Annual Summer Institute

Intentional Intersections: Tapping Into Learning Science With Technology

Educational technology holds a real promise for humanizing learning: it can help us translate evidence from the learning sciences into learning experiences that deepen understanding and build engagement. The impact, however, doesn’t come from the tools themselves – it comes from the design choices we make with them. In this keynote, Dr. Michelle Miller will share a practical framework for aligning three elements that are most powerful in combination: how learning works, how to foster motivation, and intentional applications of educational technology. You’ll leave with flexible, adaptable techniques you can apply immediately to make learning more effective and engaging, across disciplines and modalities.

 

Note: Dr. Miller will also lead an interactive workshop in the afternoon of Day One.

What AI Forgets, and What Teaching Remembers

The conversation on AI in Education centers on models, compute and capabilities — the machinery of AI. But the measure that really matters is what happens between a student and their learning: do they understand more, participate more confidently, think more critically, and leave prepared for what the workforce demands? We’ll examine the design choices that turn a flashy feature into a meaningful learning moment, and the quiet mistakes that erode learning when no one’s watching. Learn how faculty can use these tools in ways that honor students as whole people and keep teaching intentionally human.

 

Keynote Presentation: Intentional Intersections: Tapping Into Learning Science With Technology

Presenter: Dr. Michelle Miller

Description: Educational technology holds a real promise for humanizing learning: it can help us translate evidence from the learning sciences into learning experiences that deepen understanding and build engagement. The impact, however, doesn’t come from the tools themselves – it comes from the design choices we make with them. In this keynote, Dr. Michelle Miller will share a practical framework for aligning three elements that are most powerful in combination: how learning works, how to foster motivation, and intentional applications of educational technology. You’ll leave with flexible, adaptable techniques you can apply immediately to make learning more effective and engaging, across disciplines and modalities.

During this time slot, you will be free to choose one of the following breakout sessions to attend!

1. Beyond AI Policing: Fostering Student Agency in the AI-Integrated Classroom

Presenter: Gail Yosh, Associate Teaching Professor, Information Management and Business Analytics

Description: Generative AI is reshaping the teaching landscape, and many faculty are working to determine how best to respond. This session invites a broader and more human-centered question: How can educators help students use AI with competence, critical thinking, ethical judgment, and agency? Informed by Dr. Gail Yosh’s experience integrating AI into business communication assignments and her research on students’ perceptions of AI-generated elevator speeches, this session examines how AI can both support and weaken student agency. Participants will leave with a flexible AI Agency Framework they can apply to their own courses to determine where AI may support or weaken learning, what human skills should remain visible, and how students can be asked to explain, evaluate, and stand behind their work.

2. Co-Constructing Community: From Classroom to Campus Practice

Presenter: Dr. John Yi, Director of Teaching and Learning

Description:What does it mean to humanize learning as it moves from classroom to campus?

This session centers on the co-construction of community, tracing how it takes shape in First-Year Writing classrooms and extends into institutional practice more broadly. Drawing on narrative-based research with FYW students, I examine how belonging, care, and sociocultural connection emerge through intentional design rather than incidental interaction. My work begins in the First-Year Writing classroom, where I have seen how community is not simply formed, but co-constructed through shared inquiry, dialogue, and engagement. I extend this work into my role at Montclair by working alongside faculty, offering resources, cultivating collegial exchange, and shaping spaces where community is intentionally developed across contexts.

As teaching environments continue to shift, this session considers how community co-construction can be sustained and adapted across changing contexts. Participants will be invited to reflect on how their own practices might shift toward more attentive ways of engaging students and shaping learning. Attendees will leave with a concise framework for community co-construction and a small set of approaches they may choose to adapt within their own teaching and broader academic roles. The session includes brief guided reflection and opportunities to apply the framework, supported by a concise takeaway resource for continued use beyond the session.

