Tag: Faculty

When ZIP Codes Teach: How Geographic Inequity Shows Up in Our Classrooms – Faculty Focus

What if I told you the education system isn’t broken—it’s working exactly the way it was built to? That’s not just a soundbite from my TEDx Talk—it’s my lived experience.

I grew up in a historically underserved neighborhood in Houston, Texas, zoned to one of the lowest-performing elementary schools in the city. But due to a granted academic transfer, I ended up attending a top-performing public school just three miles away. Same city. Different ZIP code. Completely different resources—and trajectory.

That three-mile difference changed everything. And today, as a doctoral student and aspiring professor, I can see how those early disparities still show up in our college classrooms.

Here’s the thing: public school funding in the U.S. depends heavily on local property taxes. That means wealthier neighborhoods get better schools—often with state-of-the-art facilities, robust extracurriculars, and college prep courses—while nearby communities may struggle with crumbling infrastructure and underpaid staff (Owens-Young 2023).

Part of my dissertation, I compared two elementary schools less than three miles apart. One had a PTA raising over $100,000 annually. The other didn’t have working air conditioning. These weren’t just different schools—they were different worlds. And students from those environments bring that context with them when they walk into our lecture halls.

But what we see in higher education—missed assignments, low engagement, quiet classrooms—isn’t always a motivation issue. Often, it’s a preparedness gap. And that gap isn’t the student’s fault.

As faculty, we can’t change where our students come from. But we can shape what they experience once they’re here. Below are four strategies I use in the classroom to help level the playing field:

1. Start by Asking, Not Assuming

Instead of assuming a lack of interest, ask about their background. I use a quick, anonymous prompt on the first day of class: “What’s one thing you overcame to get here today?” One student wrote about taking two buses from the other side of town after getting their younger siblings off to school. That kind of insight changes how we teach.

2. Rethink Participation

Not everyone feels comfortable speaking up in class. Consider using written reflections, discussion boards, or tools like Jamboard and Padlet. For instance, in one of my leadership classes, I use a shared Google Doc where students add thoughts anonymously. The quieter students thrive—and the louder ones gain new perspectives.

3. Normalize Struggle

Students from under-resourced schools often view academic struggle as failure. That’s why I share my own story of nearly failing out during undergrad. I also let students revise one major assignment. One student improved from a 72 to a 90—and more importantly, realized they were capable all along.

4. Offer Flexible Assessment Options

Some students express themselves better visually or verbally. I once had a student create a narrated photo essay instead of a traditional paper—it was powerful, reflective, and demonstrated full mastery. When students see that their strengths are valued, their confidence grows.

None of these ideas require overhauling your entire course. But they do require intentionality. And that’s what makes the difference.

I’ve been the under-resourced student, and now I’m becoming the professor I wish I had—someone who saw potential beyond performance.

We don’t control our students’ ZIP codes. But we do influence how they feel in our classrooms—and whether they believe they belong there.

Lloyd Lindley Jr. is a PhD student in Educational Leadership and Organization at Texas Woman’s University, a TEDx speaker, and author of “From the Hood to Understood”. He is the co-founder of a grassroots nonprofit that advocates for equitable access to education, mentorship, and financial literacy in underserved communities. Lloyd has been featured on Good Morning Houston and KTSU Radio for his impactful community work and continues to champion culturally responsive teaching and student empowerment at all levels of education.

References

Owens-Young, Jessica. 2023. “The ZIP Code Effect.” American University.

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July 11, 2025
When ZIP Codes Teach: How Geographic Inequity Shows Up in Our Classrooms – Faculty Focus

What if I told you the education system isn’t broken—it’s working exactly the way it was built to? That’s not just a soundbite from my TEDx Talk—it’s my lived experience.

I grew up in a historically underserved neighborhood in Houston, Texas, zoned to one of the lowest-performing elementary schools in the city. But due to a granted academic transfer, I ended up attending a top-performing public school just three miles away. Same city. Different ZIP code. Completely different resources—and trajectory.

That three-mile difference changed everything. And today, as a doctoral student and aspiring professor, I can see how those early disparities still show up in our college classrooms.

Here’s the thing: public school funding in the U.S. depends heavily on local property taxes. That means wealthier neighborhoods get better schools—often with state-of-the-art facilities, robust extracurriculars, and college prep courses—while nearby communities may struggle with crumbling infrastructure and underpaid staff (Owens-Young 2023).

Part of my dissertation, I compared two elementary schools less than three miles apart. One had a PTA raising over $100,000 annually. The other didn’t have working air conditioning. These weren’t just different schools—they were different worlds. And students from those environments bring that context with them when they walk into our lecture halls.

But what we see in higher education—missed assignments, low engagement, quiet classrooms—isn’t always a motivation issue. Often, it’s a preparedness gap. And that gap isn’t the student’s fault.

As faculty, we can’t change where our students come from. But we can shape what they experience once they’re here. Below are four strategies I use in the classroom to help level the playing field:

1. Start by Asking, Not Assuming

Instead of assuming a lack of interest, ask about their background. I use a quick, anonymous prompt on the first day of class: “What’s one thing you overcame to get here today?” One student wrote about taking two buses from the other side of town after getting their younger siblings off to school. That kind of insight changes how we teach.

2. Rethink Participation

Not everyone feels comfortable speaking up in class. Consider using written reflections, discussion boards, or tools like Jamboard and Padlet. For instance, in one of my leadership classes, I use a shared Google Doc where students add thoughts anonymously. The quieter students thrive—and the louder ones gain new perspectives.

3. Normalize Struggle

Students from under-resourced schools often view academic struggle as failure. That’s why I share my own story of nearly failing out during undergrad. I also let students revise one major assignment. One student improved from a 72 to a 90—and more importantly, realized they were capable all along.

4. Offer Flexible Assessment Options

Some students express themselves better visually or verbally. I once had a student create a narrated photo essay instead of a traditional paper—it was powerful, reflective, and demonstrated full mastery. When students see that their strengths are valued, their confidence grows.

None of these ideas require overhauling your entire course. But they do require intentionality. And that’s what makes the difference.

I’ve been the under-resourced student, and now I’m becoming the professor I wish I had—someone who saw potential beyond performance.

We don’t control our students’ ZIP codes. But we do influence how they feel in our classrooms—and whether they believe they belong there.

Lloyd Lindley Jr. is a PhD student in Educational Leadership and Organization at Texas Woman’s University, a TEDx speaker, and author of “From the Hood to Understood”. He is the co-founder of a grassroots nonprofit that advocates for equitable access to education, mentorship, and financial literacy in underserved communities. Lloyd has been featured on Good Morning Houston and KTSU Radio for his impactful community work and continues to champion culturally responsive teaching and student empowerment at all levels of education.

References

Owens-Young, Jessica. 2023. “The ZIP Code Effect.” American University.

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July 11, 2025
Essay on Faculty Engagement and Web Accessibility (opinion)
Inaccessible PDFs are a stubborn problem. How can we marshal the energy within our institutions to make digital course materials more accessible—one PDF, one class, one instructor at a time?

Like many public higher education institutions, William & Mary is working to come into compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines by April 2026. These guidelines aim to ensure digital content is accessible for people who rely on screen readers and require that content be machine-readable.

Amid a flurry of other broad institutional efforts to comply with the federal deadline, my colleague—coordinator of instruction for libraries Liz Bellamy—and I agreed to lead a series of workshops designed to help instructors improve the accessibility of their digital course materials. We’ve learned a lot along the way that we hope can be instructive to other institutions engaged in this important work.

What We’ve Tried

Our first big hurdle wasn’t technical—it was cultural, structural and organizational. At the same time various groups across campus were addressing digital accessibility, William & Mary had just moved our learning management system from Blackboard Learn to Blackboard Ultra, we were beginning the rollout of new campuswide enterprise software for several major institutional areas, the institution achieved R-1 status and everyone had so many questions about generative AI. Put plainly, instructors were overwhelmed, and inaccessible PDFs were only one of many competing priorities vying for their attention.

To tackle the issue, a group of institutional leaders launched the “Strive for 85” campaign, encouraging instructors to raise their scores in Blackboard Ally, which provides automated feedback to instructors on the accessibility of their course materials, to 85 percent or higher. The idea was simple—make most course content accessible, starting with the most common problem: PDFs that are not machine-readable.

