2024 IEIL Faculty

Dawn Michele Whitehead is the Vice President of the Office of Global Citizenship for Campus, Community, and Careers at the Association of American College and Universities (AAC&U), director of the Institute on Integrative Learning and Signature Work and co-director of the Interfaith Leadership in Higher Education initiative. Whitehead’s work focuses on advancing practices and strategies to integrate global and experiential learning across curricular and co-curricular initiatives, general education and the majors, within professional schools, and on-campus and off-campus experiences. She has presented nationally and internationally and has written on these topics and earned her Ph.D. at Indiana University Bloomington.

Nancy Budwig is currently a Professor of Psychology at Clark University where she served for more than a decade in the academic administration in a variety of roles. In her role as Associate Provost Nancy played a leadership role in developing and implementing the Liberal Education and Effective Practice (LEEP) curricular framework guiding Clark’s undergraduate reform initiative around engaged and integrative learning. Nancy was the project lead when Clark was invited to participate in AAC&U’s Teagle-funded project on cultivating faculty leadership for integrative liberal learning and more recently she has worked with the Clark team, as well as coordinating AAC&U’s national project on Capstone and Signature Capstone. From 2016-2020, Nancy was a senior fellow at AAC&U, and spent 2016-2017 in residence working on the LEAP Challenge project that resulted in the publication of the 2018 Spring issue of Peer Review examining how LEAP Challenge campuses defined, organized, and scaled signature work. A developmental and learning scientist by training, Budwig infuses her administrative work with what we know about student learning and organizational development. Most recently she has begun a national study interviewing college students about engaged learning as they transition from high school to college. Some of her work has been published in higher education outlets including Peer Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Change: A Magazine of Higher Learning, and Liberal Education. She is a co-editor (with Turiel and Zelazo) of the volume New Perspectives on Human Development published by Cambridge University Press in 2017 and an author of an article in Frontiers on interdisciplinary learning in 2020, as well as constructivist education in the journal Human Development in 2022. In 2023, she began publishing on her new work on students’ developing perspectives on engaged learning as they transition to and exgage in college learning in Human Arenas. Nancy received her BA in Psychology from Vassar College, and her PhD from University of California, Berkeley.

J. Elizabeth Clark shares her ideas about writing and technology at LaGuardia Community College–City University of New York where, as Professor of English, she teaches composition, children’s literature, and fiction writing. Part of LaGuardia’s dynamic ePortfolio team since its inception, her work with ePortfolio at the college has included leading year-long professional development seminars, collaborating to design several iterations of the college’s ePortfolio assessment, and serving as Interim ePortfolio Director. Liz’s work at LaGuardia has also included serving as Writing Program Director and director of the Accelerated Learning Program for basic writing, chairing the Online Learning Committee, chairing the Common Reading Committee, and leading an interdisciplinary team in a year-long curriculum development process for a project-based learning course for Liberal Arts majors. Outside of LaGuardia, she is an associate editor for the International Journal of ePortfolio and a past-chair of the national Council on Basic Writing. Liz has worked with many colleges & universities on the pedagogy and design of ePortfolio programs. She is a returning member of the IEIL faculty and regularly presents at AAC&U conferences and workshops. Liz is particularly interested in innovative pedagogy, leadership and professional development, Signature Work, ePortfolios, reflection as a tool for integrative learning, and the intersections of writing and technology.

Peter Felten is executive director of the Center for Engaged Learning, professor of history, and assistant provost for teaching and learning at Elon University. He has published seven books about undergraduate education, including Connections are Everything: A College Student’s Guide to Relationship-Rich Education (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023) co-authored by Isis Artze-Vega, Leo Lambert, and Oscar Miranda Tapia – with an open access online version free to all readers. His next book, The SoTL Guide, is co-authored by Katarina Mårtensson and Nancy Chick, and will be published in late 2024. He is on the advisory board of the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) and is a fellow of the Gardner Institute.

Kim has nearly 30 years of experience in the field of education. In higher education, she worked as the Director for Institutional Effectiveness and Assessment at Roanoke College as well as the Associate Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning at Virginia Tech. At both a small liberal arts institution, and a large land grant university, she supported the systematic design, planning, implementation, and assessment of experiential learning programs to integrate high impact learning into courses and curricula. Currently, she serves as a resource specialist at Roanoke County Public Schools. In addition to teaching responsibilities, she is working to develop a comprehensive, integrated system-wide approach for addressing the leaking K-12 to higher education pipeline. Kim earned her B.S. from the University of Maryland, M.S. from Johns Hopkins, and Ph.D. in Educational Research and Evaluation from Virginia Tech.

