Office of the Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs

Message Archive

Monday, March 25, 2019

This email is being sent to all members of the Baruch College faculty.

For an archive of announcements sent from the Associate Provost beginning June 2011, click here.

March 1 was Heather Samples’s last day at Baruch as the Director of the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute. Following her tenure at Baruch’s Writing Center, first as a Writing Consultant and then as the Assistant Director, Heather, who received her MFA in Fiction from Columbia and her Bachelor’s degree from Johns Hopkins, was BLSCI’s Director for four and a half years.

Heather exhibited true service leadership in all she did. To name a few of her accomplishments: in her time as Director of the Schwartz Communication Institute, she enhanced course support partnerships, deepening student learning outcomes; designed and facilitated new faculty development programming to support communication-intensive teaching and learning; launched a comprehensive staff development program; co-sponsored Creative Inquiry Day and advocated for undergraduate research; and co-chaired the MSCHE working group on educational effectiveness assessment. An additional extraordinary (and I believe extraordinarily important) accomplishment was creation with Meechal Hoffman of The Very Short Guides, a toolkit that overviews core pedagogical practices and principles—an original resource to support communication-intensive teaching and learning. True to their name, each guide is a single page introduction to the fundamentals of good teaching, and prioritizes communicating actionable strategies to make teaching more effective, as well as easier.

Heather is now a senior strategist at a boutique marketing agency.

Losing Heather is difficult, but we are very lucky to be able to welcome Dr. Meechal Hoffman to the role of Acting Director of the Schwartz Institute. Meechal became the Associate Director of the Institute about four years ago. Previously, she was a Senior Communication Fellow at the Institute and also taught in Baruch’s First-year Writing and Great Works of Literature programs. She holds a PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center, where her research focused on epistemology, affect, and the social and political utility of negative emotions in the British 19th-century novel. Her undergraduate work was at Barnard College.

Effectively serving as co-Director with Heather on all of the Institute’s projects and programming over the past four years, including co-authorship of The Very Short Guides, Meechal also developed and leads faculty development programming on inclusive pedagogy. Her Inclusive Pedagogy Seminar, initially developed in collaboration with the Marxe School’s Diversity Committee, was held twice at Marxe and is currently running for the first time at Weissman. A total of 29 faculty members have participated so far, and Meechal looks forward to supporting our Strategic Plan’s goal to elevate and embed the principles of diversity, equity, inclusion, and cultural competency throughout the College by expanding the reach of the Seminar. If you’re interested in participating in future cohorts, please be in touch with her directly.

Meechal looks forward to continuing to work with all of the Institute’s partners, ensuring continuity and growth for the Institute, supporting the College’s Strategic Plan, and developing new partnerships across the College.

Please join me in welcoming Meechal to her new role at the Institute.

Dennis Slavin, PhD

Associate Provost for Teaching and Learning

Assistant Vice President

Baruch College, CUNY

646-660-6504 (phone); 646-660-6531 (fax)

Dennis.Slavin@baruch.cuny.edu

http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/provost/teaching_learning.htm