Scholar Engagement Seminars 2024-25

Unsettling Autism Friday 03/28/25

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. 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. 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.

Racism in the Poverty-to-Prison Cycle: African Americans, Mass Incarceration and Everyday White Supremacy. Fri – Apr -25-2025

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.

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. SUNY College at Brockport, History Department, B.F.A , Rochester Institute of Technology, Fine Arts (Painting) Department. Jane Crow (In)Justice: Race, Crime and Punishment in New York State, 1893—1916 (book manuscript in progress) and the soon to be published book Feminists Talk Whiteness by Leigh-Anne Francis and Janet Gray. 

Trans 101: Intro to Trans & Strategies for Supporting BIPOC Trans Students  Fri – May 02 – 2025

What do the terms cisgender and non-binary trans mean? Why are they/them pronouns important?
How are trans students of colors’ (BIPOC trans students’) academic lives shaped by racist anti-trans discrimination at school?
How do we create a trans-affirming classrooms and administrative offices?

“Trans 101” introduces and explores the gender terminology and concepts that articulate and explain trans identities and the systemic oppression of BIPOC trans people. The seminar instructor, Dr. Leigh-Anne Francis, will define the terms cis and transgender, discuss a trans liberatory approach to understanding gender, and address the ways in which institutional power and privilege benefit cisgender people (i.e., people that are not transgender) and subject trans people, particularly trans BIPOC people, to discrimination. Dr. Francis addresses the intersectionality of anti-trans beliefs and discrimination – that is, the ways in which bigotry against trans people is enmeshed with multiple oppressions, including racism, classism and ableism. We will consider the ways in which BIPOC trans students are impacted by intersectional anti-trans discrimination and discuss concrete strategies for creating trans inclusive school communities.

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. SUNY College at Brockport, History Department, B.F.A , Rochester Institute of Technology, Fine Arts (Painting) Department. Jane Crow (In)Justice: Race, Crime and Punishment in New York State, 1893—1916 (book manuscript in progress) and the soon to be published book Feminists Talk Whiteness by Leigh-Anne Francis and Janet Gray.

The Bilingual Mind: Understanding Cognitive Flexibility.  Mon-May-05-2025

In this workshop will discuss how bilingualism affects cognitive flexibility—the ability to adjust to changing stimuli and environments. Participants will explore studies and theories that prove how bilingual students can benefit from enhanced mental flexibility, and how to leverage this in various subject areas to foster a dynamic learning environment. During the session, we will discuss theories and recent research that showcase how managing two languages can improve the brain’s executive functions, such as task switching, problem-solving, and maintaining attention.
Seminar Leader: Ivan Andreu Rascon
Ivan Andreu Rascon is a final-year PhD candidate at Rutgers University, specializing in bilingualism and second language acquisition. During his tenure at Rutgers, he has directed the Spanish program during the summers of 2022 and 2023 and has served as the assistant director for Spanish instruction for the past three years. Additionally, he has taught graduate courses at Rutgers in the departments of education and social work. He holds a master’s degree in Hispanic studies with a concentration in pedagogy from Auburn University, and another master’s degree in language acquisition from Universidad de Alcalá de Henares, Spain. He is also a graduate of Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, where he studied Spanish linguistics and literature. His research has focused on language acquisition through visual perception and mouth articulators, as well as high variability phonetic training. He is currently working at The College of New Jersey as an Adjunct Professor in the World Languages Department.

The Representation of Women in Ancient Greek Art  Fri-May-09-2025

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.

*Engaging Older Readers with Poetry through Social-Emotional Sustenance. English teachers and leaders grades 5 -12
Fri-Mar-28-2025

This session will focus on teaching approaches that can help students access the joy of reading and writing poetry. The facilitator will share activities to support students who have found poetry (and reading in general) difficult or disengaging in the past. Several critical inquiry units that are designed to engage adolescent students will be shared. Participants will have a chance to explore the work of many lesser-known living poets who speak to contemporary issues in the lives of young people. We will also dive into the poetry of several contemporary picture books and other illustrated literature written for older readers. Strategic and scaffolded approaches such as guided metacognitive visualization, poetry distillation, concept sorts and many more will be modelled. The objective of the workshop will be to highlight the ways in which poetry can build academic literacy skills while supporting connection, empathy, community, self-expression, self-efficacy—even courage!  *This workshop is 9:00am – 3:00pm and is the fee is $300.00
Seminar Leader: Anne Peel Ed.D.
Anne is an assistant professor of Special Education, Language and Literacy. She taught high school English for 14 years in public schools in Philadelphia and New Jersey and 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, and Literacy among others, and she has presented her research at numerous national and international conferences. She was awarded the Edward Fry Graduate Fellowship in Literacy from Rutgers University.

