J. Elizabeth Clark is a higher education leader, writing scholar, and pedagogical innovator whose career sits at the intersection of transformative pedagogy, curriculum design, and faculty development. For over two decades, she has pursued a single driving question: how do we design learning experiences that meet students where they are and take them somewhere new?
That commitment has shaped Clark's work at LaGuardia Community College–City University of New York, where she is a Professor of English and Writing Program Administrator, and where her students are among the most linguistically and culturally diverse in the nation. At LaGuardia, she was part of the founding team of what has become a nationally recognized ePortfolio program, and has served in multiple leadership roles for the program. She has led the design of project-based learning curricula for Liberal Arts majors, directed both the Writing Program and the Accelerated Learning Program, and regularly leads year-long professional development seminars that move faculty from individual practice toward collective, inquiry-driven work.
Outside LaGuardia, Clark brings that same commitment to national conversations about learning design and faculty development. A faculty member at WPI's Project-Based Learning Institute since 2016 and a longtime faculty member of AAC&U's Institute on Engaged and Integrative Learning (IEIL), she brings both theoretical grounding and hard-won practical experience to questions of curriculum design and pedagogy that scales.
As Associate Editor of the International Journal of ePortfolio and a contributor to Paul Gaston's AAC&U volume General Education and Liberal Learning, her scholarly work has long examined the design of learning environments that ask students to think, reflect, and integrate. Her research on writing and technology has appeared in Computers and Composition, and her op-ed on high-stakes writing assessment was published in The New York Times.
Clark's scholarship and leadership increasingly focus on what it means to teach and to learn in a rapidly changing technological landscape. As the Humanities Disciplinary Lead on CUNY's Lumina-funded Building Bridges of Knowledge AI Project and Co-Lead of LaGuardia's GenAI team, she works at the intersection of human-centered pedagogy and emerging technology. Her open educational resource, Textual Transformations: An Introduction to AI for Composition 101, a nine-unit curriculum released under a Creative Commons license, is freely available for adoption by any instructor or institution.
She is, at heart, a teacher who believes that the best learning creates space for inquiry and room for genuine growth, and that those two things, given enough room, change everything.
