular standards. Participants will apply the issues approach to their own courses and leave the seminar with a module that they can take back to their classrooms.

Seminar Leader: Christopher Murphy, PhD
Christopher Murphy is the Associate Provost for Curriculum and Liberal Learning and a Professor of Biology at TCNJ.  He taught his first class of non-majors biology 28 years ago as a post-doctoral associate, and since then, over 95% of his teaching has been with this population.  For much of this time, he has used an issues-based approach to help non-majors become interested in science and develop as educated citizens capable of using reliable scientific information to make reasoned decisions.  He conducts research in both biology and college education.

Seminar 31: The Meaning of Life – March 21 and 28, 2022

Do our lives have a meaning or purpose? Or are they merely meaningless or purposeless? If our lives do have a meaning, what is it and what is its source? If they do not, then why not? These are among the oldest and most profound questions humans have wrestled with for over 3000 years, questions we will explore in this seminar.
In doing so, we will critically examine seven philosophically and religiously important approaches to answering these questions: Nihilism (our lives have no meaning), Buddhism (the meaning of our lives is to seek the extinction of the self), Hinduism (the meaning of our lives is to realize our oneness with the source of all being), Epicureanism (the meaning of lives is to seek the highest forms of pleasure in this world), Stoicism (the meaning of life is to seek peace of mind) Existentialism (we create ourselves the meanings of our lives), and a Judeo-Christian perspective (the meaning of our lives is to love our Creator and to love our neighbors as ourselves).The seminar will also discuss ways of motivating students to engage with these issue and a number of learning activities related to meaning exploration.

Seminar Leader: Pierre Le Morvan, PhD
Pierre is Professor of Philosophy and Coordinator of Religious Studies in the Department of Philosophy, Religion and Classical Studies at TCNJ. He has taught epistemology, philosophy of religion, philosophy of science, aesthetics, and ethics, and has published articles on such topics as the problem of suffering, the nature of knowledge, the nature of truth, the nature of ignorance, the nature of perception, and how to distinguish healthy from unhealthy skepticism.

Seminar 32: “Life sentences: Teaching the Literature of the Prison” – April 4 and 11, 2022

America has become known as the “Incarceration Nation,” imprisoning more people than any other country in the world. Interdisciplinary in nature, this seminar will explore literature by and about prisoners, and address such themes as confinement, slavery and oppression, and most importantly, the power of the written word. We will consider many disciplines as we approach these materials: gender, criminology, psychology, sociology, and, most notably, literary analysis. Together, we will turn to this groundbreaking, provocative material written by one of the most neglected, silenced, but all-too-critical sectors of our population– the incarcerate.

Seminar Leader: Michele Lise Tarter, PhD
Michele is a professor of English at TCNJ. She has published and presented extensively on early American women’s writing as well as on 17th– and 18th-century transatlantic Quaker literature. She is co-editor of New Critical Studies on Early Quaker Women, 1650- 1800 (Oxford UP, 2018), Buried Lives: Incarcerated in Early America (University of Georgia Press, 2012) and “A Centre of Wonders “: The Body in Early America (Cornell UP, 2001). Her most recent research project is based on her volunteer work teaching a memoir-writing class to prisoners in the  maximum-security wing of the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women in New Jersey.

Seminar 33: Teaching LGBTQIA* Literature in Secondary School – April 12 and 19, 2022

New Jersey public schools are now legally responsible for providing a LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum and teaching middle and high school students about the political, economic, and social contributions of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. As a result, New Jersey teachers have a unique opportunity to explore gender and sexuality not only in history classes, but across the curriculum. This seminar will examine how teachers might invest secondary English classrooms with LGBTQ literature as well as methods for teaching it. Seminar participants will read two middle grade novels with LGBTQ content, Ashley Herring Blake’s Ivy Aberdeen’s Letter to the World and Kacen Callender’s King and the Dragonflies, as well as excerpts from other texts (fiction and nonfiction) written for children and teens. Using seminal concepts from gender and queer theory as close-reading lenses, participants will investigate how theory is experienced – as embodied, lived, and real – in the lives of the characters in these books. Participants will also explore how to make these concepts accessible to secondary students by examining models of curriculum with LGBTQ content currently in place in local schools. Approaches relevant to whole class novel, book club, or reading/writing workshop models of instruction will be discussed.

