Keeping up with the rapidly expanding capabilities of generative AI platforms is challenging, especially at campuses with heavy teaching loads and limited resources. In this episode, Racheal Fest joins us to discuss a multicampus AI professional development project that addresses some of these challenges.
Racheal is a pedagogy specialist at the Faculty Center for Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship at the State University of New York at Oneonta. She also teaches writing courses in the English Department there. Racheal was a principal investigator on two SUNY multi-campus grants focused on faculty development related to AI.
Show Notes
- Racheal Fest and Stephanie Pritchard (2025). Multicampus AI Initiative. Tea for Teaching podcast. Episode 398. June 18.
- SUNY Innovative Instructional Technology Grant (IITG) program
- SUNY Center for Professional Development
- Anna Mills
- Marc Watkins
- Vee, A., Watkins, M., & Bruff, D. (2026). The Norton guide to AI-aware teaching. WW Norton & Company.
- Mel Hogan
- SUNY ACE
- Butler, Octavia (1995). Parable of the Sower. Warner.
- Orwell, G. (1949). 1984. Secker & Warburg.
Transcript
John: Keeping up with the rapidly expanding capabilities of generative AI platforms is challenging, especially at campuses with heavy teaching loads and limited resources. In this episode, we examine a multicampus AI professional development project that addresses some of these challenges.
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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.
Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…
John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…
Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.
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John: Our guest today is Racheal Fest. Racheal is a pedagogy specialist at the Faculty Center for Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship at the State University of New York at Oneonta. She also teaches writing courses in the English Department there. Racheal was a principal investigator on two SUNY multi-campus grants focused on faculty development related to AI. Welcome back, Racheal.
Racheal: Thanks for having me.
Rebecca: Today’s teas are… Racheal, are you having tea with us today?
Racheal: Yes, I am. I love tea, and today I am just drinking my standard, which is PG Tips English Breakfast. I’m on my second cup.
Rebecca: That seems right for the day, for sure.
John: A very popular tea in England, and we often have that in the office, it’s a really good tea. My tea is spring cherry green tea.
Rebecca: Oh, nice, John! Bringing back your favorites. I have an Irish breakfast this morning, so definitely breakfasting it up with Racheal for sure. Some extra caffeine.
John: On an earlier podcast, we discussed that first multi-campus AI initiative for which you were the principal investigator. Today, we’d like to focus on the second multi-campus AI professional development. But it would probably be helpful for those who don’t remember or did not listen to the first podcast to set the stage for it a little bit because the second grant grew out of the first to some extent. Can you give us a brief overview of that initial project?
Racheal: In the 2024-2025 academic year, we worked with a team of six campuses, which included Oswego, Oneonta, where I’m located, and then we had colleagues from SUNY Alfred, Morrisville, Orange, and Schenectady joining us for Teaching with AI: A Cross-Campus Community of Practice. And in that project, we really focused on developing a set of common materials together related to critical AI literacy, and participants designed assignments through that project to help students evaluate AI outputs from a critical perspective appropriate to the range of disciplines that faculty were joining us from, and faculty earned a modest stipend for doing so. They met on campus with educational developers and faculty leaders to go through our intro to AI literacy programming, and the cross-campus element came in through small virtual groups that connected them across the six campuses.
Rebecca: Can you remind us how many faculty participated in that initial group?
Racheal: So we had six campuses, and we initially secured funding for 10 faculty per campus. We also were able to gain some additional funding from Oswego and from Oneonta, and so we had stipends for over 60 faculty. I think we ended up concluding with 66. We had some dropout for personal reasons, and some campuses had smaller cohorts to begin with, just depending on resources and availability. But yeah, we finished out with about 66.
Rebecca: Great. Can you talk a little bit about how this new project relates to that older project?
