The event marks its 16th year with Faculty Fellow panels on engaging pedagogy and the student work it inspires.
On April 8, over 100 faculty, students, and staff gathered in Fairchild-Martindale Library for the 16th annual Symposium on Teaching and Learning at Lehigh. The one-day event, hosted by Lehigh’s Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning (CITL), celebrates the many ways Lehigh professors engage and challenge students, leverage technology to deepen learning, and enhance the impact and value of student projects.
“For this year’s symposium, we wanted to highlight a sampling of the thoughtful work that Faculty Fellows and their students engaged in around the themes of inquiry-based learning, XR as a pedagogical tool, and teaching with (or without) AI,” said Judd Hark, interim director of the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning. “We also wanted to showcase even more digital and physical artifacts created by students in courses the Fellows taught.”
During three, four-member panel discussions, Faculty Fellows showcased their innovative pedagogical approaches across diverse disciplines, including Theater; Religion, Culture and Society; English; International Center for Academic and Professional English (ICAPE); Political Science; Population Health; Biological Sciences; Earth and Environmental Sciences; Teaching, Learning, and Technology; and Political Science.
“This year, CITL worked with 32 faculty partners over the course of the academic year--and a few of those Faculty Fellows worked with us in both the fall 24 and spring 25 semesters,” Hark said. “Hearing about their experiences across two semesters was fascinating.”
Below are some highlights from the faculty panel discussions.
Explorations in Inquiry-based Learning
Holly Zakos, manager of the CITL instructional technology team, opened the first panel by describing inquiry-based learning as “active learning,” where students explore questions or problems to build their own understanding through investigation, research, and collaboration. In this approach, she says, "the teacher’s role shifts to one that fosters critical thinking and problem-solving skills, serving more as a facilitator rather than the traditional 'sage on the stage.'”
Will Lowry, associate professor of theatre, and Brooke Rollins, associate professor of English, talked about their All Fun & Games: How Does Play Change Us? Big Question seminar, using play design and game studies to explore how play changes us. They highlighted project-based learning, in-class activities using games and prompts, and the integration of both digital and analog technologies to promote problem-solving and critical thinking.
Students started with a simple storytelling exercise using three cards, showing how we naturally create narratives. For their final project, they designed original games and documented their creative process through journals and rule books—focusing not just on the game itself, but how they communicated the experience. “It's a creative work. We told students you are going to create a game, but you also need a journal of how you're developing it, being able to articulate your process on it,” Lowry said.
Rollins added “My impression was that students didn't worry too much about failing or perfection, because we distributed the assessment across all of those process steps in each case. So we really felt like that kind of project-based learning helped develop those critical thinking skills.”
Mellie Katakalos, associate professor of theatre, described transforming a traditionally lecture-based history course into an inquiry-driven, student-centered experience. "Typically, history courses are taught by disseminating a bunch of historical information that students then absorb and learn and sort of regurgitate back, which sounds deadly to me,” she said. By combining discussion-based learning with student-created digital timelines, Katakalos said the course encouraged students’ deeper engagement with course material, research skills, and personal reflection.
XR as a Pedagogical Tool
Steve Sakasitz, emerging technology specialist in the CITL, introduced the second panel with an overview of XR, an umbrella term for immersive technologies like virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, spatial computing, 360 video, and more. “XR isn’t limited to headsets like the Meta Quest or Apple Vision Pro—it also includes mobile and browser-based experiences, which can be especially useful in classroom settings where accessibility on student laptops is key,” he said.
Teresa Cusumano, language specialist for ICAPE, opened the discussion by sharing her experience using XR for team-building and intercultural communication in a collaborative online international learning (COIL) course that partners Lehigh students with students from Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ) in Quito, Ecuador. In the course, Composition & Literature for International Writers II (with Jessica Harbaum), students analyzed the impact of occupied space on health and well-being.
“They used Frame VR to develop 3D models of their chosen spaces, such as aggressive architecture in New York City, the effects of urban pollution, and the design of emergency rooms,” Cusumano said. The project aimed to enhance understanding of spatial analysis and writing in a multimodal digital environment. Cusumano noted challenges such as differing levels of English fluency and students adjusting to new technology. “So for the spatial analysis project,” she said, “we wanted to encourage them to work with people of the same interests, and really weren't focusing so much on the language levels, but more now on the writing and the research and engagement.”