Environmental Children’s Literature. Thu-May-09-2024

In 2020, New Jersey became the first state in the country to adopt K-12 climate change standards. The adoption of these standards has created opportunities for curricular change in English Language Arts as well as the development of innovative and interdisciplinary units of study that integrate children’s, middle grade, and young adult literature, both fiction and non-fiction. This workshop will provide a critical introduction to this literature as well as a variety of teaching tools to engage student readers and writers.
Seminar Leader: Emily Meixner, Professor of English, Coordinator of English Secondary Education Program
Emily received her Ph.D. in Curriculum Theory & Multicultural Teacher Education from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the coordinator of the Secondary English Education Program and regularly teaches courses on secondary reading and writing pedagogy as well as courses on children’s and young adult literature. Her research interests include secondary literacy best practices, LGBTQIA young adult literature, and teacher professional development. Dr. Meixner also works regularly in local school districts providing professional development on such topics as reading/writing workshop, reading strategies and close reading, reading in the content areas, and young adult literature.

The Bilingual Mind: Understanding Cognitive Flexibility.  Mon-May-05-2025

In this workshop will discuss how bilingualism affects cognitive flexibility—the ability to adjust to changing stimuli and environments. Participants will explore studies and theories that prove how bilingual students can benefit from enhanced mental flexibility, and how to leverage this in various subject areas to foster a dynamic learning environment. During the session, we will discuss theories and recent research that showcase how managing two languages can improve the brain’s executive functions, such as task switching, problem-solving, and maintaining attention.
Seminar Leader: Ivan Andreu Rascon
Ivan Andreu Rascon is a final-year PhD candidate at Rutgers University, specializing in bilingualism and second language acquisition. During his tenure at Rutgers, he has directed the Spanish program during the summers of 2022 and 2023 and has served as the assistant director for Spanish instruction for the past three years. Additionally, he has taught graduate courses at Rutgers in the departments of education and social work. He holds a master’s degree in Hispanic studies with a concentration in pedagogy from Auburn University, and another master’s degree in language acquisition from Universidad de Alcalá de Henares, Spain. He is also a graduate of Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, where he studied Spanish linguistics and literature. His research has focused on language acquisition through visual perception and mouth articulators, as well as high variability phonetic training. He is currently working at The College of New Jersey as an Adjunct Professor in the World Languages Department.

*Literary Essay Writing in Reverse.  Fri-May-02-2025

Traditionally, the literary essay is something students write after they have finished reading a story or a book. This workshop will model how to invert that process and ask students to consider the essay as something that begins when they start reading. Rather than thinking of the essay as an exercise in determining the author’s meaning, the essay will be used as a tool to document the reader’s meaning-making throughout the reading process. This backwards-designed essay has several advantages for students, particularly those who find essay writing difficult or disengaging: it uses the essay as a tool to help reading comprehension, allows students to tackle the writing process in multiple, small steps, and isolates different writing skills (such as finding evidence, analyzing evidence, contextualizing evidence) into micro-writing exercises. Perhaps most importantly, an integrated reading and writing approach builds students’ confidence in their literary argument skills and reduces their reliance on formulaic structures. *This workshop is 9:00am – 3:00pm and is the fee is $300.00
Seminar Leader: Anne Peel Ed.D.
Anne is an assistant professor of Special Education, Language and Literacy. She taught high school English for 14 years in public schools in Philadelphia and New Jersey and 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, and Literacy among others, and she has presented her research at numerous national and international conferences. She was awarded the Edward Fry Graduate Fellowship in Literacy from Rutgers University.