3. Discussion Boards are Out, Memes, AI Chatbots, Podcasts, and Single-column rubrics are in: Using Digital Pedagogy and AI to Engage Online Graduate Students

Presenter: Dr. Barry Bachenheimer, Adjunct Professor, Educational Leadership

Description: Are your students expressing genuine thought or “performative compliance”? This session explores a roadmap for moving beyond text-heavy assignments toward high-impact, collaborative, multimodal engagement. By leveraging Artificial Intelligence Chatbots and Digital Pedagogy, instructors can foster authentic intellectual synthesis while protecting academic integrity.

We will dive into a diverse digital toolkit featuring podcasts, AI chatbots, memes, and Bitmojis ”to transform students from passive observers into active knowledge co-creators. We will also discuss how the instructor shifted his assessment schema to include standards-based grading and single-column rubrics. Learn how the instructor integrates these high-impact strategies into his courses to ensure that student work remains both deeply original, meaningful, and engaging.

During this time slot, you will be free to choose one of the following breakout sessions to attend!

1. Montclair Unbound: Building a Blended Campus

Presenter: Dr. Marc Austin, Vice Provost and Managing Director for Montclair Unbound

Description: Montclair Unbound launched with a focus on online learning, but the vision is far more ambitious: to fundamentally reimagine the university. In its next phase, Unbound will begin building a campus that is truly unconstrained — where modality follows the learner rather than institutional convenience, and where in-person, online, and emerging delivery modes coexist as equals.

Dr. Austin will introduce the Unbound initiative, share early thinking on how a genuinely blended campus could take shape, and open a focused discussion with faculty on the real-world constraints and opportunities they’ve encountered when trying to blend modes of instruction.

This conversation is particularly well-timed: Dr. Austin meets with President Koppell immediately following this session and welcomes faculty input to bring directly to that meeting.

2. Building Belonging Online: Strategies for Stronger Digital Communities

Presenters: Kristen Kenny & Lora Yao

Description: This presentation will provide successful tactics for engaging online learning communities for both undergraduate and graduate students. Participants will examine why community matters in online education, the challenges students often face, and ways to identify and support students who may be most at risk of disengagement.

The presentation will highlight tactics for getting to know students personally, including Zoom welcome sessions, student introduction videos, individual check-ins, instructor participation in discussion threads, and intentional communication practices. Additional topics will include designing effective discussion prompts, helping students connect with campus resources and organizations, and using student feedback to strengthen the online learning experience.

The session will also include an interactive AI-supported activity using Mentimeter to encourage audience participation and model engagement strategies that can be applied in online courses.

3. Human-Centered AI Policies: Designing Transparent, Teachable, and Ethical AI Use

Presenters: Dr. AJ Kelton, Program Manager, College of Humanities and Social Sciences

Description: With regard to generative AI tools, instructors face a dual challenge: supporting thoughtful, ethical technology use while preserving the core human intellectual work our courses are designed to develop. This session presents a practical, student-facing approach to AI integration that prioritizes transparency, process, and trust, without relying on punitive or adversarial enforcement models.

This session will walk participants through designing syllabus language that humanizes AI policy by explaining why limits exist, using early, low-stakes assessments to surface student beliefs about AI, implementing probability-based AI alerts that emphasize notice, not punishment, leveraging Google Docs Version History as a teachable artifact of thinking and revision, and reducing bias and accessibility concerns by allowing multiple pathways to demonstrate authorship

Importantly, this model acknowledges the known limitations of AI-detection software and avoids treating probabilistic scores as definitive judgments. Instead, it uses them to open conversations about authorship, voice, and academic growth, helping students understand that writing is not just a product, but a traceable, revisable human process.

Participants will leave with adaptable policy language, a graduated response framework, and concrete strategies for integrating AI in ways that preserve student agency, encourage ethical experimentation, and keep learning (rather than surveillance) at the center of the classroom.

