“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. 

Student Podcasting

Nicholas Paul, Ph.D., an associate professor of history, teaches in Fordham’s Medieval Studies program, one of the biggest programs of its kind in the world. His presentation, Podcasting and the History Graduate Classroom, offered ideas on how to make dense topics easier to digest.

While teaching a course on the Crusader states, which Paul described as “an arcane subject, even within the field of medieval history,” he wanted his students to have a way of interpreting these esoteric and difficult ideas to a larger audience.

“My students were gaining knowledge about something that no one else knows about. So the idea was to get comfortable with communicating these difficult ideas… How are we going to be able to explain the skills and the knowledge that this person has gained in some sort of wider context?”

As a solution, Paul came up with the podcasting idea. He tasked his students with creating a seven-to-10 minute podcast, encouraging them to listen to other popular history podcasts to get a feel of what to do. For the assignment, they were required to gather the technology and equipment they needed, write a script, record the podcast, and work with Paul on editing their audio until they were satisfied with the final products, which were then uploaded to SoundCloud and linked to their website, The Crusader States, for anyone to listen to.

Students were graded on how effectively they organized the information in a comprehensible way, which “was challenging to some people, especially people who were in Ph.D. programs, who have identified themselves as an intellectual. And they’re like, ‘I deliberately can’t speak to other people,’ so we break that down and say ‘you have to try.’”

The podcasts received encouraging responses from Paul’s Twitter followers. Listeners bantered back and forth, gave feedback, wrote comments, and even started to look forward to new episodes after the year ended, which Paul jokingly called “season 2” of the podcast series.

Using Polling Techniques for Instant Feedback

Usha Sankar, Ph.D., a lecturer in the biological sciences department who teaches courses like human physiology, was also looking for ways to keep students engaged. She has found polling techniques to be a useful strategy.

Using polling software, Sankar incorporated an interactive strategy into her lectures to keep her classroom energy as dynamic as possible.

There are many polling technologies out there—Sankar uses Poll Everywhere, a live interactive audience participation website used to gather responses. It can be used to create pop quizzes, polls, teaching games, and more. Students access their personal account page on their phones, answer questions directly, and see responses in real time.

Sankar has hosted a medley of quizzes, games, and competitions on her own Poll Everywhere page to test students about what they’ve learned during the lecture. The interactive aspect of the polling strategy allows her students to feel more engaged than if they were just listening to a lecture.

“Polling is a great way to gauge student engagement and understanding of concepts. The best polling methods are those that are intuitive, easy to access, cheap, encourage full participation, and provide detailed reports and feedback,” she said.

She’s also “constantly looking to improve my teaching,” she said, and polling is a great way to get feedback.

Keeping Students Engaged with Creative Pedagogy

Jane Suda, head of reference and information services in the Walsh Library on the Rose Hill campus, was impressed with the presentations she sat in on during the day, and their emphasis on “how you can use different technologies to make important learning points to the students and also make a creative classroom environment that is not your standard ‘write a paper, take a test’ environment,’” she said.

“In essence it’s like taking the classroom, breaking down the walls, and saying OK, now we’re gonna take what you’re learning in this one class, and throw it out into the public, and so we’re all polling, we’re podcasting, we’re creating websites, and so it’s not just what am I doing for the teacher, but what am I doing for the world, and that’s really dynamic. It changes what the classroom is all about.”

“I didn’t know, for example, that he had polio,” Levine says. She was also unaware that Alda’s mother exhibited symptoms of mental illness throughout his life and was hospitalized for it when he was about 18. “I spent months working closely with Alan and had no idea of the tragedies that surrounded him and the hardships he had to overcome to have the faith in himself to do this work.”

Similarly, Levine had bonded with the actress Molly Ringwald in a mommy-and-me class when the two were traversing the new frontier of first-time motherhood. But it wasn’t until interviewing her for Little Known Facts that she learned that Ringwald’s father is a blind jazz musician. They spoke about her catapult to stardom in the mid-1980s, with the blockbuster success of Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club, and about the perils of young fame.