We kicked things off at our August 2024 “Ready, Set, Teach!” event, offering workshops and consultations. Instructors learned how to find and use their Ally reports, scan and convert PDFs, and apply practical strategies to improve digital content accessibility. In the year that followed, we tried everything we could think of to keep the momentum going and move the needle on our institutional Ally score above the baseline. Despite our best efforts, some approaches fell flat:
- Let’s try online workshops! Low engagement.
- What about in-person sessions? Low attendance.
- But what if we feed them lunch? Low attendance, now with a fridge full of leftovers.
- OK, what if we reach out to department chairs and ask to speak in their department meetings? It turns out department meeting agendas are already pretty full; response rates were … low (n = 1).
The truth is, instructors are busy. Accessibility often feels like one more thing on an already full plate. So far, our greatest success stories have come from one-on-one conversations and by identifying departmental champions—instructors who will model and advocate for accessible practices with discipline-specific solutions. (Consider the linguistics professor seeking an accurate 3-D model of the larynx collaborating with a health sciences colleague, who provided access to an interactive model from an online medical textbook—enhancing accessibility for students learning about speech production.)

But these approaches require time and people power we don’t always have. Despite the challenges we’ve faced with scaling our efforts, when success happens, it can feel a little magical, like the time at the end of one of our highly attended workshops (n = 2) when a previously skeptical instructor reflected, “So, it sounds like accessibility is about more than students with disabilities. This can also help my other students.”

What We’ve Learned
Two ingredients seem essential:

Activation energy: Instructors need a compelling reason to act, but they also need a small step to get started; otherwise, the work can feel overwhelming.
Sometimes this comes in the form of an individual student disclosing their need for accessible content. But often, college students (especially first year or first generation) don’t disclose disabilities or feel empowered to advocate for themselves. For some instructors, seeing their score in Ally is enough of a motivation—they’re high achievers, and they don’t want a “low grade” on anything linked to their name. More often, though, we’ve seen instructors engage in this work because a colleague or department chair tells them they need to. Leveraging positive peer pressure, coupled with quick practical solutions to improve accessibility, seems to be an effective approach.
1. Point-of-need support: Help must be timely, relevant and easy to access.
When instructors feel overwhelmed by the mountain of accessibility recommendations in their Ally reports, they are often hesitant to even get started. We’ve found that personal conversations about student engagement and course content or design often provide an opening to talk about accessibility. And once the door is open, instructors are often very receptive to hearing about a few small changes they can make to improve the accessibility of their course content.

Where Things Stand

Now for the reality check. So far, our institutional Ally score has been fairly stagnant; we haven’t reached the 85 percent goal we set for ourselves. And even for seasoned educational developers, it can be discouraging to see so little change after so much effort. But new tools offer hope. Ally recently announced planned updates to allow professors to remediate previously inaccessible PDFs directly in Blackboard without having to navigate to another platform. If reliable, this could make remediation more manageable, providing a solution at the point of need and lowering the activation energy required to solve the problem.

We’re also considering:
- Focus groups to better understand what motivates instructors to engage in this work.
- Exploring the effectiveness of pop-up notifications that appear with accessibility tips and reminders when instructors log in to Blackboard to raise awareness and make the most of point-of-need supports.
- Defining “reasonable measures” for compliance, especially for disciplines with unique content needs (e.g., organic chemistry, modern languages and linguistics).
Leading With Empathy

One unintended consequence we’ve seen: Some instructors are choosing to stop uploading digital content altogether. Faced with the complexity of digital accessibility requirements, they’re opting out rather than adapting. Although this could help our institutional compliance score, it’s often a net loss for students and for learning, so we want to find a path forward that doesn’t force instructors to make this kind of choice.

Accessibility is about equity, but it’s also about empathy. As we move toward 2026, we need to support—not scare—instructors into compliance. Every step we make toward increased accessibility helps our students. Every instructor champion working with their peers to find context-specific solutions helps further our institutional goals. Progress over perfection might be the only sustainable path forward.
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July 9, 2025
5 Steps to Update Assignments to Foster Critical Thinking and Authentic Learning in an AI Age – Faculty Focus

I recently attended a student panel on use of AI in college classes. The three panelists shared their perspectives, borne out in an April 2025 Gallup survey: they want to learn to use AI tools in appropriate ways, they’re anxious about the potential negative impact on their critical thinking skills, and they want explicit guidance from their faculty members—which they’re not consistently getting.

Even, or especially, in an AI age, we know our students need to think critically and learn authentically to be productive and engaged citizens and future employees. We recognize we need to update assignments to promote academic integrity in an AI age, yet many of us feel unprepared to do so. The crux of the problem is this: how do we foster critical thinking and authentic learning when it’s so easy for students to outsource their cognitive work?

One promising solution to the triple challenge of fostering critical thinking, meaningful learning, and academic integrity is to double down on transparency. We can provide the guidance students want, embed analysis and evaluation into our assignments to get at that all-important critical thinking, and nudge students toward integrity. How? By embracing transparency.

Let’s detail our expectations for responsible AI use. Let’s emphasize the why: why we want students to use their own cognitive abilities for some tasks, why using AI could be helpful at times, and why we’ve crafted our AI-integrated assignments in the ways we have. Finally, let’s ask students to disclose their use in full transparency (and reflect on their learning, as Marc Watkins argues here).

In short, we can promote integrity when assessments are meaningful, purposeful, and include transparent instruction on appropriate AI use. We can teach students to critically analyze AI-assisted work and promote authentic learning as we do. To help us achieve these aims, here are five steps to update assignments in ways that help students learn the skills they need while fostering a culture of academic honesty.

Step 1: Take a critical look at your current syllabus.

If you’re like me, you have tried-and-true activities and assignments that you’ve relied on for many years. Some of these may be updateable, but others may just need to go. If AI can easily complete a task (try running your instructions through a tool like ChatGPT to find out), maybe it’s no longer a relevant measure of authentic learning. Also, following the remaining steps below will likely mean that you add new instructional practices (like modelling AI use) and new components of the assignments you update (like a reflection on how AI helped or hindered learning). Make time for these important new course elements by getting rid of outdated tasks.

Step 2: Consider whether and how students should use AI on the assignments you keep.

Remember, students want to know exactly what is appropriate for AI use in your class. A helpful tool for this process is the 5-level AI Assessment Scale (AIAS). The levels range from No AI, AI Planning, AI Collaboration, Full AI, and AI Exploration. Each one identifies and sanctions different ways students can use AI in appropriate and meaningful ways to support their learning.

Leon Furze, one of the creators of the AIAS, presents it a tool that helps update our assignments and start conversations with our students. He recommends using this framework to guide your thinking: break down each assignment, project, or discussion board activity into disparate steps, then decide for which parts of the process AI use is appropriate. Providing transparent guidance, guidance that may vary for different parts of the project, is what students need right now.

Step 3: Carve out time to discuss and model your expectations.

Many students are not sure what is acceptable in this current moment. What better way to help them feel confident while developing the AI skills they need than modelling what you’re looking for? Take class time or record a video for your online class to teach your students what you expect them to do with AI for each assignment, what not to do, and what you’ll be looking for in their finished product.

As you approach this aspect of instruction, take heart. I don’t think every instructor needs to be an AI expert, but I do think we’re doing our students a disservice if we’re not teaching them how to be AI Whisperers, a concept I gleaned from Ethan Mollick’s 2024 book, Co-Intelligence. A new kind of expertise is emerging, he argues: the skilled and effective use of AI in every field. As disciplinary experts, you know what kind of AI use will help students learn your material and what will disempower them as learners. Let’s allocate time to help students develop AI literacy while maintaining their agency.

Step 4: Ask students to disclose their AI use, as noted above.

The student panelists showed palpable relief when they described instructors who simply had them cite their use of AI. “Encourage your students to be transparent about their AI use,” one student, a finance major, said. As she talked about how simple it was to add a line at the end of the assignment such as, “ChatGPT generated the outline for this essay,” the anxiety that had previously clouded her expression disappeared.

One approach is to use the AI Disclosure (AID) framework to document how students used AI, or add an appendix to each assignment, or add comments or footnotes to make transparent what they wrote and what AI wrote. Get students to declare their AI use and even better, ask them to reflect on whether their use helped or hindered their learning.

Step 5: If you suspect inappropriate use of AI, don’t accuse students of cheating.