Why Memory is (Still) Important for Learning and How to Build It Through Our Teaching

Presenters: Dr. Michelle Miller

Description: Today’s educators are wary of over-emphasizing memory in their teaching. This aversion comes from a good place, one of concern for students and valuing of higher-order thinking skills over rote memorization. However, neglecting memory in our teaching creates missed opportunities to take advantage of new research on the importance of developing a knowledge base during learning. It also sets students up to fail in situations where they can’t fall back on technology for key information. In this interactive workshop, we will challenge common myths and misconceptions about memory and learning, review new research linking memory to thinking skills, and review techniques and technologies that help students develop a solid base of knowledge.

During this time slot, you will be free to choose one of the following breakout sessions to attend!

1. The Bloomfield ePortfolio: Recognition and Belonging from the Pandemic to AI

Presenter: Dr. Nora McCook, Associate Professor of Writing

Description: The Bloomfield College ePortfolio launched in Fall 2020 when virtually no class was held in person. We were a member of the inaugural cohort for the AAC&U’s annual ePortfolio Institute and utilized remote strategies for co-designing this new campus-wide High Impact Practice. In recognition of this unique roll-out and lessons learned, I will share some brief takeaways from our 6-year experiences and data from implementing ePortfolios with Bloomfield College students and faculty. I will also invite participants to try out the BCMSU ePortfolio template and explore the affordances and constraints of a college- or program-wide ePortfolio. Two options for a deliverable will be 1) their own faculty-oriented Google Site ePortfolio that they can utilize and expand upon if they wish or 2) a mockup of a student ePortfolio template they could use in a course or program. Some key discussion points include:

– What do ePortfolios add to students’ learning, sense of belonging, and opportunities for student research symposium participation?
– What are the uses of ePortfolios at a course or program or college level?
– What are the strengths and drawbacks of pre-set ePortfolio templates?
– How can ePortfolios support and not be undermined by generative AI’s capacity to emulate reflection?

2. More Than Accessible: Designing Courses That Cultivate Student Belonging

Presenter: Danica Stitz, Lead Instructional Designer & Abigail Hunte, Senior Technology Trainer

Description: What if the way you design your course could tell a student they belong here before you ever meet them? This session explores how Universal Design for Learning (UDL) helps faculty diversify how content is delivered, how they demonstrate what they know, and how students engage with it. We will also examine two tools, YuJa Panorama and NotebookLM, that make it easy to put these principles into practice.

3. Canvas and Career Readiness: Strengthening Student Employee Outcomes Using Learning Management Systems

Presenters: Renee Sharif, Partner Success Team Lead at FeedbackFruits, & Dr. Soyoung Lee, Associate Professor, Family Science and Human Development

Description: Join us for a session exploring how FeedbackFruits supports teaching and learning. We’ll share an overview of the platform’s capabilities, followed by a faculty perspective from Dr. Soyoung Lee, Associate Professor of Family Science and Human Development, who will walk through how they’ve integrated FeedbackFruits into their course to enhance student engagement and feedback. Whether you’re new to the tool or looking for fresh ideas, you’ll leave with practical takeaways you can apply in your own classroom.

During this time slot, you will be free to choose one of the following breakout sessions to attend!

1. Introducing Poll Everywhere 2.0 | Making Every Student Visible: Engagement Strategies for Inclusive Classrooms

Presenters: Lauren Swanson, Customer Success Manager at Poll Everywhere , Dan Petito, Account Executive – Higher Education at Poll Everywhere, & Sarah Sangregorio, Instructional Support Specialist, Feliciano School of Business

Description: This session explores the new Poll Everywhere 2.0 platform and how its live polling and interactive engagement tools can help faculty create more inclusive, student-centered learning experiences. This session highlights practical ways to use polls, anonymous responses, reflection prompts, and critical thinking activities to lower participation barriers, elevate student voice, and strengthen belonging. Participants will see how real-time polling and audience engagement can make student thinking more visible across face-to-face, hybrid, and large-class environments; ensuring every student feels seen, heard, and included.