Racheal: When we scaled up the second round of IITG funding and we proposed the project to SUNY, we had more campuses involved, we had had some campuses reach out to us because we had publicized and shared the communities of practice model. And one of the aims of working together across campuses is to really pool resources and think about efficiency within the professional development that we’re offering. I think we’re lucky in SUNY that we have a lot of professional development opportunities, both through our individual campuses and through the Center for Professional Development that supports faculty across the system, and one of the both challenges and opportunities that comes with that is how we can come together to use those resources to develop support programming in a way that makes sense. And so both of these projects aimed to do some of the support programming for faculty. Basically, we wanted to plan together. We said “We’re all on our individual campuses. We’re all trying to support faculty in responding to AI.” The way faculty are engaging with the emergence of AI is very different, and for me, a real passion point for both of these grant projects, I wanted to get faculty remuneration for doing this work. AI has been a huge disruption to higher ed since ChatGPT emerged for free in November 2022, and we’ve seen all different responses, all different means of engagement, all different levels of information that faculty are coming to this problem with. And so, both the smaller grant and the larger grant aim to say, “How can we come together across the system and provide faculty with the support they need while also giving them funding?” So we, again, were giving faculty stipends to do some course redesign work. We moved from six campuses to nine, and we had funding initially for 90 faculty. We did end somewhere in the 80s. Again, we always have some attrition from folks who just have things come up, or they realize the time commitment doesn’t work for them. But we were able to offer stipends again to about 90 faculty. And one of the primary differences in this grant year, initially we had all worked together on one theme and one set of materials, that was basically designing assignments for critical AI literacy. The new project, we had educational developers from multiple schools. We had a leadership team of over 10, I think, and we decided that the best way to use our collective efforts and resources would be to offer multiple themed virtual communities of practice, and so we offered five of those.
John: And so, in that first year, people were just getting used to AI because it was only two years into the process, and it was new to everybody, but one of the reasons I think why we split up into more topics is faculty had been working with AI to some extent. Some people were coming into this new, and one of the groups that was run was very much like the first-year group, but the others were mostly for people who wanted to explore things a little deeper. What were those five groups?
Racheal: Yeah, I think that’s a great way of describing it, John. And I don’t know if we’ve said out loud yet that John was the co-lead of one of our groups. I had led the group that focused again on designing assignments for AI literacy. That was great because I was able to use the materials that we had developed again and bring them to more people. Again, that was focused on an assignment redesign. The other four groups, starting with the one John led with David Wolf, a colleague at Schenectady, focused on building chatbots and specifically in the context of study tools. I think it was. John, do you want to say a little bit more about what you did?
John: We did ask people to develop two chatbots, one of which would be a Socratic tutor that would assist students in understanding, but would not directly answer questions. And we let the other depending on what their role was, many of them did create things that were useful in teaching, but some of them were working in other areas. Some were instructional designers, some were faculty support, and so they wanted to do something a little bit different. One of the more interesting things, was someone developed an interactive simulation of a patient role, where people would interact with a chatbot that was actually stored in, I think, a dummy type of a thing, where basically the student would ask questions of the dummy and it would respond as a patient from a random selection of diseases and so forth, and report symptoms with some level of accuracy. And it was set up with a microphone and a speaker there, so it was as if they were interacting with the real patient. So that used verbal interactions. Others were set up for very specific assignments, such as analysis of a particular text or interacting with a text more deeply. There was a pretty wide variety in terms of what people did with the other chatbots.
Racheal: That’s great, John. Yeah, I was always really excited to hear about the work that you and David were doing, and I’ll share a little bit more of the other three groups that ran as communities of practice virtually. But I’ll just emphasize now that build a chatbot group that focused on some of these Socratic tools that are available. We wanted to make sure that we were offering new and deeper engagement with emerging tools. That was one of the things that faculty asked for. So, as we came up with these five different community themes, we wanted to both serve beginners, people who were still coming on board and wanting to learn about what exactly AI is. We had multiple faculty who hadn’t even looked at ChatGPT or Copilot or Gemini or whatever available tool they might have looked at, but then we also had, as John already said, many faculty who were ready to take the next step and to get some support in exploring in conversation with community members from across the system. So, I think John, your group did a wonderful job there. We had AI and accessibility, which was a group run by Luis Colon at Stony Brook, and initially with John’s colleague, Stephanie Pritchard, who ended up moving away from the university. That group focused on AI’s applications for accessibility needs and projects, and that was one of the few groups that did not create student-facing materials. Most of our groups were focused on pedagogy and instruction. Luis’s group had instruction in mind, but they were examining AI accessibility tools with an imagined audience of colleagues, other faculty. So, if they learned about a tool that could be useful to them for a classroom application, be it captioning or something else, they created deliverables that would share the information and what they had learned related to AI and accessibility. And then the final two groups that ran, we had AI and writing across the disciplines, which Matt Newcomb from New Paltz and Laura Pierie from SUNY Morrisville co-led, and finally we had redesigning assessment in the age of AI, which was led by Alexis Clifton, Deepa Deshpande and Jenny Zhang, and they focused, as the title suggests, on creating new exams, new assignments that were responsive in some ways to AI. So some faculty in that group were focused on AI-proofing assignments; others focused on integrating AI to update their assignments, so there were multiple approaches in the group, and I think that reflects all of the groups and in a common ethos that we developed together at the beginning. Not only did we want these groups to work for faculty who were bringing a range of levels of experience with AI, but AI is a very ideological topic. It depends on your disciplinary formation. It depends on your view of these tools and their emergence. And we wanted people across the spectrum of attitude toward AI to feel welcome and to be in conversation with each other as well.