Seminar Leader: Emily S. Meixner, PhD.
Emily S. Meixner is an associate professor of English and the coordinator of the secondary English education program at TCNJ. Dr. Meixner regularly teaches undergraduate courses on English Language Arts reading and writing pedagogy as well as graduate and undergraduate courses on children’s and young adult literature. Dr. Meixner’s scholarship has been published in a variety of scholarly journals including Radical Teacher, English Leadership Quarterly, The Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, and Multicultural Perspectives. Her most recent article with co-author Rachel Scupp, “Building Community, Empathy, and Engagement through LGBTQ Book Clubs” is featured in the December 2019 volume of Voices from the Middle.

Seminar 34:  On Line Lives: Autobiography & Social Media – April 19 and 26, 2022

The course focuses on cutting-edge theoretical approaches to the study of digital life writing. Is social media revolutionizing the way people tell the stories of their lives? No longer a novelty, digital “automedia” have become the standard of representing public personhood. This seminar explores a range of autobiographical forms as they present themselves through interactive on-line platforms. Participants become familiar with discourses and debates about digital life writing forms in the 21st century as an old genre learns new tricks. Discussions highlight questions of creative license and freedom of expression, as well as ethics and measures of security: Are online role-playing games and other seemingly ephemeral spaces for constructing online profiles as “real” as off-line spaces of lived identity? How do platforms that facilitate sharing life narratives online open doors to the construction of fake lives used for “catfishing” and other on-line deceptions?

Seminar Leader: Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle, PhD
Dr. Ortiz-Vilarelle is Professor of English at TCNJ. She specializes in twentieth century Inter-American literature and autobiographical studies. She has published numerous articles on life writing practice and theory and is currently completing a book on the functional life writing of everyday life. Her book, titled Overwriting the Dictator: Americanas, Autocracy and Autobiographical Innovation, is forthcoming this year at Routledge Press.  

Seminar 35: Cli Fi: Climate Fiction – May 2 and 9, 2022

What might cli-fi tell us about environmental change and whether we can find hope for the future? As Katy Waldman wrote in a 2018 issue of The New Yorker, cli-fi “offers ways of thinking about something we desperately do not want to think about: the incipient death of the planet.” In this seminar we will discuss one of the latest trends in literature, focusing in the first session on Paolo Bacigalupi’s 2010 young adult novel Ship Breaker (a winner of the Michael L. Printz Award), for a look at a drowned world, and in the second session on Nnedi Okorafor’s 2010 Who Fears Death (optioned as an HBO series with George R. R. Martin as executive producer) for a look at a parched world. As does much dystopian literature, both novels offer hope for the future.

Seminar Leader: Jean E. Graham, PhD
Dr. Graham is professor of English and associate chair of the Department of English. Her research interests are varied, with publications on Star Trek and the Narnian Chronicles as well as on John Milton and John Donne. She is currently working on a series of articles interpreting literature from an ecocritical perspective. She has taught more than 30 different courses at TCNJ, including a senior seminar and a graduate seminar in dystopian literature.

Seminar 36: Stepping Out of My Comfort Zone: Raising Cultural Awareness through Mini Ethnography  – May 5 & May 12, 2022

It is imperative to increase K-12 students’ intercultural awareness and enhance their intercultural communication competence in a diverse world. What better way to achieve this goal than immersing oneself in a culture that is different from his/her own? This workshop will creatively teach participants how to use and apply the ethnographic approach to get a deep understanding of a unique culture in a relatively short period of time. The first day will focus on learning ethnographic methods through lectures, case studies, practices, and discussions. Participants will take home a small-scale ethnographic assignment to complete. When they come back on the second day, they will be guided to synthesize field notes, identify cultural patterns, draw conclusions, and share findings through presentations. These exercises, though a bit time and effort consuming will be rewarding, fulfilling, and enlightening. In addition to opening up to new cultures and improving intercultural communication skills, participants may see their own cultures in a newanew light. Participants taking this course should have an open-mind, a commitment to required assignments, and be willing to step out of their comfort zones. The pedagogy can be applied to advanced elementary students as well as middle and high school schoolers.