2. Save the Last Dance for Me: Making the Most of the Last Class in our Courses

Presenters: Dr. Milton A. Fuentes, Interim Chairperson, Social Work and Child Advocacy, & Michelle Truffin, Adjunct Instructor, Psychology

Description: All courses must come to an end, creating a meaningful opportunity for faculty to purposely and ethically close their courses. While much attention has been given to the first class of the semester, limited guidance exists in the teaching literature on how to plan for a meaningful last class in college courses. Guided by the existing literature, this workshop will highlight the benefits associated with thoughtful and intentional course terminations. Specifically, we will emphasize how thoughtful endings can help students recognize their progress, connect with peers, and leave the classroom with a clearer sense of accomplishment and belonging. For faculty, these moments can also create space for reflection on the teaching experience itself, offering insight around impactful course experiences that can be used for future course development. In addition to sharing potential ideas for closing a course, we will also offer a case study that can be easily adapted for numerous courses across campus. Furthermore, we will invite attendees to share their last class activity ideas. Our aim is to co-create a compendium of last class activities for the Montclair community. Aligned with the spirit of the conference theme, we will focus on fostering meaningful interactions, while centering a sense of belonging.

3. Using AI Reflection Assignments to Promote Deeper Thinking in Chemistry: A Classroom Study

Presenters: Dr. Figen Suchanek, Assistant Teaching Professor of Chemistry

Description: As artificial intelligence tools become increasingly integrated into higher education, there is a growing need to design instructional approaches that preserve and strengthen student thinking. This session presents a classroom-based study conducted in General and Organic Chemistry courses that examines how structured AI reflection assignments can support deeper conceptual understanding.

In this study, students were asked to generate AI-based responses to chemistry problems and then critically evaluate those responses by analyzing accuracy, quality of explanation, and underlying assumptions. Students also redesigned prompts to improve clarity and scientific reasoning. These activities were aligned with course learning objectives and assessed using a rubric emphasizing conceptual reasoning.

Findings indicate that while many students initially engaged with AI passively, structured reflection tasks encouraged a shift toward higher-order thinking, including evaluating explanations, identifying missing assumptions, and refining problem-solving approaches. Differences in student performance across reflection tasks highlight both strengths and challenges in developing critical evaluation skills.

This session will share study design, assessment strategies, and student outcome data, along with practical approaches for integrating AI in ways that support critical thinking and meaningful learning. Participants will leave with adaptable strategies for using AI as a tool to enhance, rather than replace, student engagement and reasoning.

Keynote Presentation: What AI Forgets, and What Teaching Remembers

Presenter: Shiren Vijiasingam, Chief Product Officer, Instructure

Description: The conversation on AI in Education centers on models, compute and capabilities — the machinery of AI. But the measure that really matters is what happens between a student and their learning: do they understand more, participate more confidently, think more critically, and leave prepared for what the workforce demands? We’ll examine the design choices that turn a flashy feature into a meaningful learning moment, and the quiet mistakes that erode learning when no one’s watching. Learn how faculty can use these tools in ways that honor students as whole people and keep teaching intentionally human.

During this time slot, you will be free to choose one of the following breakout sessions to attend!

1. The Miseducation of Dr. Jean: Memoirs of a Child Almost Left Behind

Presenter: Dr. Daniel Jean, Associate Provost for Educational Opportunity and Success Programs

Description: This powerful session traces Dr. Daniel Jean’s journey from a 1.9 GPA to earning a doctorate, revealing how intentional educators can disrupt the “miseducation” of marginalized male scholars. Blending personal narrative with research informed frameworks, including the I Am, I Will identity affirmation model examining how validation, mentorship, and wellness reshape academic trajectories. Participants will confront hidden personal/institutional barriers and leave equipped to design environments where all scholars are seen, supported, and positioned to thrive.