Rebecca: Running communities of practice across institutions can be both exciting and challenging at the same time. Can you talk a little bit about some of the logistics of how you were able to make those communities of practice work and talk across campuses, and maybe some of the benefits and challenges that you faced in doing that?
Racheal: Yeah, there were definitely both challenges and rewards to a big project like this. I will say that I think approaching with an aggressive logistical plan [LAUGHTER] when you know that you’re going to be working both with a large leadership team that’s working online at multiple institutions is a really strong way to start. And then also we had about 15 to 20 faculty members in each of the five groups. So thinking about how to manage these schedules to make those conversations happen within each group, these were all concerns and considerations that we definitely foregrounded going into the planning. And I think it really did help that we had had the previous year’s experience. Being able to scale up and build on something we’d already done and succeeded at felt really comfortable this year. At the same time, I would say that the structure of the project really changed and the way we were working really changed. In the first year, we felt like a group of collaborators. We were educational developers and faculty from six campuses who were working primarily with campus folks in person. So we would come together. We would create the rubric for our deliverables. We would create the presentation that we were going to give to faculty each month to help them work toward those deliverables, and we had a lot of time to share, troubleshoot, bring our ideas together. The second year as the project lead, it was more of a logistical position. I was really more there to just keep us on track, keep things moving, and that was exciting too, because it meant that our leadership team members could each develop content the way they saw fit for their group and the way they saw fit for the theme that they had developed based on their expertise and interests. So there was more freedom there, and I think that was really positive in terms of drawing upon the expertise at different institutions to serve faculty on different campuses.
John: One of the nice features of it, from my perspective, is that if we tried to do a year-long development project on a specific topic, it would have been unlikely to have 10 to 20 people who would have persisted for a year. But when you were dealing with nine different campuses, there were people who were interested in spending a year on developing those specific tools and skills, and so that was a really nice process. The fact that we had multi-campus participation made it really valuable in a way that it would be really hard to do in a small campus or on a campus where you just don’t have the same level of focused interest. By providing a number of choices, faculty members from each campus had five different things to choose from in terms of where they wanted to focus. But it did shift much of the work from you to us, so that in the first thing, you did much of the development of the slides, which we all greatly appreciated. But there was collaboration, as you noted from the very beginning, beginning with a meeting in Oneonta before the start of the 2024 academic year. So, what were some of the other benefits or challenges that you observed from your side or from interactions with the groups?
Racheal: So, I think that, John, as you’re emphasizing, I love that we were able to offer more choice for engagement to our faculty. I think that was so vital. And the other thing that I would add to that, just being able to engage a group of faculty who were all coming not only from different disciplines but from different campuses and institutions. That was some of the feedback on our survey that faculty mentioned really enjoying. Oftentimes, we can get in our silos, we always talk about this. We’re in our own departments. We’re in our own disciplines. Here, I think faculty were exposed to the energy and excitement and fury and engagements and questions that people were bringing from so many different institutions across the state, and that was really cited as a strength, was just getting to have these conversations. So yes, getting to have these conversations with a group virtually from different locations, and also faculty often cited valuing just the opportunity to have these conversations and to do a deeper dive into materials that they could search out on their own, but they’re so busy, right? It’s like now they have the dedicated time to say, “Okay, I’m going to think about AI policies. You’ve given me a number of them to look at. I’m hearing what my colleagues are saying about the choices they’ve made, and we’re talking about what has worked and what hasn’t, and now I have this dedicated time to make those changes.” So that was another strength, I think. In terms of the challenges, and I think we could definitely talk about the Brightspace area and that logistical piece of how we ran this through the DLE, the digital learning environment, but I will just mention first, maybe before saying more about that, I do think that scheduling and logistics is such an important and also challenging part of a project of this kind. We tried to get ahead of that by scheduling everything in advance. So if we’re having monthly meetings with our communities of practice, we tried to set those schedules in the fall, or I think we had to circle back in the spring, of course, because teaching schedules change. But we scheduled out the entire semester at the beginning of each semester, and each of the five groups had to offer two meeting times in order to make sure that everybody could come to our meetings, and we did set high expectations too. I think that was important to us. We used backward planning, which we know from teaching and learning best practices. And so we tried to be really clear about the expectations up front, about attendance expectations and about deliverables expectations, because I think with our colleagues as well as with our students, we know that having those expectations set and those structures in place are what really allows you to thrive in common work together. So I think those things were really important, but they did mean that at the leadership team meetings, we were like, “Okay, I’ve almost scheduled my meetings,” so that was something we talked about.