Associate professor of political science, Nandini Deo, reflected on her experience using VR in her South Asian politics course. While the initial semester saw enthusiastic student engagement in building VR experiences, she said the current semester has faced lower engagement, with some students seemingly less invested in learning the technology. “Part of it is the emotional path that the students have to walk with encountering a new technology from initial excitement to potential frustration,” she said, adding that she hopes students will eventually find the project fulfilling. Deo questioned whether VR truly enhances learning objectives related to empathy and understanding the realities of South Asia, and grapples with effective assessment methods for these projects, but noted the supportive role of the CITL team as a way to improve outcomes.
Larry Tartaglia, teaching associate professor of biological sciences, discussed his experience using VR with senior and first-year genetics students. He found seniors to be more creative and engaged with the technology, while first-year students exhibited more resistance, focused on grades, and required more "deprogramming" from conventional learning. While he believes VR can offer advantages over traditional learning, he currently sees it as a supplement, somewhat limited by the physical technology (eg, headset discomfort for some users). He also noted the importance of exposing students to various platforms, including AI sandboxes, to prepare them for the future workforce, drawing parallels to historical technological shifts.
"What advice would I give anyone who hasn't done VR yet? I say blindly go into it. You have an incredible infrastructure here,” he said. “As an educator, if you're not working with the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning, you're not reaching your full potential."
Teaching with (or without) AI
Jeremy Mack, data and visualization specialist on the CITL digital research and scholarship team, introduced the final panel, highlighting the transformative and rapidly evolving nature of AI in education, the proactive approaches of faculty, and the significant impact of the AI sandbox initiative developed by CITL staff.
"These tools are here to stay, and they're drastically changing the way we teach, and they're drastically changing the way we learn for better or for worse,” he said. Mack noted that the AI sandbox has been used the last two semesters by about 800 students, who together generated 7,500 prompts and almost 15,000 images for around $600. “The sandbox gives everyone access to OpenAI tools at a much reduced cost,” he said.
In her first-year writing courses, Jessica Harbaum, language specialist for ICAPE, designed a project titled "Enchanted AI or Twisted Fairy Tales" where students explored the writing process through the lens of reimagined fairy tales. The project intentionally integrated AI at specific stages, such as expanding on brainstormed themes and conducting peer review, while emphasizing student originality and authorship in their narratives. "We wanted students to still be the originators, still be the authors of their own stories, but we still had the AI kind of assist them,” she said. Students also used AI tools within a sandbox environment to generate visuals for their stories, leading to significant engagement and demonstrating the potential of AI to facilitate creative expression and address tasks students might otherwise struggle with.
Ann Meltzer, professor of earth and environmental science, discussed integrating AI into an introductory, non-majors science lab course focused on quantitative and science literacy. Faced with students who often dislike or feel inadequate in science, she saw AI as a tool to provide background knowledge and facilitate inquiry-based learning. Despite departmental hesitations about AI as "just another search tool" and concerns about cheating, Meltzer said she “plunged ahead anyway. Whether we explicitly acknowledge it or not, we’re all teaching with it—because it’s ubiquitous in everything.” Using the CITL sandbox and the book Teaching with AI, she designed assignments to motivate students and frame science as a human endeavor driven by curiosity. One early activity involved drawing natural objects and then using DALL-E in the AI sandbox to generate images of the same objects, prompting discussions about naturalism in AI-generated visuals and the art of prompt engineering.
Meltzer emphasized the importance of teaching students the strengths and limitations of AI, motivating them to surpass AI-generated responses to remain competitive in the job market. “You need to figure out what you bring above and beyond what AI can do, because that's what you can do as a human being.”
Marie Shenk, assistant professor of political science, discussed her master's level quantitative political science course, where many students are new to coding in R. Initially, she observed students struggling with coding details, hindering data analysis. With the advent of accessible generative AI, she hoped it would aid problem-solving, but instead found students relying too heavily on AI-generated code without understanding it. She now starts without AI, emphasizing the foundational understanding of R syntax before introducing AI as a tool to make the language more accessible and expedite the process of creating and interpreting figures.
In addition to the faculty panels, the symposium included an exhibition area where attendees could view and interact with student work created in a number of courses taught by Faculty Fellows. Some of the projects included AI-assisted images (ART/FILM 007), spatial 3D worlds (Biological Sciences, Political Science), physical games (English, Theatre), data and charts using AI sandbox (Earth and Environmental Science), and children’s books, posters, and podcasts (Biological Sciences, Modern Languages and Literatures, Philosophy, Sociology).
Hark noted that future symposia will move to a twice-a-year cadence, starting in fall, 2025. “We streamlined the Symposium from a day and a half to a single five-hour event to give attendees focused access to the incredible work of CITL Faculty Fellows and their students—while making it easier to fit into busy schedules,” Hark said.