The Lincoln Center Learning & Innovative Technology Environment, located on the fourth floor of Lowenstein in room 416, was operating at full tilt as of last Thursday. A miniature, plastic model of the Eiffel Tower was coming to life in the belly of a 3D printer. Students with virtual reality goggles practiced hurling imaginary objects across a giant flat-screen. And inside the brand-new video/podcasting studio, a pair of LITE’s work-study students demonstrated how to record a video while jotting notes on a screen, weatherman-style.

“People say when they walk into the space, they feel more creative—that LITE lets them think outside the box and be able to apply these technologies in their classes,” said Nicole Zeidan, Ed.D., assistant director of emerging educational technologies and learning space design. She helps connect LITE’s resources to students and faculty, such as Assistant Professor of Art History Nushelle de Silva, Ph.D.

Virtual Reality for Museum Studies

Earlier this fall, de Silva wanted her Museum Architecture students to see how a museum experience changes when you “visit” it virtually. Using VR headsets at Rose HIll’s LITE, students were able to view the “Mona Lisa” up close without the hordes of tourists in the Louvre. 

With this technology now available at Lincoln Center, said de Silva, “ I could turn this into homework. And then we would have the whole of the class time to talk about that experience.”

Printing Sturdy Replicas of Fragile Artifacts 

The tools at the LITE Center in Lowenstein and its counterpart at Rose Hill are designed to make classes experiential and creative work more accessible. Students can fashion theater costumes with LITE’s sewing machines or repair objects with its soldering equipment. A too-fragile-to-touch artifact can be 3D scanned, then 3D printed to create a durable facsimile, like the medieval seals the LITE Center recreated for Center for Medieval Studies Director Nicholas Paul. “The originals … are made out of wax and, obviously, extremely old, so having copies that we can pass around and look at closely is really useful in classes,” he said.

Fleur Eshghi, Ed.D., associate vice president of educational technology research computing, said she thinks many academic departments will make good use of the center. 

“We have been looking for space for Lincoln Center to build the same facilities [as Rose Hill],” she said. “And we have finally succeeded … I’m extremely excited.” 

Letting the Light in

Nicola Terzulli, learning space design lead for the Office of Technology, made the most of Lincoln Center’s light-filled space when designing the different stations.

“Lowenstein has those iconic windows for each floor,” said Terzulli, so he found a manufacturer who could soundproof a podcasting room but keep the glass walls. When the studio is not in use, you can see through it. But should you need privacy—or want to use the room to record a media-rich lesson for Panopto, Fordham’s platform for video classes—you just draw the room’s thick black curtains to enclose it.

Terzulli even used all-glass cabinets to make the tools at Lincoln Center’s LITE easy to see. 

“We wanted as much glass as possible … so people when they walk in, they see [these tools]and they’re like, ‘Hey, what’s that? Can I do that? Can I use that?’”

For details on the features and hours of the Lincoln Center and the Rose Hill LITE Centers, visit their site.

“There’s something really important about the fact that we are in the business of teaching,” said Tetlow. “If there’s anyone who should understand how to spread information, how to help people understand—it’s us. So how do we model our own pedagogy with each other?”

Tetlow spoke on the Twice Over Podcast, which was developed during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic as a way to find meaning and connection during a turbulent time. Over the past two years, it evolved into a platform where students, faculty, administrators, and guest speakers at other academic institutions share effective practices in their work and build connections through candid conversations. More than 40 guests have been interviewed by the podcast’s two hosts: Steven D’Agustino, director of online learning, and Anne Fernald, special advisor to the provost. They conduct recording sessions in a sound-controlled studio within the Learning, Innovation, Technology Environment, a new center in the basement of Walsh Library where students, faculty, and administrators use cutting-edge technology for their research.  

The podcast episode featuring Tetlow was published on Nov. 28. For nearly an hour, Tetlow speaks in depth on many topics, including why she decided to work in higher education and how her second grade teacher changed her life. The podcast episode can be streamed on Twice Over’s website, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, SoundCloud, and YouTube. 

Anne Fernald, Ph.D., professor of English and special adviser to the provost for faculty development, said one of her hopes for the retreat was to provide participants with inspiration and time to reflect on lessons of equity and inclusion gleaned during the pandemic and how technology and pedagogy can be used to advance those goals.

“Much of what we learned about racial justice and teaching online in the past two years was learned in crisis,” she said. “This retreat was designed to give us the chance to deepen those lessons while getting to know colleagues—both other teachers and some of the many support staff here at Fordham.”

