About

Twice Over

During the pandemic, Anne and I, along with everyone else, found ourselves displaced and destabilized, unsure of the present and anxious about the future. How might we care for our families, ourselves and our students? Continue to strive to fulfill our academic mission? Because it is a mission in the deepest sense of that word, a commitment to the past – this is what we have learned – and to the future – this is what we need to know to make a better tomorrow. No pressure.

So, we decided to respond to this current crisis the best way we know how as academics.

By talking.

Anne and I hope, through these conversations, that we can begin to identify ways through, share effective practices and build networks of support. We invite you to listen and comment, to take this journey with us, as we make our way, tentatively and deliberately, to a greater understanding of ourselves and our teaching.

Anne Fernald is Special Advisor to the Provost for Faculty Development and co-chair of the university council on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Fordham University. She collaborates closely with the Chief Diversity Officer and his team, and, in spring 2019 she spearheaded the Provost’s Office Initiative on Inclusive Pedagogy and Student Engagement which continues in 2019-2020. At Fordham since 2004, she facilitated the Arts and Sciences Faculty Pedagogy Seminar from 2016-2019. A scholar of modernism with a special focus on Virginia Woolf, she is the editor of the Cambridge University Press Mrs. Dalloway (2014), and one of the editors of The Norton Reader, a widely-used anthology of essays. Born and raised in Seattle Washington, she lives with her family in New Jersey. She occasionally updates her blog, Fernham, and can be found on twitter @fernham.

Steve D’Agustino is the Director of Online Learning at Fordham University, where he supports the development of distance learning programs. A lifelong educator, he began his career as a public high school teacher and has served as a school district administrator, clinical supervisor of student teachers and as the founding director of a community learning center in the Bronx, that provided access to learning technologies for at-risk high school students and their families. He shares his research and thoughts about effective practices in online teaching at Learning at a Distance.