The Faculty Center hosted our eighth Fall Faculty Institute in October. This year, we focused on experiential learning, inviting faculty and staff from across campus to share with us how they help students learn by doing. Presenters talked about the many ways we build learning experiences into courses and co-curricular opportunities, from bringing students to New York City to participate in the Model United Nations, to requiring internships that help students find their futures in Sports and Exercise Sciences, to partnering with alumnae to support current students in Fashion & Textiles and beyond. This year’s theme helped us snapshot the hard work our faculty and staff devote to experiential learning, and it gave us a forum for sharing strategies and developing new ideas.

We were also lucky to host our keynote speaker, Jacquelyne Thoni (Tony) Howard, Professor of Practice of Data and the Associate Director of Student Engagement at the Connolly Alexander Institute for Data Science at Tulane University. Dr. Thoni Howard engages her students in experiential learning through a range of original and exciting data literacy and digital humanities projects, many with a feminist lens, including This Beautiful Sisterhood of Books: A Digital Recreation of the Women’s Literary Department from the 1884 New Orleans World’s Fair. Throughout her keynote address and workshop, Dr. Thoni Howard offered an expansive vision for engaging students in meaningful, public-facing projects with social justice pedagogies and access equity in mind.