Instead, have a conversation with them. Recall that a primary goal of the AIAS is to facilitate discussions about AI use. Imagine that as a class, you agreed that Level 2 (AI Planning) was appropriate for a particular project. If a student submits work that seems to have been completed at Level 4 (Full AI), refer back to the framework to facilitate a conversation about your perception of their work and their process. As AIAS co-creator Leon Furze points out, now you can get away from wondering whether a student cheated with AI and instead ask, “can I make a valid judgement of this student’s capabilities [whether they have used AI or not]?”

And as argued by the authors of a new book titled The Opposite of Cheating: Teaching for Integrity in an Age of AI, this takes moral accusation out of the conversation, reduces the adversarial tone, and enables students to reflect on and hopefully learn from the experience. You can also decide together what actions should take place next, whether the student resubmits the assignment in accordance with your AI-usage guidance, whether they lose the opportunity to earn a grade for that assignment, or whatever else you and your student decide is appropriate in that situation.

Students want to know how to use AI well. “If we don’t teach students how to use AI responsibly, they’re going to be poorly equipped for the workforce,” said the third student panelist, a computer science major. Let’s update our assignments to facilitate meaningful learning of our content, the skills students need in an AI age, and ethical, integrous use of AI to equip them for the workplace they’ll enter. In doing so, we’re helping to develop engaged citizens who think critically about information they encounter. I can’t think of more important work to be engaged in at this moment in time.

Flower Darby is an associate director of the Teaching for Learning Center at the University of Missouri, a co-author of The Norton Guide to Equity-Minded Teaching (2023), and the lead author, with James M. Lang, of Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science in Online Classes (2019).

References

Bertram Gallant, Tricia, and David A. Rettinger. 2025. The Opposite of Cheating: Teaching for Integrity in the Age of AI. University of Oklahoma Press.

Furze, Leon. 2024. “Updating the AI Assessment Scale.” August 28. https://leonfurze.com/2024/08/28/updating-the-ai-assessment-scale/

Furze, Leon. 2025. LinkedIn post. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/leonfurze_artificialintelligence-aieducation-assessment-activity-7295247135480889346-UWFC/

Kassorla, M. 2024. “Our New Course: Some Highlights.” January 4. https://michellekassorla.substack.com/p/our-new-course-some-highlights

McMurtrie, Beth. 2025. “AI Unready.” January 30. https://www.chronicle.com/newsletter/teaching/2025-01-30?utm_source=Iterable&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=campaign_12441556_nl_Teaching_date_20250130&sra=true

Mollick, E. 2024. Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI. Portfolio.

Walton Family Foundation and Gallup. 2025. How American Youth View and Use Artificial Intelligence. https://www.gallup.com/analytics/658901/walton-family-foundation-gallup-voices-gen-american-youth.aspx

Watkins, Marc. 2024. “Make AI Part of the Assignment.” October 2. https://www.chronicle.com/article/make-ai-part-of-the-assignment?sra=true

Weaver, Kari D. 2024. “The Artificial Intelligence Disclosure (AID) Framework: An Introduction.” College & Research Libraries News 85 (10). https://crln.acrl.org/index.php/crlnews/article/view/26548/34482

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July 9, 2025
Galvanizing Student Voters: Lessons from the Inaugural Semester of “Plattsburgh Votes” at SUNY Plattsburgh – Faculty Focus

The United States typically sees an uptick in the general public’s interest in civic issues during presidential election years. According to the Pew Research Center, Americans more closely follow the news during such years, and the 2024 election cycle was no exception to what Pew calls the “typical election year surge” (Younis 2020).

On college campuses, this trend can be palpable as well, with students, faculty, and staff feeling more inclined to get involved in civic affairs in some way. Yet it can be difficult to know how to do so, especially on campuses where there is not already a robust civic participation infrastructure.

This article offers a retrospective on our incipient effort in fall 2024 at SUNY Plattsburgh to grow an organization – dubbed simply Plattsburgh Votes – to educate students (in a nonpartisan manner) about voting and to ultimately boost turnout. This is intended to provide guidance for others seeking to galvanize student voting and to create a foundational civic infrastructure on their own campuses for future election cycles. It outlines our approach to conceptualizing student voter engagement, details some key organizational support that is widely accessible to campuses, and reflects on the relative success of different methods of outreach to students.

Understanding the Student Voter Gap

The perception that the latest cohort of young adults is somehow less civically-inclined or interested in politics and current events is, ironically, a trope that recurs with each successive generation. Survey data, however, seem to contradict this notion for members of both the Millennial Generation and Generation Z. According to the American National Election Survey (a reputable source of data widely utilized by political scientists) for instance, young voters (defined as people aged 18-29) in fact show higher levels of interest in elections and public affairs since the turn of the millennium compared to what they reported on surveys conducted between 1976 and 2000 (Holbein and Hillygus 2020, 9).

In this vein, when conceptualizing Plattsburgh Votes, my collaborator Dr. Daniel Lake (Associate Professor of Political Science) and I channeled the framework for understanding young voters’ behavior offered by political scientists John Holbein and Sunshine Hillygus. Hillygus and Holbein note that while young people indeed exhibit a threshold level of interest in elections and civic affairs, there is still a disconnect between these attitudes and their rates of actual voting. Further, many of them intend to vote, but simply do not manage to – a gap that reaches 30% in some ANES data. As the authors summarize the situation, “young people are not turned off by politics…and yet they are not voting in US elections” (Holbein and Hillygus 2020, 8).

To explain the disconnect, they point to what behavioral scientists call “noncognitive skills” as the key impediment to voting among young people. The definition of noncognitive skills varies by context, but they generally refer to “patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior” rather than cognitive aptitudes like reasoning, understanding, and problem solving” (Bjorklund-Young 2016). Noncognitive skills are critical in what Hillygus and Holbein call “follow through” for young people in navigating the practical obstacles and time costs associated with voting, which can be formidable for those unfamiliar with the system (Holbein and Hillygus 2020, 14).

Our voter education efforts at SUNY Plattsburgh were therefore oriented toward ameliorating some of these practical barriers to voting, and in the process, helping reinforce the cultivation of the noncognitive skills that students need in order to be civically engaged.

Helping Students Navigate Location-Based Voting Decisions

One reality that became apparent very quickly is that students largely do not have difficulty registering to vote in some capacity before they arrive at college. Our on-the-ground experience echoed the data for our campus tabulated by the National Study of Voting, Learning, and Engagement (NSLVE) project at Tufts University, which is available for most campuses in the United States (National Study of Learning, Voting and Engagement 2025). Our latest NSLVE data indicated a registration rate above 70 percent even during the 2022 midterm election cycle. Whether this is due to efforts by K-12 institutions, the success of “motor voter” laws that enable registration when applying for a driver license or other ID, or some other factor, a large majority of the students we contacted through various outreach efforts indeed reported that they were already registered to vote. This of course has implications for how we address our practical guidance: if the majority of them are successfully registered, what is it that they still need help with?

Our experience with Plattsburgh Votes indicates that possibly the most significant remaining hurdle is young people’s relative lack of awareness that voting is a location-specific activity. Perhaps the most important work conducted by our organization involved the tabling efforts, class visits, and digital outreach geared specifically toward helping students make proactive decisions about where they wanted to vote (using either their home or college address), to check where they were indeed registered, and to request absentee ballots. Yet judging by the volume of students who were still unaware that these options required decisive action before a deadline, it is clear that earlier and more emphatic efforts are necessary to help students actually follow through on their intentions.

Peer-to-Peer Outreach: What Worked—and What Didn’t

Another significant takeaway from the fall 2024 initiative concerns the importance of peer influence in student voter education. As Dr. Allison Rank, a political scientist, veteran organizer, and director of SUNY Oswego’s robust “Vote Oswego” initiative emphasized in guidance to our group, students are more receptive to information delivered face-to-face by a peer than from faculty or another authority figure in any medium. Thanks to our submission of an action plan with the All-In Democracy Challenge – which “outline[s] a campus’ landscape, leadership team, goals, strategies and tactics, and evaluation processes” for encouraging voter participation – we were consequently eligible to apply for and receive a mini-grant from All-In that was used to hire three student interns (ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge 2025). Using collectively generated presentations and educational material, these interns took the lead in delivering our in-person educational outreach efforts during the fall 2024 semester.