Seminar Leader: Yifeng Hu, PhD
Yifeng is the Chair and Associate Professor of Communication Studies at TCNJ. One of her favorite courses is Intercultural Communication. Hu believes that people can always achieve greater intercultural communication competence in a complex social world. In her class, Hu’s students conduct ethnographic studies on various cultures from a communication perspective. One project the class regularly engages in is to create intercultural communication guides and workshops for community partners, who have given great acclaim to this initiative.

Seminar 37: Inquiry Based Learning in the Mathematics Classroom – May 5 & 12, 2022

Inquiry Based Learning, or IBL for short, is a broad range of empirically validated teaching methods which emphasize (a)deeply engaging students and (b) providing students with opportunities to authentically learn by collaborating with their peers. Students in an IBL mathematics class engage with a sequence of problems that are rich and support inquiry to the heart of big mathematical ideas. The solutions are discussed in class, with the students leading both the presentations and the questioning. The process is also deeply engaging for the teacher as she or he has a chance to learn about how students actually learn mathematics.

According to the NCTM Equity principle: Excellence in mathematics education requires equity — high expectations and strong support for all students. Students can do more than memorize, mimic, perform algorithms, and apply computational skills, if we ask them to.  In this workshop you will get a taste of the IBL experience both as a student and as a teacher as we share IBL resources, problem sets, stories, and evidence for the methods’ effectiveness. We also believe, and recent advances in Neurology have proved, that we can playfully develop mathematical ability using games. We will share some research on games and play games that foster reasoning skills, problem solving skills and other cognitive abilities connected with mathematical thinking.

Seminar Leader: Judit Karlos, PhD
Judit is an assistant professor of mathematics. She received her BA in mathematics and MS in philosophy from Eötvös University in Budapest, followed by a PhD in mathematics with a focus on Real Analysis. Her research interests as a teacher are related to teaching and learning mathematics using the Inquiry Based Learning method. Most recently, she was a panelist on IBL at Mathfest in 2019 and she presented a paper on using IBL in the Real Analysis classroom at the National IBL Conference in Denver. 

Seminar 38: Ethics and the Environment – October 21 & 28, 2024

Do we have ethical obligations and responsibilities concerning the environment? If so, what are they? If not, why not? Do we also have ethical obligations and responsibilities concerning non-human animals? This seminar explores such important questions, and considers a variety of positions on them. The seminar will also discuss ways of motivating students to engage with these issues and a number of learning activities related to exploring ethical questions.

Seminar Leader: Pierre (first) Le Morvan (last), Ph.D.  is a Professor of Philosophy and Coordinator of Religious Studies in the Department of Philosophy, Religion, and Classical Studies at TCNJ. He has taught courses in epistemology, philosophy of religion, philosophy of science, aesthetics, and ethics. He has has published articles on such topics as the problem of suffering, the nature of knowledge, the nature of truth, the nature of ignorance, the nature of perception, and how to distinguish healthy from unhealthy skepticism.

Seminar 40: The Witches of Salem 1692

October 23 & 30, 2024 – Special Prize for Best Witch Costume – Dress up on October 30 only

This seminar will focus on the most notorious witch hunt of America: Salem 1692. Looking at a plethora of archival and literary sources—ranging from pamphlets of “Wonders” and “Strange Occurrences,” sermons and court trial records, accusations and confessions, and many perplexing, fascinating manuscript diaries and letters—we will explore the multiple meanings of witchcraft in this early American village. Our class will delve into the primary texts preserved from this cultural phenomenon, and then review the ever-growing interdisciplinary scholarship that theorizes and illuminates this colonial community’s hysteria, rooted in its own beliefs about gender, sexuality, race and class.Book Banning, Classroom Challenged Materials, Intellectual Freedom and New Information Literacy State Standard.

Seminar Leader: Michele Lise Tarter, PhD is professor of English at The College of New Jersey. She is also an affiliate faculty member in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Religious Studies, and U.S. Studies programs. Tarter has published and presented extensively on early American women’s writing, as well as on 17th- and 18th-century Quaker literature. She has co-edited three book collections: A Centre of Wonders: The Body in Early America (Cornell University Press, 2001); Buried Lives: Incarcerated in Early America (University of Georgia Press, 2012); and New Critical Studies on Early Quaker Women, 1650–1800 (Oxford University Press, 2018). Her most recent book project is about the memoir-writing program she established in 2001 in New Jersey’s only maximum-security prison for women, the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility..