2. Humanizing Learning Through Portraiture: Building Belonging Through the Arts in Higher Education

Presenter: Susan Pope, Adjunct Instructor, Theatre and Dance

Description: What transforms a classroom into a community? In this interactive, experiential workshop, participants will explore how Portraiture Methodology can serve as a powerful pedagogical tool to humanize learning, foster social connection, and cultivate belonging in higher education. Grounded in arts-based research, portraiture blends aesthetics and inquiry to construct rich, multidimensional representations of individuals and their lived experiences. Central to this methodology is a focus on goodness, attending to strengths, resilience, and the “whole story” rather than deficit-based narratives. Portraiture invites educators and learners to engage multiple perspectives, fostering empathy, connection, and deeper understanding. This approach aligns with embodied learning by engaging the body as a site of knowledge, reflection, and meaning-making.

Participants will actively engage in three experiential activities designed to model portraiture in practice. First, in The Name Game, participants will create a movement that reflects their identity; small groups will then combine individual gestures into a collective movement piece, emphasizing shared identity and community-building through embodied expression. Second, in History to Life Through Artifacts, participants will explore an assignment to reflect on an artifact connected to their identity. Through guided reflection and discussion, they will explore emotional connections and the bridges between past and present. Third, in Collaborative Storytelling, participants will co-construct a narrative about a fictional character, with each person contributing a segment, demonstrating how multiple perspectives create richer, more inclusive stories.

Through these activities, participants will engage in design thinking processes such as empathy-building, ideation, and collaborative meaning-making. Working in small teams, they will develop an example of portraiture-informed learning activities and assignments that can be adapted to their own teaching contexts. The session will require minimal but intentional resources, including open space for movement, chart paper or whiteboards, markers, and optional personal artifacts brought by participants. Digital handouts with activity prompts, reflection questions, and adaptable templates will be provided to support implementation beyond the session.

3. EdTech Elevator Pitches

Presenters: ITDS

Description: Looking to level up your teaching with powerful, practical EdTech tools—but short on time? In this fast-paced session, you’ll get concise, high-impact elevator pitches for nine innovative tools that can transform how you teach, collaborate, and connect with students in higher education.

Each tool will be introduced in a brief, focused presentation highlighting what it does, its pedagogical benefits, and how you can start using it effectively. Walk away with a solid sense of which tools align with your goals and are worth exploring further.

During this time slot, you will be free to choose one of the following breakout sessions to attend!

1. From Day One: Designing Community in an Introductory Informatics Course

Presenter: Dr. Grace Cook, Associate Professor of Mathematics

Description: Informatics is an inherently interdisciplinary field. Grounded in systems theory, the study of how components interact and influence one another, it sits at the intersection of people, technology, and information, drawing from and contributing to virtually every domain of knowledge. CMP100, Introduction to Informatics, embodies that spirit. The course covers a wide range of topics including AI, computer programming, art, psychology, statistics, business, and history, and enrolls students from many different majors who bring diverse perspectives, goals, and lived experiences into the same classroom. This diversity is one of the course’s greatest strengths, and one of its most important design challenges: how do you build a true sense of community in the classroom out of such varied backgrounds?

This presentation explores that question through the lens of intentional course design. Drawing on the structure and activities of CMP100, this session will demonstrate how community and belonging can be deliberately built into a course, not left to chance or personality.

Participants will examine specific strategies for humanizing the learning environment, including structured class rituals that create predictability and psychological safety, culturally responsive content selection, and the integration of High Impact Practices such as e-portfolios and collaborative assignments and projects. These strategies include an introductory PowerPoint that opens every class with a welcome message, relevant campus announcements, an affirmation, and a preview of the day. Entrance tickets give students a consistent and purposeful way to begin class, connecting them to campus life, prior learning, and new material. Exit tickets close the loop, gathering student feedback that directly shapes the next class session. Shared note-taking in Google Docs encourages students to build knowledge collectively and learn from one another in real time. Group projects create opportunities for students to collaborate across different backgrounds and majors, and to see how their peers approach the same problems in different ways.