Yet we learned quickly that in-person outreach efforts led by student peers still must be strategically responsive to the realities of how students apportion their time and attention. Informational classroom visits by student advocates can be especially effective because students can be coached through a process like (re-)registering or requesting a ballot on the spot, minimizing the need for subsequent steps to be completed on their own. To that end, our group likewise concluded that it behooves organizers to focus classroom visits on one discrete process (e.g. “requesting a ballot to vote by mail”) rather than delivering a presentation that covers all relevant aspects of voting comprehensively.

Other forms of outreach were less successful, however. For instance, the student interns reported dismal attendance at the “voting office hours” that they held in common areas of the college residence buildings. While it is possible that our method of publicizing their availability through emails from the residence life director was suboptimal in garnering student attention, the experience also seemed to indicate significant reluctance on the part of students to plan in advance to seek out help and proactively ask questions. Instead, approaches in which the voter education organization’s representatives initiate the contact seem more promising.

The Untapped Power of Pledges

Finally, one tactic which Plattsburgh Votes did not have the time or resources to pursue extensively in fall 2024 was securing pledges from students to take particular voting actions.

Both research as well as conventional wisdom in grassroots organizing holds that people are generally more likely to follow through on an action when they have pledged to take it. Political science researchers testing whether pledging to vote affected voter turnout in fact found specifically that first-time young voters were likeliest to follow through and vote when they pledged to (Costa, Schaffner, and Prevost 2018). It seems promising, then, for both our organization and any others engaging in student voter education to brainstorm methods of soliciting pledges from students and then following up to remind them of their pledges as deadlines approach.

The campus-specific data on 2024 voter turnout from NSLVE is not yet available. Preliminary reports from the CIRCLE organization at Tufts (which administers the program) estimates that youth turnout in 2024 was down from 2020 to a rate of around 42%, but was stronger in battleground states like Pennsylvania (Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement 2025).We are confident that Plattsburgh Votes was able to have some impact on closing the gap between registration rate and actual voter turnout, but the precise magnitude remains to be seen. Regardless, it is clear that continued effort on campuses is necessary. The efforts must find creative, contextually-sensitive ways to account for the role that “noncognitive skills” play in affecting voting behavior and help students with the procedural aspects of voting so that they can successfully follow through on their intentions.

Dr. Ben Medeiros is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at SUNY Plattsburgh. His teaching and research focus on political communication, media law, and digital media culture. Medeiros is on the editorial board of the journal Communication & Democracy and the author of the book Reputation Management Online: America’s ‘Right To Be Forgotten’ (Routledge/National Communication Association, 2022).

References

ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge. “Campus Action Plan Development.” ALL IN Challenge. Accessed June 18, 2025. https://allinchallenge.org/resources/action-plans/.

Bjorklund-Young, Alanna. What Do We Know About Developing Students’ Non-cognitive Skills? Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy, June 2016. https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/e7ed674e-6fab-4339-95e2-50c0d78e6833/content.

Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. “The Youth Vote in 2024.” CIRCLE. Accessed June 18, 2025. https://circle.tufts.edu/2024-election.

Costa, Mia, Brian F. Schaffner, and Alicia Prevost. “Walking the Walk? Experiments on the Effect of Pledging to Vote on Youth Turnout.” PLoS One 13, no. 5 (May 29, 2018): e0197066. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0197066.

Holbein, John B., and D. Sunshine Hillygus. Making Young Voters: Converting Civic Attitudes into Civic Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

National Study of Learning, Voting and Engagement. “About NSLVE.” National Study of Learning, Voting and Engagement. Accessed June 18, 2025. https://nslve.tufts.edu/about-us.

Younis, Mohamed. “In U.S., Attention to Politics Shows Typical Election Year Surge.” Gallup. September 23, 2020. https://news.gallup.com/poll/320738/attention-politics-shows-typical-election-year-surge.aspx.

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July 7, 2025
Galvanizing Student Voters: Lessons from the Inaugural Semester of “Plattsburgh Votes” at SUNY Plattsburgh – Faculty Focus

The United States typically sees an uptick in the general public’s interest in civic issues during presidential election years. According to the Pew Research Center, Americans more closely follow the news during such years, and the 2024 election cycle was no exception to what Pew calls the “typical election year surge” (Younis 2020).

On college campuses, this trend can be palpable as well, with students, faculty, and staff feeling more inclined to get involved in civic affairs in some way. Yet it can be difficult to know how to do so, especially on campuses where there is not already a robust civic participation infrastructure.

This article offers a retrospective on our incipient effort in fall 2024 at SUNY Plattsburgh to grow an organization – dubbed simply Plattsburgh Votes – to educate students (in a nonpartisan manner) about voting and to ultimately boost turnout. This is intended to provide guidance for others seeking to galvanize student voting and to create a foundational civic infrastructure on their own campuses for future election cycles. It outlines our approach to conceptualizing student voter engagement, details some key organizational support that is widely accessible to campuses, and reflects on the relative success of different methods of outreach to students.

Understanding the Student Voter Gap

The perception that the latest cohort of young adults is somehow less civically-inclined or interested in politics and current events is, ironically, a trope that recurs with each successive generation. Survey data, however, seem to contradict this notion for members of both the Millennial Generation and Generation Z. According to the American National Election Survey (a reputable source of data widely utilized by political scientists) for instance, young voters (defined as people aged 18-29) in fact show higher levels of interest in elections and public affairs since the turn of the millennium compared to what they reported on surveys conducted between 1976 and 2000 (Holbein and Hillygus 2020, 9).

In this vein, when conceptualizing Plattsburgh Votes, my collaborator Dr. Daniel Lake (Associate Professor of Political Science) and I channeled the framework for understanding young voters’ behavior offered by political scientists John Holbein and Sunshine Hillygus. Hillygus and Holbein note that while young people indeed exhibit a threshold level of interest in elections and civic affairs, there is still a disconnect between these attitudes and their rates of actual voting. Further, many of them intend to vote, but simply do not manage to – a gap that reaches 30% in some ANES data. As the authors summarize the situation, “young people are not turned off by politics…and yet they are not voting in US elections” (Holbein and Hillygus 2020, 8).

To explain the disconnect, they point to what behavioral scientists call “noncognitive skills” as the key impediment to voting among young people. The definition of noncognitive skills varies by context, but they generally refer to “patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior” rather than cognitive aptitudes like reasoning, understanding, and problem solving” (Bjorklund-Young 2016). Noncognitive skills are critical in what Hillygus and Holbein call “follow through” for young people in navigating the practical obstacles and time costs associated with voting, which can be formidable for those unfamiliar with the system (Holbein and Hillygus 2020, 14).

Our voter education efforts at SUNY Plattsburgh were therefore oriented toward ameliorating some of these practical barriers to voting, and in the process, helping reinforce the cultivation of the noncognitive skills that students need in order to be civically engaged.

Helping Students Navigate Location-Based Voting Decisions

One reality that became apparent very quickly is that students largely do not have difficulty registering to vote in some capacity before they arrive at college. Our on-the-ground experience echoed the data for our campus tabulated by the National Study of Voting, Learning, and Engagement (NSLVE) project at Tufts University, which is available for most campuses in the United States (National Study of Learning, Voting and Engagement 2025). Our latest NSLVE data indicated a registration rate above 70 percent even during the 2022 midterm election cycle. Whether this is due to efforts by K-12 institutions, the success of “motor voter” laws that enable registration when applying for a driver license or other ID, or some other factor, a large majority of the students we contacted through various outreach efforts indeed reported that they were already registered to vote. This of course has implications for how we address our practical guidance: if the majority of them are successfully registered, what is it that they still need help with?

Our experience with Plattsburgh Votes indicates that possibly the most significant remaining hurdle is young people’s relative lack of awareness that voting is a location-specific activity. Perhaps the most important work conducted by our organization involved the tabling efforts, class visits, and digital outreach geared specifically toward helping students make proactive decisions about where they wanted to vote (using either their home or college address), to check where they were indeed registered, and to request absentee ballots. Yet judging by the volume of students who were still unaware that these options required decisive action before a deadline, it is clear that earlier and more emphatic efforts are necessary to help students actually follow through on their intentions.