Nicholas V. Longo is a chair and professor of Global Studies and co-director of the Dialogue, Inclusion, and Democracy (DID) Lab at Providence College, where he also serves as a faculty fellow for engaged scholarship for Center for Teaching Excellence.

Nick is a faculty mentor and board member of College Unbound, a college working to re-invent higher education for returning adult learners. He consults with some of the leading national civic engagement organizations, including serving as a deliberative dialogue fellow for Campus Compact, a faculty consultant for AAC&U’s Institute for Engaged and Integrated Learning, a faculty fellow for the Institute for Citizens & Scholars summer institute on Dialogue Across Difference, and an affiliated facilitator for the Constructive Dialogue Institute. He formerly served as a program officer at the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, the inaugural director of the Harry T. Wilks Leadership Institute at Miami University in Ohio, and the director of Campus Compact’s national youth civic engagement initiative, Raise Your Voice.
Nick is author of a number of books, articles, and reports on civic education, deliberative dialogue, youth civic engagement, and community-based learning. His publications include Why Community Matters: Connecting Education with Civic Life (SUNY Press) and several co-edited volumes, including Creating Space for Democracy: A Primer on Dialogue and Deliberation in Higher Education (Stylus) and Deliberative Pedagogy: Teaching and Learning for Democratic Engagement (Michigan State University Press). He was awarded the Early Career Research Award from the International Association for Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement (IARSCLE) in 2009 and was the 2022 recipient of the Innovation in Teaching Excellence Award from Providence College. He holds a master’s in public affairs and a Ph.D. in education from the University of Minnesota.

Nick lives in Providence, Rhode Island with his wife, Aleida. Together, they have a great passion for educating the next generation of democratic citizens, starting with their children, Maya and Noah.

Richard F. Vaz is Professor Emeritus of Integrative and Global Studies and Senior Fellow for the Center for Project-Based Learning at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). He earned the BS, MS, and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from WPI, and has served on the WPI faculty since 1987.

From 2006 to 2016 Rick served as WPI’s Dean of Interdisciplinary and Global Studies, overseeing the Global Projects Program, a worldwide network of 50 centers where more than 1000 students and faculty per year address problems for local agencies and organizations, as well as WPI’s interdisciplinary research project requirement, the Interactive Qualifying Project. In 2016, he established WPI’s Center for Project-Based Learning, which has provided support to over 200 colleges and universities looking to enhance student learning with project experiences.

Rick’s interests include experiential and global learning, faculty development, curricular reform, and institutional change. He has authored over 70 peer-reviewed or invited publications and directed student research projects in 18 locations worldwide, including Australia, Denmark, Greece, Hong Kong, Italy, Ireland, Namibia, Puerto Rico, and Thailand. From 2004 to 2010 he was a Senior Science Fellow of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. In 2016 he was awarded the National Academy of Engineering’s Bernard M. Gordon Prize for Innovation in Engineering and Technology Education.

Dr. Kiesha Warren-Gordon is a Professor of Criminal Justice/Criminology and the director of the African American studies program. She also an affiliate faculty member in the Gender and Women’s Studies program and teaches a variety of courses including; Victimology; Race, Gender, and Crime; Black women and Justice, and the Capstone in Criminal Justice at Ball State University where she recently completed her 17th year.

Dr. Warren-Gordon also serves as adjunct faculty at Galen University in Belize where she has worked to help develop and teach the first women and gender studies courses at the institution.

Dr. Warren-Gordon’s substantive areas include critical community engagement, Victimology, Black women across the Black diaspora. Her research explores the intersection of race and social justice issues, victimization, and intercultural conflict. Her work also centers on critical approaches of community engagement while working with marginalized communities.

Dr. Warren-Gordon’s substantive areas include critical community engagement, Victimology, Black women across the Black diaspora. Her research explores the intersection of race and social justice issues, victimization, and intercultural conflict. Her work also centers on critical approaches of community engagement while working with marginalized communities.