The session will also highlight how collaborative projects can connect students to professional communities beyond the classroom, helping them see themselves reflected in their field of study.

Participants will not only hear about these strategies; they will experience them. The session will open with an entrance ticket activity, modeling one of the core rituals used in CMP100. Throughout the presentation, attendees will receive targeted suggestions for how these community-building approaches can be applied across a variety of disciplines. Attendees will leave with concrete examples of group projects and collaborative activities, practical frameworks for designing belonging into their own courses, and resources ready for immediate use, regardless of subject area or student population.

2. Engaging Graduate Students in Online Research Courses

Presenters: Dr. Dawn Marie Hayes, Professor of History, & Chris Petrillo, Instructional Designer

Description: Imagine you are a master artist investigating a murder in 16th century Bavaria, or a team of timeline enforcers chasing a criminal from the Roman Empire to the Renaissance. These are not just fun thought exercises; these are two real examples of history classes offered right here at Montclair that utilize games as a novel instructional method. Join history professor Dawn Marie Hayes (CHSS) and instructional designer Chris Petrillo (ITDS) as we share two courses developed to help make history exciting and fun for students. In this presentation session, we will share how games and gamification can support higher student motivation and engagement, our course design experience and process, and thoughts and considerations for adopting or developing your own games. By the end of this session, we hope you will be inspired to bring opportunities for play into your own courses.

3. Complementary Collaborators: Proactive Steps for Fostering Meaningful Group Dynamics

Presenter: Melissa Adamo, Assistant Teaching Professor, Writing Studies

Description: Students often dread group work, yet instructors know collaborative work benefits students’ sense of belonging in the classroom and better prepares them for varied career paths. Despite this, we often assign group projects without much guidance on how to work in a team. By adding more scaffolding and community building into group assignments, we can help foster more effective group work. In my current Technical Writing courses, I aim to shift how students perceive their own strengths and weaknesses in isolation toward seeing how their skills can be amplified and complemented in collaboration – to reinforce that humans are meant to work together and thus their strengths are furthered in connection with one another.

In this presentation, I will review proactive strategies in assembling groups and fostering effective team dynamics. Such strategies include the use of self-reflective writing, instructor modeling, interactive team requests and team building, and writing collaborative by-laws. I will not only review these assignments and lessons but also lead a discussion with the audience to talk through how such practices can fit into various course experiences to create a foundation for more collaboration in the classroom.

From Skills to Connection: What Employers Say About Career-Ready Students

Presenters: Employer Panel Facilitated by Crystal Tejada-Breton, Employer Relations Specialist

Description: This interactive employer panel will feature professionals from a range of industries who will speak about what helps students stand out in today’ s evolving workplace. Rather than focusing only on technical qualifications or traditional skill checklists, the conversation will center on the human dimensions of career readiness – communication, adaptability, curiosity, resilience, and the ability to build genuine connections with others.
This session will invite faculty to consider how these human-centered qualities are developed through the learning experiences they design. Employers will share what they actually notice when students are well-prepared, not just in terms of what they know, but how they show up, engage, and navigate real-world environments. They will also speak candidly about common gaps they continue to see, particularly in areas that are harder to teach but essential for long-term success.

This session is designed to be highly engaging and participatory. We will begin with a brief framing of current hiring trends and how expectations for early-career talent are shifting, especially in a landscape increasingly influenced by artificial intelligence and automation. The panel discussion will then be guided by targeted questions that connect directly to teaching and learning, followed by opportunities for participants to engage with employers through live Q&A.

To further involve attendees, participants will engage in brief small-group reflections, where they will consider how their current teaching practices already support these human dimensions of learning, and where there may be opportunities to make small, intentional shifts.