Peer-to-Peer Outreach: What Worked—and What Didn’t

Another significant takeaway from the fall 2024 initiative concerns the importance of peer influence in student voter education. As Dr. Allison Rank, a political scientist, veteran organizer, and director of SUNY Oswego’s robust “Vote Oswego” initiative emphasized in guidance to our group, students are more receptive to information delivered face-to-face by a peer than from faculty or another authority figure in any medium. Thanks to our submission of an action plan with the All-In Democracy Challenge – which “outline[s] a campus’ landscape, leadership team, goals, strategies and tactics, and evaluation processes” for encouraging voter participation – we were consequently eligible to apply for and receive a mini-grant from All-In that was used to hire three student interns (ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge 2025). Using collectively generated presentations and educational material, these interns took the lead in delivering our in-person educational outreach efforts during the fall 2024 semester.

Yet we learned quickly that in-person outreach efforts led by student peers still must be strategically responsive to the realities of how students apportion their time and attention. Informational classroom visits by student advocates can be especially effective because students can be coached through a process like (re-)registering or requesting a ballot on the spot, minimizing the need for subsequent steps to be completed on their own. To that end, our group likewise concluded that it behooves organizers to focus classroom visits on one discrete process (e.g. “requesting a ballot to vote by mail”) rather than delivering a presentation that covers all relevant aspects of voting comprehensively.

Other forms of outreach were less successful, however. For instance, the student interns reported dismal attendance at the “voting office hours” that they held in common areas of the college residence buildings. While it is possible that our method of publicizing their availability through emails from the residence life director was suboptimal in garnering student attention, the experience also seemed to indicate significant reluctance on the part of students to plan in advance to seek out help and proactively ask questions. Instead, approaches in which the voter education organization’s representatives initiate the contact seem more promising.

The Untapped Power of Pledges

Finally, one tactic which Plattsburgh Votes did not have the time or resources to pursue extensively in fall 2024 was securing pledges from students to take particular voting actions.

Both research as well as conventional wisdom in grassroots organizing holds that people are generally more likely to follow through on an action when they have pledged to take it. Political science researchers testing whether pledging to vote affected voter turnout in fact found specifically that first-time young voters were likeliest to follow through and vote when they pledged to (Costa, Schaffner, and Prevost 2018). It seems promising, then, for both our organization and any others engaging in student voter education to brainstorm methods of soliciting pledges from students and then following up to remind them of their pledges as deadlines approach.

The campus-specific data on 2024 voter turnout from NSLVE is not yet available. Preliminary reports from the CIRCLE organization at Tufts (which administers the program) estimates that youth turnout in 2024 was down from 2020 to a rate of around 42%, but was stronger in battleground states like Pennsylvania (Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement 2025).We are confident that Plattsburgh Votes was able to have some impact on closing the gap between registration rate and actual voter turnout, but the precise magnitude remains to be seen. Regardless, it is clear that continued effort on campuses is necessary. The efforts must find creative, contextually-sensitive ways to account for the role that “noncognitive skills” play in affecting voting behavior and help students with the procedural aspects of voting so that they can successfully follow through on their intentions.

Dr. Ben Medeiros is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at SUNY Plattsburgh. His teaching and research focus on political communication, media law, and digital media culture. Medeiros is on the editorial board of the journal Communication & Democracy and the author of the book Reputation Management Online: America’s ‘Right To Be Forgotten’ (Routledge/National Communication Association, 2022).

References

ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge. “Campus Action Plan Development.” ALL IN Challenge. Accessed June 18, 2025. https://allinchallenge.org/resources/action-plans/.

Bjorklund-Young, Alanna. What Do We Know About Developing Students’ Non-cognitive Skills? Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy, June 2016. https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/e7ed674e-6fab-4339-95e2-50c0d78e6833/content.

Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. “The Youth Vote in 2024.” CIRCLE. Accessed June 18, 2025. https://circle.tufts.edu/2024-election.

Costa, Mia, Brian F. Schaffner, and Alicia Prevost. “Walking the Walk? Experiments on the Effect of Pledging to Vote on Youth Turnout.” PLoS One 13, no. 5 (May 29, 2018): e0197066. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0197066.

Holbein, John B., and D. Sunshine Hillygus. Making Young Voters: Converting Civic Attitudes into Civic Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

National Study of Learning, Voting and Engagement. “About NSLVE.” National Study of Learning, Voting and Engagement. Accessed June 18, 2025. https://nslve.tufts.edu/about-us.

Younis, Mohamed. “In U.S., Attention to Politics Shows Typical Election Year Surge.” Gallup. September 23, 2020. https://news.gallup.com/poll/320738/attention-politics-shows-typical-election-year-surge.aspx.

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July 7, 2025
Reimagining the Flipped Classroom: Integrating AI, Microlearning, and Learning Analytics to Elevate Student Engagement and Critical Thinking – Faculty Focus

The traditional flipped classroom model, which reverses the conventional lecture-homework structure, has evolved significantly since its inception. In the digital era, especially post-pandemic, this strategy has gained renewed importance for fostering active learning, critical thinking, and academic resilience. Today, the flipped classroom is no longer just about moving lectures online but about curating immersive, personalized learning environments. The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI), microlearning, and learning analytics provides new dimensions to this pedagogical approach, enhancing both student preparation and in-class engagement. This article explores how these three components can reshape flipped learning and address persistent challenges such as student unpreparedness, fear of participation, and lack of motivation.

Flipped Classroom 2.0: Enriching the Core Strategy

The original flipped classroom model aimed to reverse the traditional structure of education by shifting the transmission of basic content, often done through lectures, outside the classroom, while using face-to-face class time for active engagement and problem-solving. While this model offered significant benefits, the ever-changing dynamics of education in the digital era demand a more adaptive and responsive framework. This has led to the evolution of Flipped Classroom 2.0, a pedagogy that not only retains the foundational principles of the original model but enhances them with modern technologies and learner-centered practices.

AI Tools

In the Flipped Classroom 2.0 model, the learning process is amplified by integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools, which help personalize student learning pathways. AI-enabled systems such as adaptive learning platforms, chatbots, and generative tools like ChatGPT can provide students with on-demand explanations, simulate peer discussions, offer low-stakes quizzes, and give instant feedback. This technological support allows students to learn at their own pace and revisit complex material without feeling anxious or dependent solely on the instructor. From the educator’s side, AI tools help identify patterns in learner behavior and performance, allowing for more targeted interventions during class time.

Microlearning

Microlearning plays a central role in supporting pre-class preparation under the Flipped Classroom 2.0 framework. Instead of overwhelming students with lengthy video lectures or dense readings, microlearning delivers short, focused modules that concentrate on single learning objectives. These modules are ideal for students who are accustomed to fast-paced digital environments and may have limited attention spans. Microlearning enhances retention by segmenting information and reinforcing key concepts through repetition and brief assessments. It also empowers students to learn efficiently on mobile devices and during flexible hours, which is particularly valuable in hybrid and online learning contexts.

Learning Analytics

Learning analytics represents another foundational component of the Flipped Classroom 2.0 design. By utilizing Learning Management Systems (LMS) and built-in analytics dashboards, instructors can gain valuable insights into which students have completed pre-class activities, how they have performed, and where they may need additional support. Analytics tools also promote student accountability, as learners are able to track their own progress and receive early alerts when they are falling behind. These data-driven approaches make it possible to transition from reactive teaching to proactive guidance.

Collectively, these innovations: AI, microlearning, and learning analytics, enhance the effectiveness of the flipped classroom by aligning content delivery, student support, and real-time feedback. Flipped Classroom 2.0 is not merely a technological upgrade; it is a reimagined learning experience that promotes self-directed learning, critical thinking, and inclusivity. It encourages students to become active participants rather than passive recipients, and it positions educators as facilitators and data-informed decision-makers in the learning process.

Understanding Student Resistance in the Digital Era

Unpreparedness often stems not from laziness or disinterest, but from deeper psychological or contextual barriers that influence a student’s ability to engage. In many cases, students may feel overwhelmed by the unfamiliarity of new instructional models or lack the confidence needed to navigate them successfully. This resistance is especially prominent in environments where flipped classroom strategies are introduced abruptly or without adequate scaffolding. In digitally enhanced learning spaces, Artificial Intelligence tools can serve as diagnostic aids to help educators understand the roots of student resistance.