Rebecca: One of the things that I think people would probably want to know is how did you share information across institutions? You talked about meetings, so that’s a synchronous opportunity. What about maybe some asynchronous ways that you were sharing information across institutions?
Racheal: We relied on Brightspace. Over the past few years SUNY signed on with Brightspace. We now have a shared multi-tenant structure that is used across campuses. There are a few campuses that aren’t included in that multi-tenant environment, and SUNY Stony Brook, although it does use Brightspace, is one of them. I mention that only because we’ll talk about both what Brightspace allowed us to do and some of the roadblocks that we ran into. One of which was that SUNY Stony Brook had to log into two different Brightspace areas, and they expressed that that was sometimes challenging for them. But I think that Brightspace was a good choice for us. And like with any project, each year you learn about things that went well and about things that you hope to do better on next time. And with Brightspace, our plan was to have a shared online location where all five of the virtual communities could go, both to access the materials we were providing in our communities, and also to engage virtually in discussion and to upload their final deliverables or assignments. So it was great to have Brightspace for that purpose, and it really did allow us to create some shared documents. Our surveys lived there. We provided lists of AI-related resources that multiple groups could use and did use, and we also wanted to make the five communities visible, so that if one person, say, was in the accessibility community, but they wanted to see what the Build a Bot community was doing, they could enter that Brightspace module. It was public to everyone in our area, and they could look around and check on what their colleagues were up to. To talk a little bit then about the challenges, there were two areas of confusion for us. Some faculty had trouble identifying the materials specific to their module, and they would sometimes go into the other modules and answer questions there, or say “where was that resource that you mentioned?” That’s one area that we would want to think about and address. And additionally, the submission tools that we used that first year there had just been one assignment dropbox everyone had uploaded. The second year with the five different groups, everyone was uploading student-facing materials, their deliverables to several different dropboxes, and then we were engaging in a peer review process with our leadership team, where we were just making sure that those deliverables hit the spot on the rubrics that we had been using throughout the professional development programming. And so there was some submission drama [LAUGHTER], but you know because we were all working together to review, give feedback to our faculty, check on our faculty, both within our groups and at our home institutions, we were absolutely able to sort things out and get people feedback where it needed to go. But I think in the future we would consider maybe using the groups feature in Brightspace so that each group would only see the assessments and materials specific to that group. And we also talked about how we’d therefore identify which resources needed to be available for everyone, rather than just saying like, “Okay, here’s everything you can explore it if you want.” Maybe just identifying, “Oh, here are some of the things I’m putting up, the bibliography or the links.” I think these should go in the shared area so that we could direct people through Brightspace in a way that was maybe more efficient for them.
John: The basic issue was that some people logged in, saw five modules, and assumed that they had to complete all five of them, and that led to some confusion. Now, I know in our group we did show people where they should put things and where everything was, but, like our students, sometimes people don’t always remember all those things because they’re doing lots of other things at the same time, and we did have some issues where submissions were going in the wrong location. But the flip side of that is it did make all the resources available to everyone, so in principle, each person could lurk and observe what was happening in all five of the groups. So there’s some tough decisions there. To what extent you want to limit the visibility to make it easier for people to focus on what they’re supposed to be focusing on versus giving them the option of browsing more broadly and groups may be a way of dealing with that with assignments, but I kind of like the way it was set up as different modules once people got that figured out. And I think after the first month or so, they pretty much knew where to go until the final submissions, and that’s where things broke down.
Rebecca: To me, it sounds like an added benefit here of faculty having the opportunity to participate as a student in the environments that they use for teaching.