Participants will leave the session with a clearer understanding of how employers define career readiness in human terms, along with practical, realistic ways to integrate these insights into their courses. The goal is not to add more to faculty workloads, but to reframe existing practices, such as group work, class discussions, reflective assignments, and experiential learning, in ways that more intentionally support student growth as whole individuals.

During this time slot, you will be free to choose one of the following breakout sessions to attend!

1. The Sequential Epidemiology Project

Presenter: Dr. Amanda Birnbaum, Professor of Public Health

Description: This session describes and demonstrates a semester-long project designed to promote access, agency, and engagement among students with a range of academic backgrounds. There are two aims: 1) provide a close look at the project itself: rationale, mechanics, responses, and outcomes; and 2) invite attendees to imagine transferring or adapting elements of this approach in other disciplines/contexts. Aim 1 will use an interactive presentation style, including examples for interest and engagement. Aim 2 will walk attendees through prompts to envision how the sequential approach might be useful in their courses.

2. Everybody Up! In-Class Exercises that Improve Engagement & Socialization

Presenter: David Vincenti, Adjunct Instructor, Information Management and Business Analytics

Description: In this presentation, we will review five classroom exercises that ask Business Communications students to move around, form groups, interact, and apply learnings recently received in the day’s lecture. We will discuss parameters that have been successful (and some that haven’t), and how to account for student learning accommodations in the design of classroom exercises. A key objective of this presentation is to invite attendees to share classroom activities that have worked (and that have not!) to encourage learning and application across disciplines.

3. Prompting Purpose: Designing AI-Enhanced Student-Centered Workshops

Presenters: Adam Mayer, Director of Career and Academic Programming, & Albert Antomattei, Academic Program Coordinator

Description: Every year, Montclair State University employs over 2000 students as student employees. With such high engagement, student employment can prove to be a high-impact practice for student career success when aligned with existing experiential learning outcomes and integrated with campus learning communities. To strengthen our student employment practices and create a connected community of both supervisors and students, Instructional Technology and Design Services and the Office of Experiential Education and Career Connections partnered to launch the Montclair WORK (Work Opportunities and Real World Knowledge) initiative. Using a triangulated approach to data collection, the teams used community feedback, recommendations from the dedicated task force and student data to create a Canvas-based learning experience for prospective and current student employees.

This session will provide an overview of the scaffolded approach used to create the WORK course, highlight assessment practices used to measure effectiveness and the tools used to build the “sandbox” course. Participants will learn effective strategies for creating communities of practice, leveraging technology to support student learning outcomes and understand techniques for integrating career development into course design or student development programming. Attendees are encouraged to bring their preliminary ideas for new initiatives, as the session will involve an active demonstration of community building, technology use and experiential learning integration.

During this time slot, you will be free to choose one of the following breakout sessions to attend!

1. The Murmuration Effect: How AI Accelerates Collective Agency in the Classroom

Presenter: Dr. Pavlo Lushyn, Associate Teaching Professor, Educational Foundations

Description: When a flock of starlings moves across the sky in a murmuration, no single bird leads. Each bird responds to its nearest neighbors, and from thousands of local adjustments a coherent, intelligent pattern emerges one that no individual planned. This session argues that something strikingly similar can happen in a classroom when AI tools are introduced not as individual tutors but as shared environmental resources that amplify the traces students leave for one another.

The presentation draws on the concept of stigmergy, a mechanism of indirect coordination first observed in insect colonies where agents communicate not through direct interaction but through modifications they make to a shared environment. In educational settings, stigmergic processes occur when one student’s contribution (a discussion post, an annotation, a question) becomes a stimulus that shapes the next student’s response, gradually building collective knowledge without centralized direction. The presenter’s ongoing research on stigmergization in educational design demonstrates that AI dramatically accelerates these processes: generative AI tools can synthesize, reformat, and redistribute student-generated traces in real time, making the collective intelligence of the group visible and actionable far faster than traditional methods allow.

