Scholars Engagement Seminars

Developing Great Thinking Minds of Students
Seminar# 1DTG: December 2, 2022

“Learning without thinking is labor lost; thinking without learning is perilous” —Confucius.

The acts of thinking directly affect our life, especially when we process information, make assumptions or interpretations, seek solutions, solve problems, make decisions, or come to conclusions. Good thinkers employ relevant information and adequate thinking skills to solve challenges or problems. Thus it is important to help students to develop a sharp thinking mind – to be able to think critically and creatively to meet the upcoming challenges in the ever-changing world. Critical thinkers can think rationally, precisely and systematically, as they can apply the rules of logic and follow practical scientific reasoning. Creative thinkers can intuitively create new and unconventional ideas which lead to many possibilities to make an impact on our lives.

Good thinking skills are essential to meaningful learning. Without engaging thinking, learning outcomes may mostly be confined to basic knowledge and skill levels. In the current school practice, students lack opportunities to exercise desirable cognitive potentials and tap into their brainpower for profound thinking and learning. In order to help students to develop adequate thinking skills, teachers need to facilitate students’ thinking development as they delve more deeply into academic learning. Powerful thinking minds are the most valuable assets in the world.

In this workshop, participating teachers will experience various teaching strategies to help improve students’ focus, observation, concentration, free association, and enhance students’ critical and creative thinking powers that can boost their confidence and joy in learning. The participants will be exposed to cases and fun challenges to gain practical experiences for their students to develop thinking minds. In addition, participating teachers will explore diverse approaches on student thinking development, discuss related issues and scenarios, and share personal experiences. Being exposed to various fun activities and hands-on experiences, participants will take away workable ideas and strategies to implement thinking development in their own teaching. A compiled list of useful activities, challenges, and resources will be shared during the seminar.

Seminar Leader: Alex C. Pan, Ph.D.

Dr. Alex C. Pan is an associate professor of Education. He teaches a broad spectrum of courses, ranging from teacher preparation courses, teacher’s action research, thinking and problem-solving, technology-enhanced instruction, to the impact of globalization. Dr. Pan has published dozens of articles, made many conference presentations, and conducted several workshops. He currently teaches in the department of Elementary and Early Childhood Education.[/solidbox]

Exploring and Writing the Contemporary Essay
Seminar# 2ELA: December 2,2022

While secondary English classrooms are often spaces in which students engage in literary analysis by writing argumentative, thesis-driven essays, there are other ways in which they might write to learn about literature and other topics of personal relevance. One traditionally under-used, but valuable genre is the contemporary essay. This workshop will provide a rationale for teaching the contemporary essay, introduce participants to its form(s), offer multi-modal example essays for consideration, and develop teachers’ comfort writing in this genre. John Green’s The Anthropocene Reviewed is the book for this seminar.

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.

Poetry Mentor Texts in the Secondary ELA Classroom
Seminar# 3ELA: February 10, 2023

Poetry, argues author Jason Reynolds, “is created to love young adults, and for them to love.” But to love poetry, students must have increased access to it. They must spend more time with it. They must stop being polite, and as poet Eve Mirriam instructs, “Bite in.” This interactive workshop seeks to help secondary ELA teachers and students do just this. Together we will explore three different strategies for incorporating poetry into secondary English classrooms. Participants will have the opportunity to read, discuss, write, and workshop poems that they can then incorporate into their instruction.

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.

Building Students’ Reading Skill and Engagement Using Critical Lenses
Seminar# 4ELA: March 3, 2023

In this seminar, participants will explore the ways in which secondary students’ reading of fiction and non-fiction texts can be enhanced through the use of critical lenses that frame their encounters with texts. Participants will be introduced to a variety of lenses, apply critical lenses in a reading of a middle grade novel, and explore ways to enrich their own curriculum using a critical lens approach. Kacen Callender’s King and the Dragonflies is the book for this seminar.

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.

Beyond Question & Answer:Supporting Engaged Literature Discussions: grades 4-8
Seminar# 5ELA: March 10, 2023

Asking students open-ended questions about what they read can be a wonderful way to initiate a literature discussion; but often, students may perceive teacher-initiated reading questions to be just another test in disguise. The I-R-E approach (teacher Initiates, student Responds, teacher Evaluates) may unintentionally create a high-stakes environment in which students hesitate to speak up, afraid to give the wrong answer.

This workshop will model activities and techniques to better support all students to engage in classroom discussion that moves beyond comprehension checks and toward more authentic dialogue. Attendees will be asked to participate in silent discussion circles, question sorts, small group structured discussions and other activities based on brief readings completed during the workshop. We will also explore several low-stakes, writing response activities such as poetry re-mix, and consider how to build discussion from students’ textual responses.

Sharing our response to literature is a huge part of the joy of reading and an essential component in encouraging life-long reading habits. The goal of this workshop is to offer some practical ideas to implement more joyful, accessible, and inviting classroom discussions for even the most reluctant students. Books to be used in this seminar are:

• • Marshmallow Clouds: Two Poets at Play Among Figure of Speech by Ted Kooser & Connie Wanek
  • Firefly July: A Year of Very Short Poems by Janeczko
  • Sweet Out of Wonder by Kwame Alexander

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.

Exploring Economic Justice through Games, Film, and Fiction!
Seminar# 6EEJ: March 10, 2023

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 should 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

James Stacey Taylor is a Professor of philosophy. 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 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.

Teaching for Critical Thinking Through Activities and Games
Seminar#7 TCT: March 17, 2023

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 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 Fishing Game,” “The Myth Busting Scavenger Hunt”, “Would This Be True If Your Mother Wrote It?”, and “Why Believe THAT?” The book for this seminar is: Doug Lemov, Teach Like a Champion 2.0 (Jossey-Bass, 2014)

Seminar Leader: James Stacey Taylor

James Stacey Taylor is a Professor of philosophy. 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 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.

Teaching Science Through Issues to Increase Engagement, Meet the NGSS, and Prepare Citizens
Seminar# 8STG: November 18,2022 or March 10, 2023, choose one.

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, a necessity made crystal-clear by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Despite the importance of science to all, many students are less than enthusiastic about their science courses. Participants will explore how teaching science through personal and current societal issues increases student interest in science, while simultaneously meeting the NGSS and creating citizens capable of applying high-quality scientific information to address these issues. Participants will develop an issue and a module based on that issue that they can implement in their courses.

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 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 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.

Fostering a Passion for Mathematics
Seminar# 9FPM: April 27, 2023

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. My main goal is to share strategies, best practices and resources that will help you increase your students’ intrinsic motivation to engage with Mathematics. I will also present some recent research on the importance of fostering students’ interest and enjoyment of doing Mathematics.

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.

Incorporating Virtual Reality (VR) in the Classroom
Seminar# 10VRC: May 9, 2023

It is imperative to upskill students for 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. Book used for this seminar is: Experience on Demand: What Virtual Reality Is, How It Works, and What It Can Do Hardcover by Jeremy Bailenson

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.