By monitoring metrics such as time spent on tasks, levels of participation, and types of interactions within pre-class activities, AI systems can identify patterns of disengagement or confusion. For example, if students frequently abandon certain video modules or quiz sections, this may signal content complexity, misalignment with learning styles, or underlying cognitive fatigue. Moreover, many students, especially those transitioning from traditional learning environments, may carry negative assumptions about active learning approaches. They may perceive them as chaotic, unpredictable, or more demanding than passive learning formats. Educators must dig deeper to explore these sentiments and confront the emotional undercurrents that influence classroom behavior. Addressing resistance with empathy, transparency, and gradual acclimatization is crucial for long-term student buy-in.

Addressing Fear Through Technology-Supported Safety

Fear is one of the most formidable barriers to classroom participation. Whether it’s the fear of giving incorrect answers, speaking publicly, or being judged by peers, these emotions can significantly hinder student engagement. In the flipped classroom, where much of the responsibility for learning shifts to students, this fear may become even more pronounced if not properly addressed. Technology, particularly AI-driven tools, can be strategically used to create psychologically safe learning environments. For example, private practice environments powered by chatbots or simulations can offer students a space to make mistakes, ask questions, and rehearse ideas without fear of embarrassment. These tools are particularly beneficial for introverted students or those who lack confidence in their subject knowledge.

Microlearning also plays a vital role in reducing anxiety. By breaking down complex content into manageable chunks, students can focus on mastering one concept at a time. This incremental mastery builds confidence and reduces cognitive overload. When paired with formative assessments and feedback loops, microlearning helps normalize error-making as part of the learning process. Analytics further enhance psychological safety by providing both educators and students with objective data on progress. When students see that others are also struggling with the same concepts or that their performance is gradually improving, they are more likely to perceive learning as a collective and iterative journey.

Making Learning Visible with Analytics and Scaffolds

Visibility of learning progress is essential in maintaining student accountability and fostering meaningful classroom interactions. In traditional flipped classrooms, instructors often face the challenge of determining whether students have genuinely completed pre-class tasks or engaged with the material in a substantive way.

Flipped Classroom 2.0 addresses this issue by leveraging data and scaffolding techniques that make learning both measurable and visible. Learning analytics tools embedded in LMS platforms can track completion rates, quiz scores, engagement time, and areas of difficulty. This data is accessible to both teachers and students through visual dashboards, which serve as powerful motivators and intervention tools. Educators can use this information to adjust instruction, form differentiated groups and provide individualized support. Scaffolding further supports this visibility. Templates, guided note-taking structures, interactive mind maps, and learning journals help students organize their thoughts and reflect on their understanding. When integrated with AI, these scaffolds can be customized based on student performance and learning preferences. This transparency not only improves learning outcomes but also enhances communication between instructors and students.

Designing Pre-Class Work That Drives In-Class Success

A key feature of the flipped classroom model is the dependency on students completing pre-class work so they can actively participate in class discussions and activities. However, the perceived value of pre-class tasks directly influences student compliance and effort. To elevate this value, educators must clearly connect pre-class preparation with in-class success. AI can support this connection by generating customized content summaries, quizzes, and diagnostic questions based on each student’s pre-class performance. For instance, if a student demonstrates mastery of foundational concepts, they can be prompted with higher-order questions to challenge their thinking. Conversely, students who struggle can be provided with remedial resources and practice modules. In-class activities should build directly on pre-class efforts. Group discussions, simulations, debates, and problem-solving exercises should reference or utilize outputs from the pre-class assignments. This integration reinforces the message that preparation is essential for success and ensures that students recognize the practical benefits of investing time in asynchronous learning.

Gamification techniques, such as digital badges, progress milestones, and peer recognition can further motivate students to complete pre-class tasks. When these activities contribute to course grades or unlock exclusive learning opportunities, their relevance is amplified.

Establishing Routine and Engagement with Focusing Activities

The transition from asynchronous pre-class learning to synchronous in-class application can be challenging if not facilitated through structured routines. Focusing activities, particularly those conducted at the beginning of class, serve as critical bridges that help students activate prior knowledge and reorient their attention. These activities may include short reflective prompts, polls, problem-solving warmups, or collaborative brainstorming sessions. When enhanced with technology, focusing activities become even more impactful. For example, AI-driven polling platforms can pose adaptive questions tailored to the students’ recent performance.

Visualization tools can help students construct or revise concept maps based on their understanding of the pre-class content. Establishing predictable routines around these activities builds habits of participation. Over time, students internalize the rhythm of flipped learning: prepare independently, apply collaboratively, reflect continuously. Such engagement patterns increase cognitive readiness and reduce classroom management challenges.

Avoiding Pitfalls in Tech-Enhanced Flipped Classrooms

While Flipped Classroom 2.0 offers numerous benefits, its success is contingent upon thoughtful implementation. Several common pitfalls can undermine the model’s effectiveness. One of the most prevalent mistakes is treating technology as a substitute for pedagogy. Simply replacing lectures with videos or adding quizzes does not constitute a true flip. Without alignment to learning objectives and instructional goals, these tools can confuse rather than support learners.

Another challenge is content overload. Students may feel overwhelmed if asked to review long readings, videos, and quizzes without clear guidance or purpose. Microlearning and scaffolding should be used to break down materials and provide learning pathways that are manageable and coherent. Educator readiness is another often-overlooked factor. Successful adoption of AI tools and data dashboards requires faculty training and support. Instructors must be equipped not only with technical skills but also with an understanding of how to interpret analytics and adjust pedagogy accordingly.

Lastly, student feedback should be incorporated into the design and refinement of flipped classroom practices. Continuous evaluation, surveys, and informal check-ins can reveal usability issues and highlight opportunities for improvement.

Toward a Future-Ready Learning Model

Reimagining the flipped classroom requires more than adopting trendy tools, it demands a philosophical shift. By combining AI, microlearning, and learning analytics, educators can create classrooms that are not only flipped but also fluid, feedback-driven, and future-ready. These strategies support student autonomy, foster critical thinking, and build academic resilience in an unpredictable world. The next frontier of flipped learning is not about technology for its own sake, but about purposeful integration that places learners at the center.

N. P. K. Ekanayake

Ms. Neranjana Priyangani Kumari Ekanayake, a senior lecturer at the University of Kelaniya, teaches Investment and Portfolio Management, Enterprise Resource Planning, Behavioural Finance, and Advanced Management Accounting. She holds a BBA in Accounting (Special) and an MSc in MMs. Neranjana Priyangani Kumari Ekanayake, a senior lecturer at the University of Kelaniya, teaches Investment and Portfolio Management, Enterprise Resource Planning, Behavioural Finance, and Advanced Management Accounting. She holds a BBA in Accounting (Special) first-class and an MSc in Management (Specialized in Finance) and is a CIMA passed finalist. Further she has completed a Diploma in Enterprise Resource Planning in University of Kelaniya.

N.K.L. Silva

Ms. Nilanthige Kaushalya Lakmali Silva is a Lecturer at the Department of Accountancy, University of Kelaniya. She teaches Management, Economics, Human Resource Management, Marketing Management, Strategic Management and Information Management. Ms. Silva holds a B.B.Mgt. (Special) Degree in Accountancy with a First-Class Honours and an M.Sc. in Management with a Merit. Her research interests include major areas of Accounting and Finance, with a particular focus on Sri Lanka’s Capital Markets, Micro and Macro Economic Environment, Corporate Governance, and Corporate Fraud. She has published several research papers in academic journals and conference proceedings. She is a CMA Sri Lanka Passed Finalist and has completed the Diploma in Banking and Finance at the Institute of Bankers of Sri Lanka.

References

Berrett, D. (2012, February 19). How “flipping” the classroom can improve the traditional lecture. Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-flipping-the-classroom-can-improve-the-traditional-lecture/130857

Gerstein, J. (2012, May 15). Flipped classroom: The full picture for higher education. User Generated Education. https://usergeneratededucation.wordpress.com/2012/05/15/flipped-classroom-the-full-picture-for-higher-education/

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July 2, 2025
Integrating Systems Thinking to Enhance Liberal Arts Curriculum through Learner-Centered Teaching – Faculty Focus
Liberal arts education empowers individuals to become well-rounded to handle complexity, diversity, and change by providing broad knowledge of the world and in-depth study in a specific area. It fosters social responsibility, strong intellectual and practical skills, and the ability to think critically to apply knowledge in real-world settings, combining general education with specialized study (Barker, 2000). Today’s modern liberal education typically encompasses a general education curriculum that offers extensive learning across various multiple disciplines and perspectives, paired with focused study in a chosen major.