Seminar 41: Unsettling Autism – November 11 & 18, 2024

Our typical understandings of ‘autism’ are shaped by presumed monolithic biomedical narratives of disability. The biomedical narrative approaches autism as a disability that is rooted in an organic physiological cause. More recently, a growing body of both counternarratives and counterdiscourses on autism question the traditional deficit-based views of autism and expand the boundaries of our current understandings. This literature on autism challenges our taken for granted ‘universal’ understandings of autism and introduces us to the complexities underlying our constructions of ‘autism.’ It draws attention to the importance of embracing capacity-based affirming perspectives and the role of context in supporting students with autism. The purpose of this seminar is to engage with the counternarratives and counterdiscourses on autism. On the first day, we will listen to the voices of autistic self-advocates and scholars and learn from their perspectives and experiences. We will also learn from counterdiscourses on autism emerging from critical autism studies and decolonial theory. We will discuss how these conversations challenge our current approaches and interventions for children with autism. On the second day, we will share and discuss ways to integrate neurodiversity-affirming perspectives and practices into our own classrooms and teaching practice. Throughout this seminar, we will not only engage with and learn about new perspectives on the experience of autism, but we will also unlearn ‘autism’ as we know it.

Seminar Leader: Shri Rao, PhD

Shri Rao is a professor at the Department of Special Education, Language, and Literacy at The College of New Jersey. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses that focus on disability in the media, supporting students with ‘challenging’ behaviors, social and legal foundations of special education, and research in special education. Her research interests include disability studies, inclusive education, perspectives of culturally and linguistically diverse families of children with disabilities, disability and the Global South, and qualitative research. Her most recent study, conducted as a part of a Fulbright grant, focuses on the narratives of autism in India. She has co-edited the book titled South Asia and Disability Studies: Redefining boundaries and extending horizons. She has authored and co-authored articles in The American Journal of Qualitative Research, Disability in the Global South, The Educational Forum, Research and Practice for Persons with Severe Disabilities, International Journal for Inclusive Education, and Disability and Society. Shri has worked as a consultant in collaboration with NJ schools in the areas of inclusive education and behavior.

Seminar 42: Grief as Transformation: Teaching, Learning, and Life After Loss – May 6 & 13, 2025

Grief as Transformation: Teaching, Learning, and Life After Loss How can we connect across differences and explore our shared humanity when faced with the universal experience of navigating life after loss? Like their students, teachers experience trauma and traumatic loss including the deaths of family members, students, friends and colleagues, secondary traumatic stress from their work, cultural grief responses to national tragedies, and existential threats like climate change. Unlike the growing attention on trauma informed pedagogy and student mental health, awareness of the impact of trauma and grief on teachers is lacking. Who checks in on the teachers? Who makes sure they are okay? This session will examine these questions and explore the impact of traumatic loss and grief on teachers. Drawing upon theories of mourning and vulnerability, a variety of art works on loss, and the experiences of participants in this session, we will explore the following questions: How might grieving impact teacher identity, teacher perspectives on education, and the learning environment educators create for and with their students? What does life after loss look like in our teaching? How does power, fear, and vulnerability impact teacher identity and expressions of grief? While our answers to these questions are uniquely intimate and personal, we can draw strength from learning how others preserve, both individually and collectively. This session seeks to explore the theme of life after loss in ways that allow for individual stories to be heard and for attendees to engage in creative practices that foster connection and healing.

Seminar Leader: Colleen Sears, Ph.D.
Dr. Colleen Sears is Professor and Chair of the TCNJ Department of Music. She also leads curriculum development and interdisciplinary programming for the The Artivism Project at TCNJ. Dr. Sears spent ten years as a music educator in New Jersey’s public schools and enjoys exploring her research interests through innovative collaborations with K-12 music educators and students. Her current projects engage students and educators with issues of social and environmental justice through music performance and interdisciplinary aesthetic experiences. Dr. Sears frequently presents work at regional and national conferences, guest lectures, and coordinates professional development sessions for educators.

