Allison Lehr Samuels, Director
Allison Lehr Samuels is a full-time Lecturer with a focus on Entrepreneurship and Small Business, and a Field Mentor at the Lawrence N. Field Center for Entrepreneurship at Baruch College. Her consulting work includes over 1500 small business owners and entrepreneurs who have ranged from fashion designers, radio producers, and restaurateurs, to hedge fund consultants, violin makers and graphic designers. She has extensive experience developing business and marketing plans, obtaining small business loans and building up the knowledge and confidence of her clients so that they feel empowered to take action. She co-developed a course “Business Meets 3D Digital Design and Fabrication” and previously co-developed and implemented a course on Women and Entrepreneurship which looks at the challenges specific to women owned businesses, and explores the necessary skills for women to successfully obtain resources and run successful businesses. She was the first recipient of the Zicklin Hybrid Online Teaching with Technology Award for her work in curriculum development. She holds an MBA in Entrepreneurship Management from Baruch College and a BA from Barnard College, Columbia University in Theatre.
Craig Stone, Project Manager for Educational Technology
Craig Stone has supported Baruch College faculty members, staff, and students in the use of web technology since 2011. At the CTL, he works with instructors and academic service units to build custom web spaces on Blogs@Baruch and also supports courses using Vocat, a web application used by students and instructors to share and assess video presentations. In Spring 2014 he helped lead the pilot of the newly developed Vocat 3.0. Craig joined Baruch in 2009 as a faculty member in the Department of Journalism and the Writing Professions, teaching classes on multimedia reporting, journalistic writing, and sports writing. In two years with that department he created websites for various faculty and student-run projects, including moving the award winning student magazine Dollars & Sense from a yearly print edition to a continuously updated website. In 2011, he joined the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute as an educational technology specialist, and moved to the same role at the Center for Teaching and Learning in 2014. Before coming to Baruch, he was the web editor at J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism at American University in Washington, D.C. Craig has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism and an MBA in information systems from Baruch’s Zicklin School of Business.
Cheryl C. Smith, Faculty Liaison
Cheryl C. Smith is Associate Professor of English at Baruch College, where she directs the Great Works of World Literature program. She teaches courses in great works, the arts in NY, advanced non-fiction writing, lyrics and literature, and American literature. She co-edited the book, Making Teaching and Learning Matter: Transformative Spaces in Higher Education (2011) and also co-edits the Journal of Basic Writing. She is currently working on three short projects: an essay on teaching literature in translation for an upcoming MLA volume, Approaches to Teaching Lu Xun; an article about the intersection of protest, poetry, and feminism at City College during Open Admissions; and a collaborative article on the pedagogical challenges and affordances of teaching literature in hybrid learning environments. She is also developing a book-length project that looks at the loss of creativity in schooling, which she traces to several factors including increasing emphasis on testing, standardization, and assessment in K-12 and beyond; disregard for teacher input and individualized instruction; and shifts in “consumer” attitudes toward higher education and its value(s). She defines and promotes creativity as a force in developing literacy and offers techniques for college faculty to engage student creativity through exercises in literary translation, writing in digital environments, and collaborative writing.
Alfred Waller, Administrative Coordinator
With a B.A. in Psychology, Alfred Waller started out as an Assistant Director for the Parkchester Baptist Church Summer Day Camp and Girl Scout Council of Greater New York where he helped develop and implement programs for children ages 5-17. While working for the recruitment team at the CUNY Welcome Center, Alfred received an M.P.A. from John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He was also the Operations Manager for the CUNY Startups program which helps propel student-founded startups across 24 CUNY campuses. Alfred comes to CTL with extensive administrative/office management and programming experience with a passion to support CTL’s vision.
Christopher Silsby, Project Manager for Blogs@Baruch
Christopher comes to the CTL from his work on Blogs@Baruch as a Communication Fellow with the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute. He also has a history in higher ed tech support and server administration at NYU, the University of Minnesota, and Carleton College. He holds a PhD in Theatre from the Graduate Center. He has taught courses in performance and theatre history at Brooklyn College, the New School, and Montclair State, and in social media at Baruch. He worked on publications at the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, where he served as the managing editor of the journal Slavic and East European Performance and as the production editor for multiple collections of plays and articles.