Liberal arts education has long been valued for its broad-based approach to learning, fostering critical thinking, creativity, and a well-rounded knowledge base. However, in an increasingly complex and interconnected world, there is a growing need to enhance this traditional model with innovative teaching methods (Barker, 2000). Systems thinking and learning-centered teaching are two such approaches that, when integrated, can significantly enrich the liberal arts educational experience (Forrester, 2016). Key learning outcomes from a Liberal Arts Curriculum include:
- A liberal arts curriculum fosters a comprehensive understanding of human cultures and the physical and natural world through diverse fields such as sciences, mathematics, social sciences, humanities, histories, languages, and the arts. This knowledge is deepened by engaging with significant, both contemporary and enduring, real-world problems.
- Additionally, it cultivates intellectual and practical skills, including inquiry and analysis, critical and creative thinking, written and oral communication, quantitative literacy, information literacy, teamwork, and problem-solving. These skills are honed extensively across the curriculum, within the context of increasingly challenging problems, projects, and performance standards.
Systems Thinking Principles and Framework for Liberal Arts Curriculum and Interdisciplinary Learning

Systems thinking is a powerful tool for promoting students’ holistic thinking, interdisciplinary learning, critical and creative thinking skills for problem solving (Meadows, 2008; Richmond, 1994, 2000). Systems thinking complements interdisciplinary learning. For example, environmental science applies systems thinking to study ecosystems and environmental sustainability, integrating ecological, economic, and social dimensions to address environmental challenges holistically. Economics utilizes systemic relationships and feedback loops in its models to analyse market dynamics, resource allocation, and the impact of economic policies on various sectors. Sociology examines social systems through their structures, functions, and interactions, using systems thinking to understand societal issues like inequality, social change, and community dynamics. This synergy between systems thinking and liberal arts curriculum enhances students’ learning and ability to:
1. Identify Patterns and Relationships: Systems thinking helps students recognize patterns and relationships across disciplines, fostering a deeper understanding of how various factors interact within a system.
1. Develop Holistic Solutions: By considering the broader context, students can develop more holistic and sustainable solutions to complex problems.
1. Enhance Critical Thinking: Systems thinking encourages critical analysis and the ability to see beyond surface-level issues, promoting a more nuanced and informed approach to problem-solving.
For this it is essential to introduce the concepts and principles of systems thinking (Figure 1). It is essential for students to learn a variety of systems thinking concepts and tools such as plotting dynamic behaviour patterns (behaviour over-time graphs, BOTGs), causal loops diagrams (CLDs) with reinforcing (R) and balancing (B) feedback loops, system archetypes for constructing models (see for example, Meadows, 2008; Richmond, 1994, 2000; Sterman, 2000).

Figure 1. Tools of systems thinking

Applying these systems thinking tools and concepts students will be able to make connections between disciplines to achieve the intended learning outcomes through integrated learning and problem-solving skills.

Purpose and System/Problem Boundary Identification
- Purpose: In liberal arts, the purpose is to develop well-rounded individuals with critical thinking, problem-solving, and ethical reasoning skills. Systems thinking helps students understand the broader purpose of their education and how different disciplines interconnect.
- System or Problem Boundary Identification: This involves defining what is included within the system and what is excluded. In liberal arts, this helps students delineate the scope of their studies and understand the limits of their knowledge.
Causation and Feedback Loops
- Causation: Understanding cause-and-effect relationships is crucial in liberal arts. Systems thinking helps students analyze how different factors influence each other within a system.
- Feedback loops: This involves recognizing how outputs of a system can loop back as inputs, influencing future behavior. In liberal arts, this principle helps students understand dynamic interactions and long-term consequences of actions.
Validity Criteria and Experiment Design for Validity
- Validity Criteria: Establishing criteria to assess the validity of information and arguments is essential in liberal arts. Systems thinking provides tools to evaluate the reliability and relevance of data.
- Experiment Design for Validity: Designing experiments or studies to test hypotheses and validate theories is a key skill. Systems thinking helps students create robust experimental designs to identify the policy levers that account for complex variables.
Policy Space and Experiment Design for Policy
- Policy Space: This involves exploring different policy options and their potential impacts. In liberal arts, students learn to consider various perspectives and the broader implications of policies.
- Experiment Design for Policy: Designing experiments to test policy interventions helps students understand the practical applications of their studies. Systems thinking aids in creating comprehensive policy experiments that consider multiple factors.
Integration of Systems Approach and Learner-Centered Teaching

Learner-centered teaching, as outlined by Weimer (Weimer 2010, 2013), fundamentally transforms the traditional classroom into dynamic, placing students at the heart of their educational journey. This approach not only involves students in the intricate process of learning but also empowers them to take charge of their educational experiences. By fostering reflection, collaboration, and explicit skill development, learner-centered teaching equips students with critical thinking and problem-solving skills essential for lifelong learning and success. When this approach is harmoniously integrated with essential pedagogical actions for engaging in activities that require independent work or collaboration, students have the chance to discover their preferred learning methods, solve problems, and explore concepts on their own or with peers. Thus, this holistic approach empowers learners to become active, self-directed participants in their educational journey, preparing them for the challenges of the modern world (Blumberg, 2019).

Liberal arts education faces several challenges, including the need to stay relevant in a rapidly changing world and to equip students with skills that are applicable across various fields. Integrating systems thinking and learning-centered teaching can address these challenges by making education more dynamic, interactive, and applicable to real-life situations (Forrester, 2016). For example, a history course might use systems thinking to analyze historical events within broader social, economic, and political contexts, while employing learning-centered techniques to encourage students to draw parallels with contemporary issues. Integrating systems thinking into liberal arts education can be achieved through various learner-centered strategies:
1. Interdisciplinary Courses: Designing courses that explicitly incorporate systems thinking and draw on multiple disciplines can help students see the connections between different fields of study.
1. Project-Based Learning: Encouraging students to work on projects that require interdisciplinary collaboration and systems thinking can enhance their problem-solving skills and real-world application of knowledge.
1. Collaborative Learning Environments: Creating learning environments that promote collaboration and dialogue among students from diverse academic backgrounds can foster a culture of interdisciplinary learning.
In conclusion, teaching in a liberal arts classroom, learner-centered environments empower students to build their own understanding by drawing on their prior knowledge, beliefs, and cultural practices. By incorporating systems thinking into the design and implementation of liberal arts curriculum and interdisciplinary course content, institutions can further enhance students’ holistic thinking and creative problem-solving skills.

Dr. Bellam Sreenivasulu earned his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the National University of Singapore. He has taught at NUS, SUTD, and MDIS, and co-taught with MIT faculty at SUTD in Singapore. Currently, he is a Senior Lecturer at Residential College 4, NUS. He specializes in Systems Thinking and System Dynamics (ST&SD) education, focusing on energy systems, sustainable energy production, energy supply and demand, energy security, and carbon emissions. He also teaches a course on sleep health using systems approach. Passionate about interdisciplinary and learner-centered teaching and research.

References

Blumberg, P. (2019). Making learning-centered teaching work: Practical strategies for implementation (2nd ed.) Stylus.

Barker, C.M. (2000). Liberal Arts Education for a Global Society. New York: Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Forrester, J. W. (2016). Learning through System Dynamics as Preparation for the 21st Century. System Dynamics Review, 32, 187−203

Meadows, D. (2008). Thinking in Systems: A Primer (Chelsea Green Publishing, Hartford, VT).

Richmond, B. (2000). The “Thinking” in Systems Thinking: Seven Essential Skills (Pegasus Communications, Waltham, MA).

Weimer, M. (2010). Inspired college teaching. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Weimer, M. (2013). Learner-centered teaching: Five key changes to practice (2nd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass.
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June 23, 2025
Teaching at a Small Private College? Take our Advice – Faculty Focus

The authors of this article were three tenured and tenure-track faculty members in a teacher preparation program at a small private college in upstate New York. In December 2023, the college announced its closure following the spring, 2024 semester. After the announcement of our small private liberal arts college, we found ourselves redefining and reinventing our careers. Based on this experience of shock, mourning, and rebirth, we have advice to offer colleagues, especially those in teacher education.