Seminar 43: Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design – December 6 & 13, 2024

It has never been easier in human history for writers to communicate with images. The ease with which we can capture a picture of a blooming flower might fool us into thinking that the skill of reading an image is as innate and intuitive as learning language. The complexity of design that goes into crafting a picture book illustration or poster layout, however, is as intricate and nuanced as any sentence. Learning to understand the grammar of visual design gives readers new tools with which to construct meaning. The presenter will introduce a toolkit for analyzing picture books, visual histories, graphic novels and more. We will also consider how studying an image can help students design their own complex visual text and discuss the transfer of skills across written and visual composition tasks. Finally, all the participants will be invited to practice some simple visual design tasks that are accessible to everyone. No drawing skills required!

Seminar Leader: Anne Peel, Ph.D.
Anne is an Associate Professor of Literacy Education in the Special Education, Language & Literacy Department and the coordinator of the Secondary Special Education Program. She teaches a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses that focus on the foundations of reading instruction and assessment, disciplinary literacy in secondary schools, writing instruction in inclusive classrooms, and children’s literature. As a former high school English teacher, she continues to maintain collaborations with multiple districts across New Jersey, providing professional development support in literacy instruction. Her scholarship has been published in English Journal, Journal of Language and Literacy Education, Literacy, and The Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy among others; she has presented her research at numerous national and international conferences.

Seminar 44: The Bilingual Advantage: Unlocking Sociocultural and Cognitive Benefits in Education – December 10 & 17, 2024

In an increasingly globalized world, bilingualism is not just a personal asset but a necessity for fostering inclusive and dynamic educational environments. “The Bilingual Advantage: Unlocking Sociocultural and Cognitive Benefits in Education” is a seminar designed for educators, administrators, and policy makers that are interested in the integration bilingual education principles into their curricula and educational strategies. The seminar will explore the benefits of bilingualism, grounded in recent academic research and case studies, highlighting the positive impact on sociocultural understanding, economic opportunities, health, and academic performance. Participants will interact with both past and recent evidence demonstrating that bilingual individuals not only access and appreciate a wider array of cultures but also exhibit improved problem-solving skills, creative thinking, and cognitive flexibility, all of which result from managing two or more languages simultaneously. The seminar will tackle common myths about bilingualism, such as the confusion of language mixing or the delayed acquisition of knowledge compared to monolingual peers, providing insights into the interconnectedness of languages and the brain’s capacity to manage multiple linguistic systems simultaneously. Through interactive sessions, educators will learn strategies to support bilingual learners effectively, emphasizing the importance of heritage languages and the role of dual-language immersion programs in promoting higher academic achievement and linguistic competence. The seminar aims to equip participants with the tools and knowledge to advocate for and implement bilingual education programs, thereby shaping a future where multilingualism is seen as the norm rather than the exception. Join us in exploring how bilingualism can enhance educational outcomes and prepare students for a diverse and interconnected world. This workshop offers a hands-on overview of the latest theories, policies, and initiatives shaping the finest bilingual teaching practices. Ideal for newcomers to the bilingual classroom setting or for those seeking an update on the most current theories.

Seminar Leader: Ivan Andreu Rascon
Ivan s a Spanish adjunct professor at The College of New Jersey and a doctoral candidate at Rutgers University, specializing in Bilingualism and Second Language Acquisition. He also holds a Master’s degree in Second Language Education from the Universidad de Alcalá de Henares and another in Hispanic Studies from Auburn University. He has served as the Assistant Director for language instruction for the Spanish courses at Rutgers University. He has taught a variety of introductory-level language courses as well as higher-level content courses, such as Introduction to Language Study, Spanish for Social Workers, and Spanish Literature from the Golden Age. His research interests include second language acquisition, bilingualism, laboratory phonology, speech perception and production, and visual perception.

Seminar 45: Hidden in Blackness: Understanding Black ethnic heterogeneity within US K-12 student population – January 10 & 17, 2025

