Students can play modern board games and dive into immersive VR experiences.

Faculty can incorporate games across disciplines to support critical thinking, collaboration, storytelling, systems analysis, and experiential learning. The Game Hub supports course integration, project-based work, and experimentation with game-based and game-informed pedagogy, whether for a single class session or an entire course.

The Game Hub is an extension of Livia Alexander’s research, which was completed as part of ����vlog’s Higher Education Academic Leadership (HEAL) Program. Alexander is a Professor of Art and Design and, as a participant of the HEAL Program, explored game-based learning and play tools for community building, pedagogy, and interdisciplinary engagement.

The Game Hub has been made possible by University Libraries’ sponsorship and The ADP Center for Learning Technologies’ partnership.

Visitor Information

Location: The ADP Center for Learning Technologies (University Hall 1140), ����vlog

Availability: Monday – Thursday: 9 AM – 8 PM; Friday: 9 AM – 3 PM

About the Higher Education Academic Leadership (HEAL) Program

The HEAL Fellowship program provides opportunities for faculty to identify and study an important problem or challenge facing higher education and propose a scalable and impactful intervention that ultimately supports the success of students, faculty, staff, or the university.

Story by Social Media and Communications Coordinator Lauren Conforti 

Koren was the guest of the Montclair’s Center of Pedagogy, which invited the artist to speak to Art Education students in the University’s art studios. In providing a lens for looking at art as a platform for social justice, the future teachers learned how including the arts in the study of black history can make a difference in the lives of their future elementary and secondary school students.

In her talk, Koren shared how she emigrated 46 years ago to New York from Budapest, Hungary, to experience cultural diversity in all of its many forms. She quickly learned, however, that understanding culture is more than mere immersion and she also learned how segregated the United States really is.

After many attempts to develop cross-cultural friendships, Koren decided she felt a connection to the Civil Rights activists she had listened to and seen at lectures. A new passion to learn about the African American experience grew, according to her . “For 15 years I attended history lectures in African American churches and community centers,” she says. “I learned from the most respected history professors in the community, teaching African American history.”

These lectures were the source of her inspiration to create sculptures of great African American historical figures.

When the city of New York decided to re-vision and remake the northwest corner of Central Park into something more than a turn-around, they considered the history of Harlem and the African American experience in America. Koren won the Central Park Conservancy design competition. She created the eight-foot bronze portrait sculpture of Frederick Douglas that now anchors the crossroads of Central Park West and 110th Street-Frederick Douglass Boulevard.

Douglass was committed to women’s rights and endorsed women’s suffrage and Koren included granite blocks that form seating encircling the bronze sculpture of Douglass. On one of the granite blocks one can read Douglass’ words: “Whatever may be said as to a division of duties and avocations, /The rights of man and the rights of woman are one and/inseparable, and stand upon the same indestructible basis. 1851”

“Creating space for justice, equity and fairness might seem like a lofty and unreachable goal,” says Art and Design Assistant Professor Dorothy Heard, who hosted the sculptor in our Calcia studio. “Except when we remember Frederick Douglass who lived a life that showed us that we all individually and collectively, have the capacity to rethink and recreate our relationships and our spaces. We can rethink and remake our ideas about race and gender.”

Koren follows in the path of other women artists who depicted the lives of ordinary people and paths of possibility extraordinary people create, Heard explains. Anne Whitney (1821-1915) was a successful American woman artist who made portrait-sculptures of abolitionists and suffragists. African American woman artist Edmonia Lewis (1844-1907) carved a medallion depicting abolitionist John Brown. Best known for her sculpture of a young black boy in ordinary clothing, the 1930s African American woman artist Augusta Savage (1892-1962) opened a community art center in Harlem.

Like these women artists who came before her, Koren is keenly aware of the community, place, space and history.

Koren’s life-sized sculpture of Malcolm X is on display in the , in the very location where El-Hajj Malik Shabazz, Malcolm X, was assassinated in Harlem.

Her lesser known piece, , is most revealing of Koren’s desire to use art to tell profound stories about people who made a difference. A Quaker abolitionist activist teacher, Crandall withstood white supremacist backlash when she opened the first school in 1833 for African American girls in Canterbury, Conn. Koren refused to complete the project commissioned by the state of Connecticut until the entire story was told. According to Koren, the statue would be incomplete without a statue of her student standing nearby.

“Find your passion,” Koren told the future art teachers. “Then pursue it with all of your determination. Then you will find success and fulfillment in life.”

Gabriel Koren, surrounded by ����vlog art education students and faculty.

Photos by University Photographer Mike Peters

The article stated: College costs, the fees required of standardized tests like the edTPA, and other financial stressors make teaching an increasingly impractical career choice, she added.

That’s especially true for people of color, who already grapple with an entrenched wealth gap, said Dr. Robinson.

Teachers union officials say boosting pay for first-time teachers would help. Starting salaries for teachers with bachelor’s degrees range from $54,000 in Hopewell to $58,000 in Montclair to $61,000 in Jersey City. The average starting salary for most New Jersey teachers is about $56,400, according to the New Jersey Education Association.

The union has a “$60K the first day” campaign that aims to lift starting pay statewide to $60,000 a year, but only 77 of the state’s 600 districts have met that target. (Another 35 have approved contracts that would hit that mark in future years, a union spokesman said.)

Dr. Robinson said policymakers intent on getting more teachers of color into classrooms should focus on removing the profession’s financial barriers.

Teacher certification requires a semester or more of full-time student teaching — and that’s typically unpaid, she noted.

“How do you pay tuition, while apprenticing with an experienced teacher full-time and you’re not getting any compensation whatsoever?” Dr. Robinson said.

Many of the attendees are students in Montclair State’s new SubIN program, which recruits and supports those interested in becoming substitute teachers. “Events like these are a win-win for Montclair State students and for our partner districts: they provide real-world opportunities for students to explore career options while providing the district with potential new substitute teachers at a time when there is a great need for additional staff in our schools,” said Caroline Murray, co-coordinator of the SubIN program.