It is no secret that enrollment in educator preparation programs nationwide has decreased by one-third to one-half over the last ten years. Simultaneously, costs associated with teacher preparation programs have increased. Accreditation costs, capstone portfolio software, and national and state certification exams have contributed to the enrollment “chill.” Political rhetoric regarding a teacher’s worth, teachers’ qualifications, and perception of the “return on investment” of a college degree have also contributed to lower enrollment numbers. We believe this adverse environment will continue for the foreseeable future.

The confluence of the political, economic, and practical factors is often hidden from faculty during the interview process. The philosophy of shared governance, displaying a college’s financial statements and “health statistics” is usually shrouded in “finance speak” at shared governance meetings. The administration and board of trustees fear the information will reach the press, thus shining a light on small endowments and how tuition-driven small private colleges are faring in today’s competitive climate. That open sharing only makes matters worse for an institution struggling to survive.

Here is our message: Take heed if you are a faculty member in educator preparation. We, the authors of this article, shared the same experience of college closure and loss of employment. However, we saw it through three different lenses: Jenni was an early tenure-track Assistant Professor; Julie was an Assistant Professor applying for rank and tenure; and Terri was a long-tenured Associate Professor who had once served as interim dean. Though viewed differently, we agree that tenure, and the pursuit of it, means little if your institution closes.

Jenni, the early career Assistant Professor, was in her second year of teaching at the institution after leaving an even smaller liberal arts institution which she felt was on shaky financial footing. She had the additional joy and stress of being pregnant with her second child when her new employer announced closure. The college would cease all operations at the close of the spring semester. She was now marked by an unlucky streak of two colleges, two closures. These circumstances had nothing to do with her competency. Jenni coordinated advisory board meetings and acted as the accreditation liaison for her entire department, and her teaching evaluations were strong.

Julie, the mid-career Assistant Professor, submitted her tenure portfolio in October, only to discover that the institution she believed would be her future academic home would no longer exist past the spring semester. The announcement left her in limbo. The board had not approved those recommended for tenure. The college also stated it was not going to vote on those submissions. A dedicated professional, with service hours, a record of scholarship, and stellar teaching evaluations should receive advancement in rank and tenure. Not only was she worthy of such recognition, but the faculty also believed that governance committees should continue their work, and the board should honor commitments to faculty, especially in light of the closure announcement. Julie had to find new employment. The advancement in rank would speak well for her future employment and contract negotiations.

For Terri, the tenured Associate Professor, the announcement came, not as a shock, since many knew the institution had experienced significant financial cutbacks over the years. However, she was looking toward another 5-10 years of dedication to scholarly work and shaping new teachers. She had dedicated 24 years to the institution and thought other institutions would not wish to hire someone who would indeed receive Professor Emeritus status had she retired immediately. She had been department chair, served as interim dean, and successfully led the last accreditation visit for the School of Education.

No matter the lens, each of us experienced a sense of shock, anger, and denial. We were living examples of Kubler-Ross’s stages of death and dying. The announcement came at the end of the fall semester when we gather evidence for accreditation, grade capstone portfolios, and perhaps, mentor student teachers who may have been unsuccessful during their last semester. In teacher preparation programs, the end of a semester is more complicated due to the external accreditation demands. It is always stressful, and knowing we were losing our jobs created more havoc. In addition, the college administration asked faculty to help develop teach-out plans for every current student and review transfer agreements with other institutions that were circling, like vultures, to acquire our students.

Though we cannot fully speak for one another, we agree that the holidays were a blur. The college’s last spring semester was about to start, and we were trying to support one another while performing triage on students. Going to campus was likened to caregiving for someone in hospice. The death was sure to come. We knew the date of the end of life. Simultaneously, we had to prepare for our professional futures.

Our questions at the time were as follows: Will I need to find work in another state? How does losing my job impact tuition exchange? How will we find employment for the following academic year when many searches have closed? Who will hire me, pregnant? Who will hire me at my advanced career stage? Should we re-enter the PK-12 classroom?

Based on this experience, we wish to warn our colleagues in educator preparation at small private institutions nationwide. Having tenure, going up for tenure, and moving early in one’s career to another institution thought to be more stable, spared none of us. So, take our experience as a cautionary tale. The most beneficial action you take now may help you leverage your next position, within or outside teacher preparation.

First, diversify your academic portfolio.

Develop a secondary passion in online pedagogy in teacher preparation, all matters of accreditation, or teacher induction through your state education department. These diversified interests may create new possibilities in state government policy development, technology, or research efforts.

Secondly, get involved in state and local teacher preparation professional organizations.

The meaningful connections you make within those networks provide you with the “inside scoop” on possible job openings, some of which may enable you to stay in your current home. Other colleges and universities surrounding your current institution may have opportunities that do not appear evident during extreme stress.

Finally, let your work and research ethic at your current institution be outstanding.

Should you move to another educator preparation position, your work on college or university governance, your knowledge of accreditation and certification, the record of acting as an involved and innovative club advisor, and strong collaboration with PK-12 partners will serve you well during stressful times. Tenure is nice, but diversified interests, your passion, a record of leadership in state and national professional activities, and a history of a strong work ethic will prove highly beneficial.

In the end, Jenni, the early career faculty member found a position ten miles from her current college in a neighboring private institution that agreed, with state approval, to subsume current programs so students could continue their education uninterrupted. She is currently on a tenure track line and has a beautiful new son. The mid-career Assistant Professor, Julie, received advanced rank and tenure at the closing institution. She is now an Associate Professor under a new contract at a new public comprehensive institution. She relocated approximately 100 miles to be near her new position. The senior faculty member, Terri, was sought out for her knowledge regarding accreditation and certification but was granted Assistant Professor status. She teaches at an entirely online public institution and has started the tenure process again.

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June 20, 2025
Investing in Student Engagement: University of Georgia Equips Faculty and Students with Free Access to Top Hat

New license agreement provides all students and faculty with free access to Top Hat, reinforcing UGA’s strategic focus on affordability, student success, and innovation in teaching.

TORONTO – June 17, 2025 – Top Hat, the leader in student engagement solutions for higher education, today announced that the University of Georgia has entered into a new enterprise agreement that will provide campus-wide access to the Top Hat platform at no cost to students or faculty. This initiative supports UGA’s continued efforts to promote high-impact teaching practices, student affordability, and innovation in the classroom.

Top Hat’s interactive teaching platform as well as content authoring and customization tools will be available to UGA faculty to enhance in-person, online, and hybrid courses across disciplines. With this agreement, UGA joins a growing number of leading institutions investing in Top Hat to empower instructors to improve learning outcomes and student success at scale.

“We are proud to support the University of Georgia in its efforts to deliver proven, student-centered teaching practices,” said Maggie Leen, CEO of Top Hat. “This partnership ensures every student and educator at UGA has access to the tools they need to drive learning and achievement, while reinforcing the university’s focus on affordability, innovation, and evidence-based instruction.”

This initiative reflects UGA’s commitment to both student affordability and instructional excellence. With Top Hat, faculty can adopt and customize low- or no-cost course materials—including OpenStax and OER—helping to reduce costs for students while delivering engaging, evidence-based instruction. The platform enables instructors to easily integrate active learning strategies, such as frequent low-stakes assessments and reflection prompts, which are proven to enhance student engagement and academic outcomes. Top Hat’s AI-powered assistant, Ace, streamlines course prep by generating high-quality questions directly from lecture content, and supports students with on-demand study help and unlimited practice opportunities—reinforcing learning both in and out of the classroom. Real-time data from polls, quizzes, and assignments also empowers educators to continuously monitor progress and improve instructional impact.

The University of Georgia is recognized nationally for excellence in teaching and learning, student completion, and affordability. The enterprise agreement with Top Hat is part of UGA’s broader commitment to building a world-class learning environment and increasing access to affordable, high impact teaching and learning resources.

About Top Hat

As the leader in student engagement solutions for higher education, Top Hat enables educators to employ proven student-centered teaching practices through interactive content and tools enhanced by AI, and activities in in-person, online and hybrid classroom environments. To accelerate student impact and return on investment, the company provides a range of change management services, including faculty training and instructional design support, integration and data management services, and digital content customization. Thousands of faculty at 900 leading North American colleges and universities use Top Hat to create meaningful, engaging and accessible learning experiences for students before, during, and after class.

Contact [email protected] for media inquiries.

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June 17, 2025