For decades, scholars have studied the educational experiences of Black and immigrant students, yet often overlook those who are both Black and immigrants. With the rising number of Black immigrants in the U.S. and their significant role in the education system, our understanding of these groups remains incomplete without recognizing the unique experiences of students who are both racially Black and immigrants. Our 2-day workshop will focus on the experiences, trajectories, and outcomes of Black immigrants across the P–20 education spectrum, highlighting how their racial and ethnic identities and nativity distinctly influence their navigation of the U.S. education system. We aim to illuminate the educational pathways of Black immigrants to foster culturally responsive support for these students, their families, and communities, and to refine our understanding of Blackness and immigrant identity within the U.S. educational context. Given the sociohistorical context of enslavement and the use of racial identity as a tool for societal stratification in the United States, being Black is positioned by U.S. society as subsuming all other social identities. This results in individuals who embody both a Black and immigrant identity becoming hidden in Blackness—meaning that in U.S. society, their Black identity is homogenized into a U.S. construction of Blackness alongside their ethnicity, nationality, and nativity going unacknowledged or used to subjugate other people of Color. In the U.S. education system, Black immigrant students become hidden in Blackness with their ethnicity, nationality, and immigrant background unacknowledged as the Black racial category assumes a singular African American ethnicity. We aim to challenge and expand the common perceptions of the Black student experience by elevating the voices, perspectives, and outcomes of Black immigrant students. This effort will increase scholars’ and educators’ awareness of the diversity within Black and immigrant communities in the U.S. By avoiding the oversimplification of Black immigrant students, we will delve into their demographic diversity—such as parental education levels, nationality, ethnicity, English language proficiency, and citizenship or documentation status—to show how these aspects uniquely influence their educational experiences and outcomes.

Seminar Leader: Adaurennaya “Ada” C. Onyewuenyi
Associate Professor of Psychology

Seminar 46: Impacts of Infectious Disease – the Positives and Negatives – January 14th and 21st

Throughout history, humans have been burdened with countless infectious diseases. Some of these, due to their lethality or their insidious spread, have become legendary. We will examine the societal impact of, and science’s response to, history’s most significant diseases, including COVID-19, plague, influenza, tuberculosis, smallpox, polio, cholera, malaria, syphilis, HIV/AIDS and Ebola. We will explore the effects of each disease on two levels: the biological (microbiology, pharmacology, and immunology) and the societal (epidemiology and sociology). The ethics of infectious disease monitoring and control, including quarantines, mandatory health department notification, and the use of experimental drugs, will be explored. Learn the biology of each disease while also learning its historical framework.

Seminar Leader: Rita King Ph.D.
Ph.D. in Microbiology from St. John’s University. Teaching biology courses at TCNJ for over 30 years – including general biology, environmental science, chemistry, anatomy and physiology, microbiology and the history of disease

Seminar 47: Fostering disability and/or deaf identity development in K-12 settings – February 5 & 12, 2025

Most deaf and/or disabled students are instructed in public schools where they spend at least part of their day in general education classrooms. Schools have made great strides in increasing inclusion for these populations. Nevertheless, there is still much work to do. Deaf and/or disabled students still exist within a largely able-bodied society and schools naturally reflect the values and understandings of the majority culture, which can leave these populations of students in the margins. While educators work to help all students to understand and value diversity among school citizens, there is a need to support deaf and/or disabled students to understand themselves in relation to majority culture and in-group identities. Promoting personal identity development, whatever identity means for individuals, leads to improved self-efficacy, psychosocial and emotional, and often academics. Just as important, defining oneself in relation to their world improves self-determination and intentional crafting of the lives they will lead.

This workshop begins by exploring the meaning of disability and deafhood in the context of United States society. We analyze trajectories of disability and deaf identity development informed by exposure to different types of discourse. Next, we define and unpack archetypical notions of cultural identity (e.g. (D)isabled or (D)eaf) as a starting point for understanding a spectrum of possible personal identities educators are likely to encounter or perhaps foster. These discussions lay a foundation for participant assessment of their own students, classrooms, and schools. We develop a plan for implementation that addresses: a) What does or what could disability and/or deafhood mean for all my students and how I will modify my classroom in respect to students’ individual definitions, b) How I will expose my deaf and/or disabled students to constructive discourse about what it means be a member of these populations, d) How I will create a classroom culture that capitalizes on deaf and/or disabled episteme to support identity development, decision-making, and school-wide cultural shift? After developing plans, we discuss possible obstacles to implantation such as teachers’ limited time, cultural resistance, learned helplessness, and parental support.

Seminar Leader: Steve Singer, Ph.D.
Steve Singer, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Deaf Education at The College of New Jersey, where he has worked since 2016. After completing a master’s degree at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, he was a middle school teacher and then earned a doctorate from Syracuse University in Cultural Foundations of Education and Disability Studies. His scholarship that spans deaf and disability studies is published in numerous national and international journals as well as book chapters. Being deaf and disabled himself informs his work that largely focuses on identity development and lived experience.