Professors gathered in the mornings to workshop key concepts into their syllabi, including racial justice and anti-racism work. For example, Grace Shen, Ph.D., associate professor of history, led a worksop on “decolonizing the syllabus.” She discussed a class that was developed with funds from a Teaching Race Across the Curriculum grant, which supports ways that professors can integrate questions of race into their curricula. Shen, an expert in late imperial and modern China, showed how she incorporated those questions into her syllabus for the class.

“This way, everyone in the room heard from one colleague in a lot of detail of how she did it, so they can go back to their department and say ‘I have notes on how history did it, and here’s where I think history’s experience matters to our discipline,” said Fernald.

As the conversations evolved, so too did a shared understanding of what anti-racist teaching is and could evolve to be. The session was very hands-on, she said, with professors teasing out a common language for anti-racist teaching.

“In many cases, this is where the discussion starts,” Fernald said of the morning sessions.

Steve D’Agustino, Ph.D., director of online learning, teamed with Fernald during the pandemic to reconceptualize teaching when everyone in the community was separated. Those lessons and benefits from online instruction have now carried over to in-person teaching. For example, he noted that the pandemic showed that students with disabilities who might not be able to attend class in person could fully participate online.

“There are people who are initially drawn to online learning as a form of assistive technology,” said D’Agustino,

A truly inclusive classroom would ensure that their unique perspective would contribute to the course, as well as provide much-needed access to learning, he said.

“During the pandemic, we all learned so much about teaching in mediated ways, teaching at a distance, perhaps even flipping my classroom,” he said, going on to explain the flipped classroom concept:

“In a traditional classroom, students do classwork in class and homework at home. In a flipped classroom, I may create learning activities for the students that they interact with at home, like a recorded lecture, and then in class they solve problems together.”

Groupwork and Beyond

During the four-day retreat, Fordham specialists held workshops that examined group dynamics. Sarah Gambito, professor of creative writing, held a workshop on creating community, and Jane Bolgatz, Ph.D., associate dean for academic affairs, looked specifically at the design and dynamics of group work.

Bolgatz discouraged starting large group work right away. She noted that most students come into the classroom competitive, so before starting out with larger groups, she advised keeping it simple by setting students up in pairs, then threes, and later fours.

“They got themselves into Fordham for goodness sake. They’re used to being competitive, so you’re going to have to cultivate their cooperative muscles,” she said.

For that reason, Bolgatz also expressed concern about the debate format, where students argue a particular point of view, rather than working together to understand why a particular group holds a particular view. She cited an earlier refection by Christie-Belle Garcia, Ph.D., former assistant dean for student support and success, which discouraged pitting students against each other via competitive situations.

“If we are caring for our students and we are putting them in a win-lose situation instead of a win-win situation, then we’re going to have people losing,” she recalls Garcia saying. “And sometimes that’s fine. That’s true in life. But I just would temper that with our cooperative time, where we’re all going to be better at this task because we’re all getting better together,” she said.

Bolgatz also talked about aspects of exclusivity inherent in debate that professors need to be cognizant of.

“Think about what a debate may be for a learner for whom English is not their first language. They’re just as smart as everybody else, but they just can’t think about the answer as fast if they’re still understanding the question,” she said.

Questioning for the Advanced Learners

Jon Craven, Ph.D., associate professor of education, said he develops a syllabus by asking students what they want to learn and what questions they want to be answered. It’s a method he reserves for graduate students.

“We know how adults learn and if they don’t have a stake in the purpose for learning, they will go through the hoops of completing the components of the syllabus without learning much,” he said. “The construct you hold in your head on what teaching is—and who you are teaching— impacts what you do in the classroom.”

Learning Commons at LITE

Each day of the retreat closed with the professors convening in the Walsh Family Library’s new LITE Center. For that week, the modular spaces at LITE, which stands for Learning & Innovative Technology Environment, acted as a one-stop-shop for the duration of the retreat and provided professors with resources to work on their new syllabi, including consultants from IT, the Center for Community Engaged Learning, Blackboard, Educational Technology and Digital Scholarship, Fordham Libraries, and Student Support.

“I can come here and talk to someone from IT, get access to a 3D scanner, or make a podcast. Here, I can sit with an expert. And the leadership here seem very committed to making this as much a one-stop-shop for faculty as possible,” said D’Agustino. “The truth is we’re in a process of hybridization; no one is just in the digital space anymore, and no one is just in the physical space.”