Racheal: I think that’s a great point, and it makes me think too about the virtual aspect of these synchronous meetings. In our initial grant year, we had mostly run meetings of 10 faculty on our own campuses, and those were in person. We also had an element of connecting with cross-campus folks in a small group of three or four, and that was the element of the project that didn’t get as much positive feedback at the end. People felt like a lot of the focus was on the in-person groups, and it certainly was. So when we were designing the second year, and just thinking about the needs that we wanted to meet for our faculty, we decided that it made sense to move to that virtual model in order to make the choices available. And so, I think that we’ve had the added benefit, again, of really foregrounding that cross-campus communication in the positive ways we already touched on. But I do think you lose something with virtual sometimes, or it’s different than it can be in the classroom. So just because you’ve shown somebody something and demoed it during a virtual meeting does not mean that person wasn’t checking their email [LAUGHTER] or dealing with other work tasks at that time. I think we really all enjoyed the energy during the in-person meetings that our colleagues on our campuses brought. I think the virtual meetings also were very strong, and I felt like we built community within my group as well. But I do think with any virtual meeting, there’s just that built-in element of distraction and multitasking that we all are familiar with from the demands on our time.
John: One of the similarities between the two things is that there was a keynote speaker for each of those to help frame the work. Can you talk a little bit about the keynote speakers and what they focused on to help set the tone of the project?
Racheal: The first year we invited Anna Mills, who is a longtime writing instructor who works for an institution in California. Anna Mills often focuses on peer feedback through AI, and one of her primary goals and the reason that we asked her to join us as the lead speaker for our first project is that she approaches AI from a critical perspective, and she’s always trying to foreground learning objectives. This was something that ran throughout all of our planning. Many of us are instructors or professors, as well as working in educational development from a variety of different angles, and we know from being in the classroom, that it is all about learning objectives. That is where you start, and the decisions you’re making about AI are about how you either preserve or update those, now that students are often engaging with these tools. So Anna has a great set of critical approaches to that. And she also is really on top of changes in tools. That’s another request we often get from faculty. And John, you were just telling me about the great work you do on your campus to just demo some of the tools that students might be using as they change every semester, as agentic AI use increases. I don’t know if you want to say anything about that?
John: At the start of each semester, we do a workshop here talking about what things have changed since the start of the previous semester because a lot of people tried AI four years ago and kind of figured it wasn’t much of an issue because it did such a poor job in terms of hallucinations and pretty predictable writing patterns. But, the people who still believe that need to try it more recently to see what’s changed, and certainly agentic AI and browser plugins that will answer student questions automatically from a Chrome browser are things that faculty should be aware of, just because it is affecting work that many students are doing.
Racheal: Yes, and that’s one thing I admire about what you’re doing, and I admire it in Anna’s outreach as well. She has a big platform, and we were lucky to have her come and join us for that initial talk. In our second year, we hosted two talks through our grant funding. We hosted Marc Watkins, who is a co-author of the Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching, which is coming out this fall. It might have already launched. I know their ebook launched over the summer, and their hard copies will be out soon. He also did great work focusing on some of the updates. We heard from faculty that they had learned a lot from his presentation. He runs an AI institute for faculty at his home institution in Mississippi. So again, our goal with these speakers was to set a shared language and a shared critical perspective going into the work of the different groups, so we got a lot of positive feedback on Marc’s talk, and then we also did host Mel Hogan through funding associated with my group designing assignments for AI literacy, and Hogan’s talk focused on the critiques of AI that are often coming out of a humanities and social sciences perspective, and it was important to me to fund that talk because I simultaneously have been advocating for support for faculty who are having to adapt to AI, and I often hear from our faculty who are sometimes in disciplines that are more engaged with the political conversations, that they wish that critical perspective on AI was represented in some of the professional development opportunities that are available. Because again, we have faculty coming from so many different orientations, places, disciplinary formations, and so I wanted to make sure I honored that feedback. And so we heard from Mel Hogan, who is a media studies and film scholar. And Mel has been essentially sharing both at her home institution in Canada and more broadly in some talks she’s been doing a set of political and ideological concerns related to AI, and that was a second talk that we opened with.
Rebecca: You’ve talked a little bit about some of the opportunities for folks in the cohort to share and interact with one another. What are some of the things that participants generated that were maybe more widely available or more widely distributed as a result of the project?