Grounded in the presenter’s framework of Eco-Centered Psychological Facilitation (ECPF), the session reframes the instructor’s role from director to facilitator of conditions someone who designs the environment so that self-organization becomes possible. This is where the murmuration metaphor proves most instructive: the facilitator does not choreograph the flock but establishes the parameters (proximity, alignment, cohesion) within which emergent order arises. When AI enters this ecology, it functions as an accelerant of the feedback loops that connect individual action to collective pattern, enabling what the presenter terms the murmuration effect, the rapid emergence of distributed agency in a learning group.

The session will present concrete examples from the presenter’s undergraduate courses (EDFD 220: Philosophy of Education; EDFD 200: Psychological Foundations of Education) where AI-mediated stigmergic design has been implemented. Participants will see how structured AI interactions, such as collective annotation with AI-generated synthesis, real-time thematic mapping of student responses, and AI-assisted pattern recognition across student reflections, create conditions in which students begin to think together rather than merely alongside one another. The difference is crucial: collective agency is not group work assigned by a syllabus but an emergent property of a well-designed learning environment.

The presentation also addresses legitimate concerns about AI in humanized learning. If the conference theme asks how we embrace new tools without losing what makes learning meaningful, the murmuration framework offers a clear answer: AI is humanizing when it makes collective intelligence visible, strengthens the connections between learners, and returns agency to the group rather than concentrating it in the algorithm. The session will distinguish between AI deployments that isolate students (individual chatbot tutoring) and those that weave them into a shared cognitive fabric.

Participants will leave with a practical “Murmuration Design” toolkit, a set of principles and activity templates for creating AI-accelerated stigmergic learning experiences in their own courses, across disciplines and modalities.

2. IgniteAI Tools in Canvas: Humanizing Learning Through Intelligent Support

Presenter: Abigail Hunte, Senior Technology Trainer, & Dan Stratthaus, Manager, Instructional Technology Support

Description: As higher education continues to move beyond content delivery toward more meaningful connection, AI tools can help educators foster communication, increase accessibility, and strengthen instructor presence. This session explores Canvas IgniteAI tools and their role in supporting human-centered teaching and learning practices. We will explore how these tools can enhance student support, create more time for fostering connection in the classroom, and provide instructors with a head start on formative feedback to promote timely, engaging student interactions.

3. Feminist Friendship in Teaching: A Method for Building Authentic Inclusive Classrooms

Presenters: Dr. Necole Jadick, Adjunct Instructor, GSWS & Teaching and Learning, & Dr. Laurie Summer, Adjunct Instructor, Teaching and Learning

Description: We are two adjunct professors in Montclair State University’s Department of Teaching and Learning who met as doctoral students and formed a deep friendship and academic bond rooted in feminism, communal care, activism, and a passion for centering the marginalized communities and voices in our work.

Together and separately, we take a constructivist approach to fostering democratic and accessible classroom communities for all of our students, and we use our critical friendship and deep bond as a means of processing our teaching experiences to improve our instructional practices and engagements. We feel that a sense of belonging is essential to student learning, and we also recognize the complexities in building authentic community, particularly within structures that have (her/his) storically centered undemocratic power structures.

Our aspiration is to model inclusivity and caring within our classrooms, so that our students can experience a different learning paradigm than perhaps they have more frequently encountered. Within these contexts, we regularly elicit student voice and collaboration in multiple ways, and we strive to lean into, rather away from, discomfort. By challenging ourselves to walk our talk, we hope to enact possibilities of community that future educators can grow and build upon within their own classrooms.

As professors, we built upon this foundation to foster learning communities that disrupt traditional hegemonic educational norms. Within our planning, enacting, and reflection, we aspire to cultivate community and belonging through the content selection and exploration, learning activities, relational practices, coming alongside students, and tapping into “big picture” themes and essential questions that are meaningful to learners.