Tamara Gubernat, Interim Associate Director
Tamara Gubernat brings her background as a documentary filmmaker, multi-media artist and educator to the CTL as a Hybrid Coordinator. She currently teaches Media Studies in the Film & Media Department at Hunter College and video production with a focus on civic engagement to High School students in Brooklyn with the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP). Tamara is also completing her second documentary, “Open Process: local democracy in one corner of Brooklyn” a film about Brooklyn Community Board 1. She looks forward to sharing her background in filmmaking and multi-media skills with Baruch faculty developing hybrid courses in the upcoming Hybrid Seminar.
Hamad Sindhi, Digital Pedagogy Specialist
(Specialties: VOCAT, game-based learning, assignment design, OER)
Hamad Sindhi is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center. At the CTL, he has assisted faculty with VOCAT, co-authored The CUNY Game project, helped evaluate the OER initiative, and consulted faculty on course and assignment design, specifically on how to include instructional technology in the classroom. Hamad is passionate about pedagogy and has completed the doctoral certificate in Interactive Technology & Pedagogy. Hamad has also taught as an adjunct instructor at several CUNY colleges since 2011, including at Baruch College, Lehman College, and City College.
Pamela Thielman, Open Educational Resources (OER) Coordinator
(Specialties: OER/zero cost course materials, visual communication, oral presentations, VOCAT, accessibility)
Pamela co-coordinates the activities of the Open Educational Resources Initiative and consults on related issues such as digital pedagogy, copyright, and accessibility of online course materials. In addition to her work with Baruch’s CTL, she teaches in the Communication Studies department and has worked with the English department on an assessment of their hybrid Great Works of Literature courses. Pamela holds a PhD in Theatre and Performance and a doctoral certificate in Interactive Technology and Pedagogy from The Graduate Center, CUNY.
Seth Graves, Digital Pedagogy Specialist
(Specialties: course design, accessibility, assessment, writing across disciplines, Blogs@Baruch)
Seth Graves is a doctoral candidate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center who specializes in writing studies, rhetoric, and digital culture, with ten years of experience in the classroom. He assists faculty in designing innovative courses, assignments, and assessment models. He co-edits Join the Conversation, an annual writing course reader published by Bedford/St. Martin’s, and is assistant editor of the Journal of Basic Writing. He teaches composition and rhetoric at Baruch and creative writing at The New School and is a 2021 Carnegie Educational Technology Fellow.
Ron Whiteman, Digital Pedagogy Specialist
(Specialties: Course & Assignment Design; Fully Online Teaching; Blackboard Course Management Platform)
Ron is a Digital Pedagogy Specialist with the CTL and also a Substitute Assistant Professor in Psychology here at Baruch College. Ron has had experience with online pedagogy from both a research perspective and a teaching perspective. In particular, he teaches a fully online version of the course, Cognitive Psychology, and he also has been working with the Psychology Department querying students’ perceptions of learning in various psychology courses and assessing how those perceptions might differ for the same course that is taught via fully-online versus in-person formats.
Katherine Tsan, Digital Pedagogy Specialist
(Specialties: Оpen Educational Resources, assessment, interactive resource creation, copyright/Creative Commons)
Katherine Tsan comes to the Center for Teaching and Learning from a joint background in Academic Libraries (she holds an M.L.S. from Queens College) and humanities teaching and resource creation (she holds a Ph.D. in Modern European History from Yale University where her dissertation dealt with the Russian émigrés in France during the interwar period). She lectures and publishes scholarship on the history of immigration, open resources in history and creating interactive tutorials. At the CTL she has been engaging with learning through digital technologies–Twine, Voyant, Hypothes.is, Storymap JS and Timeline JS–and the digital humanities field as it relates to pedagogy. In 2019-2020 she served as an OER Research Fellow at the Open Education Group, focusing on digital technology and open resource creation.
Cathy Kawalek, Zoom Pedagogy Specialist
Cathy Kawalek has recently joined the Center for Teaching and Learning and will be sharing tips about Zoom, ideas on teaching skills for the online environment and lessons from 15 years of working in the remote trenches at IBM. Since 2017, Cathy has been a member of the Baruch teaching community as an adjunct for the Zicklin capstone class, BPL 5100, and has completed the CTL courses in Hybrid Class Creation and OER. She worked in strategy and planning in the private sector for 35 years in the apparel, retail, and technology sectors and holds a BA from Tulane in Philosophy, an MA in Art History (UC Santa Barbara) and an MLS in Library and Information Studies (UC Berkeley.) Continuing studies include 8 years of summer school adult education in 18thC and 19thC history and literature at Christ Church College, Oxford University.