Seminar 48: Moving Beyond Foundational Skills in Reading: Untangling the Language Comprehension Strands of the Reading Rope in the Elementary Classroom

February 19 & 26, 2025

Seminar Leader: Helene Anthony, PhD
Helene is an assistant professor in the Department of Special Education, Language and Literacy. She received her MA in Curriculum Studies from the University of MA, and her PhD in Educational Psychology from Michigan State University. She is a passionate about literacy education, and recently presented a paper on preparing preservice teachers to close opportunity gaps through evidence-based reading instruction in urban classrooms. Dr. Anthony is currently part of a TCNJ professional development partnership with two elementary schools in Trenton.

Seminar 49: Teaching for Critical Thinking Through Activities and Games – March 7 & 14, 2025

We live in an era of “fake news” and increasing ideological division. It is now common for people to rush to judge the actions of strangers based on posts on social media, to see political discussion in terms of “us” and “them”, and to reduce complex social and political issues to one-sentence memes. Since the majority of people in America now get their news from social media—sources that are poorly designed for conveying information or presenting issues fairly—it is thus more critical than ever for people to know how to critically assess claims that are presented to them.

Unfortunately, the structure of news delivery today provides people with little incentive for critically engaging with the information that is presented to them, with the increasingly short news cycles pressing forward to the next outrage almost as soon as the most recent one has been introduced. In this seminar we will explore some practical techniques that could be used to assess both empirical claims (e.g., “The American middle class is shrinking”) and prescriptive claims (e.g., “We should raise tariffs on imported goods to protect the middle class”). These techniques will range from outlining and identifying informal fallacies that are often used to persuade people, to learning how to verify empirical claims by working back to the sources from which they are claimed to have originated.

Engaging in such critical thinking takes time and effort—and so as well as exploring how to engage in this we’ll also explore ways to motivate students (and others!) to use critical thinking techniques when they are faced with either empirical or prescriptive claims. To this end we’ll explore some methods that have proved successful in the past in motivating students to engage critically with material presented to them on social media. These will include activities and games, including “The Prisoner’s Dilemma,” “The Trolley Problem,” “The Fishing Game,” “The Myth Busting Scavenger Hunt”, “Would This Be True If Your Mother Wrote It?”, and “Why Believe THAT?”

Seminar Leader: James Stacey Taylor, Ph.D.
James Stacey Taylor is a Professor of Philosophy at TCNJ. He is frequently invited to lecture both nationally and internationally on how to improve classroom teaching; he is also frequently invited by industry groups and policy think tanks to speak on critical-thinking pitfalls that should be avoided in making public policy. An Anglo-Scot, he holds an MA and and M.Litt degrees from St Andrews University, Scotland, and an MA and a Ph.D. from Bowling Green State University, OH. He is the author of five books: Stakes and Kidneys, Practical Autonomy and Bioethics, Death, Posthumous Harm and Bioethics, Bloody Bioethics, and Markets with Limits. His Op-Eds have appeared in many publications ranging from USA Today to the Los Angeles Times, as well as Forbes.com. He has also been featured in Teen Vogue, quoted in The New York Times and is a contributor to NPR.

Seminar 50: Contemporary Literature: Flash Fiction, Twitter Narratives and Other Short Short Stories – March 19 & 26, 2025

Some of our most important contemporary writers are practitioners of very short stories, referred to variously as sudden fiction, flash fiction, or short shorts. Margaret Atwood, Matt Bell, Robert Coover, Lydia Davis, and George Saunders are among the many authors whose short fictions have entered the current literary landscape. These stories are just a few pages long, and often even shorter. While perhaps this genre responds to the short attention spans and busy lifestyles of our current Internet culture, short fiction is not a new phenomenon. Mark Twain (might have) said that if he had had more time, he would have written a shorter story. Ernest Hemingway (might have) produced the six-word narrative that illustrates the impact sudden fiction can have: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” In previous centuries, folk tales and fairy tales were also characterized by their concise, swift narrative structures. In this seminar, we will read a wide selection of short fiction: most of the works are by American authors, but we will also read international short fiction. In China, these short stories are referred to as “smoke-long,” because you can read one in the time it takes to smoke a cigarette. Minus the cigarettes, we will explore the narrative intentions and the philosophical assumptions of contemporary flash fiction—and try our hands at a bit of our own.”

