Center Staff

Deandra Little	Assistant Provost & Director	(336) 278-5205	dlittle@elon.edu
Deandra Little directs the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning and is professor of English. She teaches courses on US literature, memoir and autobiography, and has also taught in the Honors program. Her scholarship focuses on educational development in higher ed, scholarship of teaching and learning, and teaching with images. Deandra serves as Vice President for the International Consortium of Educational Development (2017-2020), and is a former president of the POD Network in Higher Education, the North American association for university teaching and learning centers. In 2011-2014, she was associate editor of the International Journal for Academic Development. Though happy to discuss most teaching and learning topics, she is particularly interested in course and assignment design, discussion leading, grading and feedback, and supporting faculty across their careers.
Mary Jo Festle	Associate Director	(336) 278-6423	festle@elon.edu
Mary Jo Festle is professor of history and associate director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning. Festle’s scholarship has been in U.S. women’s history, oral history, medical history, and social movements. While she enjoys discussing most issues related to teaching and learning, she is especially interested in inclusive classrooms, course design, disciplinary thinking, mentoring, and linking day-to-day class work to course goals. Festle received the university’s 2011 Daniels-Danieley Award for Excellence in Teaching, and she was named the Maude Sharpe Powell Professor of History in 2014.
Derek Lackaff	Associate Director	(336) 278-6492	dlackaff@elon.edu
Derek Lackaff is associate professor of communication design and associate director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning. Lackaff teaches primarily in the Interactive Media MA program, and his scholarship focuses on new opportunities afforded by digital communication technologies. He was a 2018-2019 Fulbright Scholar at the University of Bergen, and also been a visiting lecturer at DIS Copenhagen and the Singapore Institute of Management. Lackaff is interested in a range of teaching and learning topics, including global education, curriculum and assignment design, collaborative work, intercultural competence, and civic engagement.
Kelsey Bitting	Assistant Director	(336) 278-5188	kbitting@elon.edu

Kelsey Bitting is Assistant Director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning and Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Elon University. Dr. Bitting’s research interests include exploring the impact of inquiry-based learning experiences on students’ understanding of the nature of science, examining conceptual learning outcomes of student exploration in virtual field environments, and understanding how teaching assistants’ beliefs and practices develop and evolve over time. Dr. Bitting has mentored dozens of faculty from a wide range of disciplines as they design, carry out, and present or publish scholarship of teaching and learning projects. She regularly offers workshops on evidence-based course and program design, inclusive teaching theory and practice, and intentional student mentoring.

Chris Sulva	Program Coordinator	(336) 278-5100	catl@elon.edu

Chris Sulva is the Program Coordinator for the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning and the Center for Engaged Learning. He graduated from Elon in 2015 with a Bachelor of Arts in English, and a minor in Communications. In 2017, he received a Master of Education degree from the University of Vermont, where he also held a job in Student Financial Services, and an internship with the Office of Student and Community Relations. At Elon, he worked at the Moseley Student Center, and was a Writing Center consultant. While he enjoys reading and writing, he has a particular interest in how they can be integrated across a curriculum and in different disciplines in education.

See a list of previous CATL Directors & Associate Directors.