ePortfolio practice at LaGuardia helps students reflect on their learning and make connections across their courses and co-curricular experiences while learning about their discipline and careers. Although ePortfolio work starts strong in the FYS, many students engage less with their portfolios after completing the FYS. In response, a recent grant-funded Academic Affairs initiative is supporting ePortfolio Design Studios for students. In these sessions, students share their ePortfolios with faculty and former students to receive feedback on how to strengthen the content so it may be shared with professionals in their industry or faculty at transfer institutions. The first ePortfolio Design Studios included students in Education, Business, Natural Sciences, and Computer Science.

This CTL seminar will support faculty interested in planning ePortfolio-related assignments, activities, or co-curricular opportunities beyond the FYS and before Capstone courses to support students’ ongoing exploration of academics and careers while reflecting on their experiences at LaGuardia. These assignments and activities can also prompt students to work on their ePortfolios in preparation to participate in an “ePortfolio Design Studio,” where they will receive $100 gift cards for their efforts. Seminar participants will be expected to participate in at least one ePortfolio Design Studio session during the year; participation in a Design Studio along with their seminar work with ePortfolio team members and a peer mentor will inform discussions about the support needed around ePortfolio use at LaGuardia. Participants will be encouraged to implement activities in Spring 2024 as part of their seminar engagement and participation.

The goals of this seminar are:

• To identify one or two courses after the FYS where ePortfolio can strengthen transfer and career readiness;
• To create an assignment, class activity, or co-curricular activity around career readiness that prompts students to work on their ePortfolios leveraging the content produced in the FYS course and in preparation to be part of the ePortfolio Design Studio sessions;
• To identify and recommend ways to support students’ ePortfolio engagement at the program level and beyond the FYS. If the participant has program oversight responsibility, participation in this seminar will allow planning for a program-wide implementation.

Co-facilitators: Caterina Almendral, Education and Language Acquisition, J. Elizabeth Clark, English, Pablo Avila, CTL, David Brandt, CTL

• This is an in-person year-long seminar that meets on Fridays from 10 to 12:30 pm on the following dates in fall 2023: 9/29, 10/27, 11/17, 12/1.
• A Winter Institute and Spring 2024 meetings are TBD based on participants’ availability.

Through LaGuardia’s Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) program, LaGuardia faculty are paired with faculty abroad to design a shared unit that is integrated in their respective courses. Their students then engage virtually in collaborative tasks, using digital tools, such as Zoom, Slack, and Padlet. By emphasizing intercultural empathy, respect for diversity and perspective taking, COIL cultivates the principles of diversity, equity and inclusion, and it underscores LaGuardia’s commitment to global learning and students’ career readiness.

The seminar will introduce participants to COIL pedagogy and support them in developing COIL projects with their international faculty partners. Offered jointly with the COIL team at Queens College, this seminar also seeks to strengthen transfer pathways between LaGuardia and Queens. Faculty teaching courses articulated with Queens College are encouraged to apply. Priority will be given to first-time COIL participants. Prior to the seminar, each faculty participant will work with the COIL team to locate a partner from an international institution. During five 1.5-hour seminar sessions in Fall I, 2023, they will be guided to develop content for their COIL units in accordance with their course learning outcomes, select relevant technology platforms, and develop assessment tools informed by LaGuardia’s Global Learning Core Competency.

Seminar facilitators will support faculty throughout their implementation of COIL projects in Spring I 2024. Ongoing team mentorship will be complemented with two 60-minute check-ins for several teams at a time to allow for productive collegial support. At the end of Spring I 2024, COIL faculty and students will participate in COIL Faculty & Student Showcase. Possible QC campus visit for students and faculty might take place during or after implementation.

Co-facilitators: Olga Aksakalova, English, Anita Baksh, English, Pablo Avila, CTL

We have previously offered the seminar Language Across the Curriculum, but this year the seminar will have a specific focus on STEM pedagogy. STEM faculty often don’t have the pedagogical tools to support multilingual and linguistically diverse students. This seminar will help instructors move from a “language-blind” to a “language-aware” approach to teaching and learning.

We will explore the role of language diversity in the STEM classroom and how to use that diversity as a tool for teaching and learning, instead of an obstacle. Topics of interest include:

• How can I effectively help students understand word problems?
• How do I draw on my language background in the classroom?
• How can I build an inclusive classroom environment while also teaching my subject?
• Given the parameters of my class, how do I assess linguistically diverse students?

The main goal of Language across the Curriculum is to contribute to developing a multilingual campus environment which understands multilingualism as a resource in teaching and learning and invites all students to build on their language skills.