Seminar Leader: Jo Carney, Ph.D.
Department of English Jo Carney’s most recent books are Women Talk Back to Shakespeare and Fairy Tale Queens:Representations of Early Modern Queenship. She has also published articles on Renaissance and contemporary fairy tales, Shakespeare, and early modern queenship. Professor Carney teaches courses in Shakespeare, Early Modern British literature, the literary fairy tale, and contemporary literature

Seminar 51: Racism in the Poverty-to-Prison Cycle: African Americans, Mass Incarceration and Everyday White Supremacy – April 4 & 11, 2025

US government data shows that white people commit most crimes and yet the majority of people in jails and prisons are people of color. And while white men commit most violent crimes and do so at disproportionately high rates, most prisoners are men of color. • Why? What explains this racial disparity? • How are Black students academically impacted by racist criminalization and hyperpolicing? • How would a transformative justice approach end racism in the legal system? Today, African Americans comprise 13% of the United States’ total population, yet they represent approximately 40% of the country’s incarcerated people. This high incarceration rate reflects a long history of Black people’s disproportionate arrests, convictions, and confinement in the US prison system—a domain of systemic racist-classism. In this workshop, participants will acquire or strengthen the ability to intersectionally analyze policing and prisons from a racial justice perspective. Widespread fictions of blackness as criminal and violent and whiteness as innocent and under siege fuel the poverty-to-prison cycle that ensnares and obliterates Black lives. We will examine the ways in which racist beliefs and discriminatory policing drive the mass incarceration crisis in poor African American communities. This workshop supports personal, professional and collective efforts to understand white supremacy as an intersectional, normalized set of systemic beliefs and practices that justify the police occupation of poor Black communities and over-incarceration of Black people. In addition to considering the ways in which Black students’ academic lives are impacted by racist conceptions of crime and racist carceral practices, participants will explore concrete, workable, antiracist transformative justice alternatives to policing and incarceration. Participants will also brainstorm strategies for creating change in their institutions – changes that are big or small, short-term or long term – changes that are rooted in antiracism principles.

Seminar Leader: Leigh-Anne Francis, PhD
Associate Professor, Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Department of African American Studies, Ph.D., Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, History Department, Dissertation: Bad Girls: Race, Crime, and Punishment in New York State, 1893—1916 M.A., SUNY College at Brockport, History Department, B.F.A , Rochester Institute of Technology, Fine Arts (Painting) Department.

Seminar 52: Cultural Responsiveness within the Vocal Studio and Choral Classroom: How the Programming of African American Song Literature Alleviates Racial Trauma – May 7 & 14, 2025

In this session, I will showcase how culturally responsive teaching is one way to help alleviate racial trauma in black students and singers. The programming and performing African American Art songs (which include the Negro Spiritual) in the choral classroom and the vocal studio offers opportunities for students to have agency over their own learning, and empowers them to connect with their own culture, resulting in a sense of belonging and inclusion. We will analyze harmony, rhythm, and text settings in choral compositions for K-12 choir along with pieces for solo vocal programming. We will identify passages exemplifying Black roots musics such as blues, gospel and jazz and Black poetic cultural references. Singing the cultural, musical, and textual references in these art songs offers one way of releasing trauma in Black students and singers by providing vehicles for building resilience.

Seminar Leader: Brandi Diggs, PhD
American Soprano Brandi Diggs is a versatile vocalist who sings operatic and solo repertoire throughout the United States. She recently appeared as a soloist with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and as a recitalist at the Kennedy Center. She holds a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the University of Cincinnati- College Conservatory of music, a diploma from the Peabody Conservatory of Johns Hopkins University, a Master of Music degree from East Carolina University, and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Spelman College. Recent performances include Lauretta in Gianni Schicchi, Susanna in Le nozze di Figaro and Rosina in Il barbiere di Siviglia. As a former K-12 music educator her teaching perspective involves bringing successful strategies of primary and secondary urban schoolteachers into the vocal studio. Her research considers intersections of race, gender, and social justice, through lenses of culturally responsive music performance, and trauma studies along with the applications of critical theories in these areas to concert programming, performing, and pedagogy in the voice studio and choral classroom. She is an Assistant Professor of Voice and the Coordinator of Vocal Studies at The College of New Jersey.