Teaching students to think as a Mathematician using the Pósa method, Grades 6-12. Thu-Mar-27-2025

Born in 1947, Pósa was a child prodigy, silver and gold medalist in the International Mathematical Olympiads in 1965 and 1966. He was only 15 years old when he wrote his first research paper with Paul Erdős, one of the most celebrated mathematicians of the 20th century. Pósa was Erdős’ favorite “epsilon”, his most talented “student”. After finishing his Ph.D. in Mathematics, Pósa stopped producing research papers in mathematics and he became a full-time teacher. Using his boundless mathematical creativity, Pósa developed unique sequences of math problems that taught students how to think like a mathematician. His problem sets pose and abandon, repeat or vary different mathematical ideas. Different threads of problems run parallel, intersect, intertwine. Fundamental mathematical ideas return in various forms and at various levels over multiple years in Pósa’s method, enabling students at the end to think freely and creatively. The Budapest Semesters of Mathematics Education was founded by Pósa’s students in 2017. This study abroad program for North American college students immerses pre-service teachers in the Hungarian approach to teaching mathematics through the unique method of Lajos Pósa. In this workshop, we will immerse participants in the Pósa method first as a student, using problem sets of Pósa. Then we will look at the problem sets from a teacher’s perspective and learn how to apply the Pósa’ s discovery method in one’s own teaching.

Seminar Leader: Judit Kardos
Judit is an Associate Professor of Mathematics at TCNJ. She grew up in Hungary, a country that has a long tradition of superb Mathematics Education. Judit studied Mathematics and worked with the famous educator, Lajos Pósa, in 1997-1998. In 2007-2008, Judit regularly observed Pósa’s classes for talented students and then in 2023 she took a class on the Pósa method in the Budapest Semesters in Mathematics Education program. She learned a simple recipe from Lajos Pósa for teaching Mathematics: the more students enjoy doing Mathematics, the more likely that they will stay engaged and ultimately succeed. As a teacher, Judit strives to deeply engage her students, fostering their own passion for Mathematics through collaboration, inquiry, the use of games and Pósa’s discovery learning.

NEW DATES: Game On: Fostering multiplication skills through games 2nd to 5th grade.  Mon-Apr-28-2025 or Wed-Apr 30-2025

You may think that playing games in a math class is a loss of precious time that should be devoted to “coverage.” However, in our experience, the time devoted to games pays a great dividend by making students focus and think harder, by fostering community, and by creating intrinsic motivation and buy-in. In the great words of Sir Ken Robinson, “Education is not a mechanical system, it is a human system. People either do want to learn or do not want to learn.’’ Creating classes that are interactive and fun is a great way to foster students’ interest and motivation in learning Mathematics at any age. In this workshop, we will learn, play, and discuss games that develop multiplication skills from 2nd to 5th grade. Csilla will share numerous games that foster students’ multiplication skills. Judit will share interesting research from neuroscience and motivation theory on the benefits of playing games, including a wealth of resources on games and puzzles. We will also discuss how to balance the use of puzzles and games with coverage, and how to respond to parents’ and administrators’ who question the effectiveness of teaching Mathematics using games.

Seminar Leaders; Judith Kardos and Csilla Farkasházi

Csilla Farkasházi is a Master teacher in Hungary’s premier Magnet School, Fazekas. In 2023, the János Bolyai Mathematical Society awarded Csilla Farkasházi, the Beke Manó prize, the highest Teaching Award in the country. Csilla is a committed supporter of experience-based teaching and a conscious, experiential user of games in Mathematics classes. She inspires her students to invent and creatively implement games and game variants. Csilla loves challenges, and she constantly invents and implements new games in her teaching. She plays with her students in every class! She has been sharing her expertise on using games with fellow teachers in Hungary and Finland. Most recently, she presented two workshops for NJ teachers on her games using the Dienes logic set. One teacher wrote: “I feel that all of these games would be so fun to share with my students. I can’t wait to try them in my class.”
Csilla wrote 32 papers and book chapters on using games. Her students’ regularly win top prizes in Hungarian Math Competitions, but she feels that her real success as a teacher is that all children learn to love Mathematics in her classes.

Judit Kardos is an Associate Professor of Mathematics at TCNJ. She grew up in Hungary, a country that has a long tradition of superb Mathematics Education. She learned a simple recipe from her own teachers for teaching Mathematics: the more students enjoy doing Mathematics, the more likely that they will stay engaged and ultimately succeed. The recipe worked for Judit, she never stopped learning and received a Ph.D. in Mathematics with a focus on Real Analysis. As a teacher, she strives to deeply engage her students, fostering their own passion for Mathematics through collaboration, the use of games and discovery learning. Judit recently published an article about using games in teaching on the MAA’s Math Values Blog. https://www.mathvalues.org/masterblog/game-on-harnessing-the-power-of-games-for-math-learning-in-the-classroom