Co-facilitators: Leigh Garrison-Fletcher, Professor of Linguistics and ESL, whose research focuses on second language and literacy acquisition, and Lucy McNair, Professor of English, whose work focuses on translation and multilingual writing.

“A Deep Dive into Advising and AI” will review advising-related information (from our website, program handbooks, office manuals etc.). The information may include program-based advising recommendations, FAQs related to academic programs and processes, instructions on administrative processes such as appeals and waivers, and support services for students. With this information in mind, we will answer the following question: What is the best way to streamline information gathering, and how best can we disseminate this information to students, faculty, advisors, & staff? We will consider existing technology, including Ask LaGuardia, and explore other options, including Chat GPT and other language learning models.

We will hold a TBD kick-off in February and will hold 4 sessions in Spring I, with anticipated asynchronous work. Planned outputs may consist of formalizing a process for information collection, tagging information for efficient retrieval, and a white paper with written recommendations and implementation plans for tools to use going forward.

Co-facilitators: Joshua Goldblatt, Academic Affairs, and Elizabeth Jardine, Library

At the heart of Writing in the Disciplines (WID) pedagogy lies the assertion that writing, itself, plays a key role in critical thinking. Writing can be a powerful tool to cultivate students’ engagement with course material and their understanding of their own thought processes. Writing is the medium through which students can begin to learn and deepen their understanding of discipline-specific content and modes of inquiry. It is also the medium through which they can begin to produce knowledge.

WID pedagogy holds that writing to learn and learning to write are intimately linked. When you present students with problems and ask them to identify and challenge assumptions in writing, writing itself becomes an act of problem solving. Continuous writing practice helps students improve their writing and better understand core concepts. The Writing in the Disciplines (WID) seminar will support faculty as they develop strategies to guide students to use writing to formulate and shape their ideas, and to make sense of course content. It will provide faculty with a workshop-based forum to design, adapt, and incorporate a range of writing assignments and activities into their courses. These will be discipline-specific materials, designed by faculty for the specific courses they teach. They will include in-class, ungraded activities as well as “high stakes” assignments, such as research papers, lab reports, business plans, and other materials. Faculty will receive the resources, support, and feedback necessary to explore and integrate these strategies into their courses.

Faculty will be asked to workshop their syllabi and course assignments, hold honest discussions with their peers about teaching, and develop materials that can support student learning.

Key themes to be explored will include: “writing to learn,” coaching the writing process, various assessment and grading practices and responding to student work. Together, we will also address questions about grammar, and have discussions about how to use technology effectively, including AI and Learning Management Systems (Blackboard/Brightspace) in writing pedagogy. This workshop will address the concerns of STEM, Health Sciences, Social Science, Business and Technology, and Humanities faculty. We will discuss writing about data, images, graphs, literature, history, linguistics, journals, and other kinds of informal writing, etc. The seminar will incorporate a substantial amount of new material, including deeper discussions about the affective dimensions of writing, how to think about writing across different modalities, writing and online forums/platforms, and alternative assessment practices.

This seminar is open to full-time and part-time faculty members, including those who completed the seminar five or more years ago and who wish to refresh their WID pedagogy.

We encourage any faculty member scheduled to teach a writing-intensive course for Spring I who has not completed the WID program to sign up for the seminar. Faculty members who are interested in teaching writing-intensive courses in the future must take the seminar to get certified. All urban studies and capstone classes in the college are designated writing intensive.

Co-facilitators: Karen Miller, Social Science and Joshua Tan, Natural Sciences

Open educational resources (OER) are open access learning materials that anyone is welcome to create, use, and remix. Given the high price of commercial textbooks, free OER alternatives are one effective tool in reducing the price of higher education and increasing access to learning materials. Furthermore, OER open up more possibilities for culturally relevant and equitable educational opportunities. OER also present a unique opportunity to further develop a college-wide practice for collaborative, cross-disciplinary learning at LaGuardia. By incorporating open educational practices, faculty can meet students’ needs with greater editorial control over teaching materials. The seminar invites instructors and staff to explore their past, current, or desired use of OER at LaGuardia. Seminar co-leaders will present and discuss a variety of experiences with OER, from authoring a textbook to implementing OER in high enrollment courses. Other key topics include:

• Copyright, licensing, and citation in OER
• Publishing, modifying and archiving OER
• Accessibility and Universal Design for Learning
• Open pedagogy and student creators

Co-facilitators: This seminar is co-led by Assistant Professor Joshua Tan, Natural Sciences, Associate Professor Ian McDermott, Library, and a facilitator from MEC TBD, all of whom have experience developing and teaching with OER.