The Center for Pedagogical Innovation (CPI) aims to directly bring the school’s core values of creativity, innovation, and curiosity to students by connecting them with educators. Located in the basement of Fisk Hall, CPI is comprised of professors dedicated to advancing these educational methods.

“The CPI started out primarily to support faculty, but we have been spending a lot more of our effort and time developing support services for students,” Director of the CPI Jennifer Rose said.

After receiving a grant of $750,000 from the Mellon Foundation in 2017, the CPI has been able to greatly expand its services, such as offering workshops on digital design for faculty and consulting with students who want to intern in classrooms. 

“Many of our students are doing things that really are in the realm of education, and so the center is available for students as well who want to work through…anything related to pedagogical [innovation],” Associate Professor in the Practice of Education Studies Amy Grillo said. 

Grillo works with various student-led tutoring groups on campus, such as Cardinal Kids and WesReads, to help them figure out the best ways to work with young kids. Grillo also works one-on-one with any students who are seeking educational advice.

Sarah Ryan, Associate Professor of the Practice in Oral Communication, works alongside Grillo and Rose at the Center. Ryan’s role in the CPI is working with students and professors on public speaking and oral communication skills.

“A lot of universities have teaching centers, but ours is really unique because we focus on learning, too,” Ryan said. “Half of what we do is providing resources for professors, which is probably why people haven’t heard of us in the past.”

The University’s version of a “teaching center” is not just focused on training students to go into the field of education, but on training students and faculty to be more equitable and creative educators. To Grillo, one of the ways that educators can meet these goals follows the Universal Design for Education model. 

“To put it in a nutshell, [a Universal Design for Education is] basically the idea that we should—[that] every campus should—be moving towards designing learning opportunities such that there are no barriers built in,” Grillo explained. “I’ve had students come and talk to me and say that sometimes they feel that in general faculty aren’t as sensitive to challenges of first generation students as they could be.”

Grillo mentioned that many professors hold expectations that all students come to the University versed in academic lingo such as “office hours,” when in reality, many students are not fluent in the language of academia.

“We just have to think about the assumptions we’re making,” Grillo said. “I’m hoping we can do some surveying of students and focus groups to try and figure out what those barriers are.”

As part of their initiative, the CPI is in close contact with the Quantitative Analysis Center (QAC). Since receiving the Mellon Grant, the QAC has launched a data analysis certificate and minor and has transitioned to a program that is primarily project-based.

“[My students] work in teams, so they are evaluated on teamwork and on communication in addition to the ‘can they write the code, do they understand the data analysis,’ that kind of thing,” Rose said. “It’s kind of a full-bodied approach to assessment.”

This “full-bodied” approach has helped make the QAC’s programs increasingly popular.

“We’ve found it to be really successful in terms of more students wanting to continue taking courses in the area of statistics and data analysis,” Rose said. 

Still, the CPI is innovative in other ways. Just last spring, they launched the Presentation Studio as a way to provide academic support for students preparing for presentations.

“The presentation studio is just like the writing center or the math workshop, but for presentations,” Maren Westgard ’22, a mentor in the Presentation Studio, said. 

Ryan explained how the Presentation Studio was created in response to a lack of presentation support on campus.

“There was such strong support for writing at Wes; some of the best in the country,” Ryan said. “What kept coming up in various staff meetings and faculty meetings was that there just wasn’t a lot of support for presentations.”

Westgard says that although she helps people with class projects, the work accomplished in the Presentation Studio goes far beyond the classroom.

“My first appointment was someone who had a job interview and he had to do a presentation as an example of his skills,” Westgard said. “We did everything from how to structure his arguments to what to put on a slide.”

To Westgard, public speaking is a skill students will benefit from once they enter the ‘Real World’ after college. 

However, many Wesleyan students these days are involved with public speaking. Many students speak at rallies, protests, and campus events. Cognizant of this, CPI has developed resources to help students advance those skills. 

“I work with any students who are doing [anything] related to oral presentations, oral advocacy, [and] public speaking,” Ryan said.  

Halle Newman can be reached at hnewman@wesleyan.edu.