WAC Leadership
Coordinators
Elaine Avidon, a retired lecturer of the Department of Early Childhood and Childhood Education and one of the co-leaders of Lehman’s WAC initiative, has been a faculty member at Lehman College since 1969. She is director of the Elementary Teachers Network, a professional development program for New York City teachers, at the Institute for Literacy Studies at Lehman where she also leads the Institute’s Teaching and Learning Inquiry Seminar. Avidon is a former director of the New York City Writing Project and a founding member of the Bard College Institute for Writing and Thinking. Her specialty areas include composition, literacy education and descriptive inquiry. Prior to joining the faculty at Lehman, she was a teacher of social studies in New York City junior high schools. (office C-B48; phone 718-960-6091/7823; e-mail el.avidon@gmail.com)
Tyler T. Schmidt is an assistant professor of English and co-coordinator of the WAC program at Lehman. Involved with WAC since 2005, he worked alongside faculty as a Writing Fellow and co-led faculty institutes as a Faculty Development Associate. Schmidtr has worked as a teacher-consultant for the New York City Writing Project and coordinated Pass It On, their summer youth writers’ institute for NYC public school students. He has taught literature and writing at Baruch College, the Cooper Union, Bard College, and Eugene Lang College. His current project, Dreams of an Impossible Blackness: Racialized Desire and America’s Integrationist Impulse, 1945-1955, investigates cross-race writing, interracial sexuality, and queer identity in post-WWII American poetry and fiction. Research interests include 20th century American poetics, interracial cultural studies, critical pedagogy, and African American writers of the 1940s and 50s (office C-397; phone 718 960 8556; e-mail tyler.schmidt@lehman.cuny.edu ).
Marcie Wolfe is the director of Lehman College’s Institute for Literacy Studies, a CUNY institute focused on literacy education, mathematics education, and school improvement and reform. Within these three areas ILS staff conduct professional development, provide site-based support to schools and programs, and conduct and disseminate research studies that draw upon and extend the knowledge of practitioners in school and community settings. Ms. Wolfe is principal investigator for the ILS’s numerous funded projects, and, in addition, co-coordinates Lehman College’s Writing across the Curriculum Initiative and the New York City W-riting Project, the local site of the National Writing Project . For five years she co-coordinated CUNY’s Looking Both Ways project (a faculty-development collaboration among teachers of writing at CUNY and in the New York City public high schools). Her specialty areas include literacy education, composition, and school reform. (office SP-113; phone 718-960-8758; e-mail marcie.wolfe@lehman.cuny.edu).
Cindy Lobel is an assistant professor of History and co-coordinator of the WAC program at Lehman. She joined the faculty at Lehman in 2006 and is also on the faculties of Macaulay Honors College and the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies Program at the CUNY Graduate Center. Cindy is herself a graduate of the year-long Writing Across the Curriculum Program at Lehman. Her research interests include 19th-century United States history, urban history, New York City history, and the history of American foodways. (office CA-295; phone 718-960-1897 ; email cindy.lobel@lehman.cuny.edu)
Faculty Development Associates
Roberta Michel is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in the Musical Arts performance program at the CUNY Graduate Center.She holds a Bachelor of Music degree with highest honors from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a Master of Music degree from SUNY-Purchase College. Her primary research interests are extended flute techniques and contemporary repertoire and her dissertation researches the flute music of Salvatore Sciarrino from both analytical and performance practice perspectives. Roberta has performed throughout North America in venues including: Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, Alice Tully Hall, Merkin Hall, and The Kennedy Center. She is a founding member of The Cadillac Moon Ensemble, a quartet dedicated to commissioning and performing new works, and is on the flute faculty at Great Neck Music Conservatory.
Paul J. Polgar is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the CUNY Graduate Center where he studies slavery, race, and antislavery reform in the early American republic. His dissertation reexamines gradual emancipation inthe Post Revolutionary and early national Mid-Atlantic, arguing for the racially egalitarian challenge that the first American abolition movement posed to black bondage in the new nation. He has published broadly in the field of African-American history on topics ranging from chronicles of black protests, to studies of African-American disfranchisement in early nineteenth century New York, to an examination of responses to the film “The Birth of a Nation.” Prior to becoming a writing fellow at Lehman, Paul served as a graduate teaching fellow at Queens College and taught the first half of the U.S. survey.
The Writing Across the Curriculum Advisory Committee
The WAC Advisory Committee (WAC-AC) provides support and direction to the WAC initiative. WAC-AC’s charge is to assist WAC in 1) expanding its scope to include all academic departments, 2) planning and conducting college-wide faculty development initiatives, and 3) working with the Office of Institutional Research to assess the impact that WAC is having on Lehman’s student population. WAC-AC meets monthly and includes many of the faculty and administrators involved in Lehman’s Coordinated Undergraduate Education Initiative (CUE). In addition to the WAC coordinators, members of WAC-AC include the Provost, the Dean of Arts & Humanities, current and former department chairs, and faculty/ administrators who direct the Freshman Year Initiative, Instructional Support Services, the College Curriculum Committees (undergraduate and graduate), General Education Initiative, CPE coordination, and CUE.
Current members include:
Elaine Avidon, Early Childhood and Childhood Education/WAC Coordinator; Althea Forde, Instructional Support Services; Marlene Gottlieb, Dean of Arts and Humanities; Barbara Jacobson, Sociology/Chair of Curriculum Committee; Robin Kunstler, Health Sciences/Graduate Committee; Eleanor Lundeen, Nursing/CPE Coordinator; Mary Papazian, Senior Vice President of Academic Affairs and Provost; Vincent Prohaska, Psychology/ Chair of WAC-AC; Joseph Rachlin, Biology; Duane Tananbaum, History; Susanne Tumelty, Institutional Research; Lynne Van Voorhis, Ass't Dean, Summer, Weekend, & Transfer Programs/CUE Coordinator; Robert Whittaker, Journalism, Communications, and Theater/Gen Ed Coordinator; Marcie Wolfe, Institute for Literacy Studies/WAC Coordinator; Steven Wyckoff, English Composition and Coordinated Freshman Programs; Jessica Yood, English/WAC Coordinator.
Last modified: Apr 10, 2013