“I found her story incredibly compelling,” Levine says. “How do you forge your own identity when the world has decided who you will be? She has had to prove herself over and over again, and she’s done it with incredible humor.”

From Acting to Podcasting, a Mid-Career Reinvention

It’s intimate conversations like these with stage and screen artists that are earning Levine’s podcast five-star reviews on iTunes and Podbay. Listeners call the show “hilarious,” “warm,” and “welcoming,” and say that Levine “has a gift for turning an interview into a conversation with an old friend over coffee.”

That’s precisely the vibe Levine was aiming to achieve with the project that materialized serendipitously in 2016. “A friend who had just taken on a podcast business told me that I might be great as a host,” she says. Having no experience in the space, her first inclination was to say no.

“But at the time, I had mindfully decided to say yes to more things,” Levine says. “I am an actor, but doing shows every night is hard on the family,” she adds. (She and her husband, the actor Dominic Fumusa, have two children.) “It was just a weird confluence of moments” that led to an opportunity that has since become a full-time job.

Given her long career in acting and theater—she starred as Lucy in the 1999 Broadway revival of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown and appeared in television shows and films, including The Nanny Diaries, Law and Order, and the memorable Seinfeld episode “The Contest”—interviewing colleagues in the business made perfect sense. Levine points out that the same skill set needed for acting translates easily to hosting a podcast.

“I get quite engaged with all sorts of storytelling,” she says. “As an actor, you are also an investigative reporter,” she explains, noting that she devotes a lot of time to research before each interview. “I want these conversations to unearth new parts of these artists for my listeners as opposed to retreading the same things they’ve heard a hundred times.”

Her first interview subject was long-time friend John Slattery, the actor and director known best for his work in Mad Men. It went so well that Levine says the experience allowed her to give herself the “seal of approval” to move forward on the project. To date, more than 125 artists, including Jason Alexander, Cynthia Nixon, Uma Thurman, Octavia Spencer, Julianne Moore, and Edie Falco, have visited the studio for Levine’s up-close-and-personal-style interviews.

“Almost every one of my guests is a friend, and I still haven’t run out,” she jokes. “Most of my interviews are with friends I’ve collected job by job by job.”

Some guests, such as Tony Award-winning actors Julie White, PCS ’09, and John Benjamin Hickey, FCLC ’85, are friends she met at Fordham. Others are fellow performers she met as a founding member of the Naked Angels theater company, including Sarah Jessica Parker, Matthew Broderick, and Mary Stuart Masterson.

A Talent for Comedy

Levine’s conversations with her guests are often laced with humor, something that has served her well, she says, not only as a podcast host but throughout her life and acting career. It’s the reason she landed the role of Lucy in the Broadway musical, even though she insisted, when she was called to audition for the part, that she couldn’t sing.

“The director apparently had seen me perform before and felt that I had the essence of what they had in mind for Lucy,” Levine recalls. “They wanted a comedic actress.” The team worked with her on vocal exercises to give her confidence, and the project turned out to be one of the most memorable highlights of her acting career. “It was a stage-door experience that was the most glorious … so pure and beautiful,” Levine says.

Years later, the song Levine sang in the musical, “12 Little Known Facts,” inspired the name of her podcast. “It was the perfect name for what was happening in all of my conversations,” she says.

Fordham and theater weren’t in Levine’s thoughts until she spent a gap year between high school and college in Israel. Before that, her plan was to study advertising.

“Fordham was so enthusiastic and excited that I spent a year in Israel—not only did they give me credits for the courses I took, but they gave me a whole year,” says the New Jersey native. “They understood the life experience and community service were meaningful in my development as a human and my education at the college level.”

Levine adds that there is no better place to learn about theater than in New York City, and that in addition to giving her the chance to perform in and work on several productions as an undergraduate, her Fordham Theatre instructors frequently took her and her classmates to see shows on and off Broadway.

“It was such an exciting time, running around in the city with a group of warm and gifted students,” she says. “It was a tremendous beginning to my life in theater and I’m so grateful.”

—Claire Curry