Racheal: I worked with Ed Beck, my colleague here at SUNY Oneonta, who was also serving this year as the chair of the Faculty Advisory Council on Teaching and Technology for the SUNY System. Ed helped us build a WordPress site that acts as a repository for some of the student-facing materials and other deliverables that faculty made through our groups. So we definitely had faculty share within the smaller virtual communities, but then we also invited them to submit their materials to this site, which we included a Creative Commons license for the site, so the materials are there. They can be viewed publicly. They can be viewed across the system. We definitely did not mandate that our faculty share to this site. We know that intellectual property and teaching materials are personal, and people think of them in different ways; they use them in different ways, but we did invite folks to share. So there are examples from both cohort years on the SUNY ACE site, and we’re hoping to encourage additional faculty to post there as well, although we have some up now.
John: I know a survey was done at the end of this, and you referred to this a little bit before, but could you tell us a little bit more about the reactions of faculty participants to this project?
Racheal: One of the things that we wanted to track when we gave a survey before the program began, and then we gave a similar but slightly different survey at the end, we wanted to track how comfortable people felt engaging with AI in a teaching and learning setting, and the response there was really positive. People, regardless of their initial level, felt that they were more equipped, they had more knowledge, they had more time engaging with tools and ideas related to AI. So that was one aim that we set for ourselves, and the survey data did reflect that faculty felt more comfortable, more knowledgeable related to these themes at the end of the experience. So that was really great. The other celebration that came up again and again: people really liked having the time to talk to colleagues, having that devoted time to come together around a common theme, which again I think faculty experiences and all of our experiences at the university are so dependent on our departments and kind of who we see day to day. So having those opportunities to sit down, develop big ideas, hear from others how they are responding and what they are doing, faculty really appreciated the opportunity to do that. And as always, I like to encourage people in any professional development settings of this kind to steal ideas from each other. So, [LAUGHTER] we talked about that in my group, and I think that ethos of sharing all the materials and resources on Brightspace, of having conversations, of showing what you’ve done, of workshopping. We did workshopping in a lot of these groups, so we weren’t just asking you to design a new assessment or a new assignment. We were asking you to share that and have a conversation with other colleagues. That also was mentioned favorably, and we saw that cross-pollination of ideas and approaches, where some people could learn from and draw from others’ ideas. You might get one approach to a problem you’d been seeing in your class and say, “Oh, I love how this person was doing that. That’s what I’m going to do.” And sometimes these are just little tweaks, ways that you’re going to frame an assignment, things you’re going to say in class, how you’re going to revisit a policy over the course of the semester to really enliven it. And we saw that in the survey data that people appreciated that sharing opportunity.
Rebecca: Well, thanks so much for sharing this project and how it’s been developing over time. We always wrap up by asking, “What’s next?
Racheal: John and I were chatting a little bit about this before we started. I have not pursued IITG funding for another multi-campus initiative this year, so I’m focusing a lot of my energy on my home campus, and it’s been really rejuvenating to do that too. I loved working on these multi-campus projects, and I loved the leadership team members, meeting so many colleagues, presenting at CIT with colleagues, and sharing the great work that we’ve done. And now I’m also very excited to be here at home in Oneonta doing some different communities of practice, book groups, those are a lot of the things that I do here as the Pedagogy Support Specialist in the Faculty Center for Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship. This semester, one of the things I’m the most excited about, I’m working with the Center for Racial Justice and Inclusive Excellence, and my colleague there, Sally Hahn, who’s an anthro faculty member and also is leading the center for a term, but she’s leading a banned books fair for staff, faculty, and students, and we’re running a faculty reading group dedicated to Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. We already have 20 signups. We have had a lot of enthusiasm around some of the novel groups that we’ve run, including a group on Nineteen Eighty-Four last academic year, and we’re asking faculty to read these books together to connect their themes and ideas to their teaching, their research, contemporary political and social questions, and we’ve gotten a lot of enthusiasm for that programming. So those are some of the things I’m excited to be focusing on now.
John: And you will also be presenting on these projects at the AAC&U. [LAUGHTER]
Racheal: Yes, John and I are traveling to Atlanta in October to present the work that our team has done at the AAC& U’s conference on AI, which looks to be an enormous higher ed conference. Lots of folks from many different institutions nationally coming, and we’re excited to present this work because SUNY is such a big system, and I think that our project models how to share resources in a way that creates more choices for our faculty, as we’ve discussed.
John: Well, thank you. It’s always great talking to you, and thank you for all the work you’ve done on these two projects.
Racheal: Thank you so much, John. It’s been wonderful working with you too, and just benefiting from your own expertise and the incredible professional development work you do on your campus.
Rebecca: Thanks so much for joining us.
Racheal: Thanks for having me.
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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.
Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.
John: Editing Assistance provided by Madison Lee.
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