Empowering Students
April 23, 2025
Collegium Magazine explores the Transformative Power of Fisher’s Cardinal Experience
In 2020, when the world was scrambling to navigate life in this new and forced virtual world, faculty, staff, and students at St. John Fisher University were doing the same. But they were also poised to launch the new Fisher Core, a series of 10 courses that are an integral part of every Fisher student’s educational experience. And launch they did, with a new Cardinal Experience where students are guided by faculty mentors while they engage in meaningful, project-based learning and research alongside peers from across majors. It is meant to be the culminating moment of the Core, and for many students, that rings true.
Collegium sat down with the dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, faculty, and students to learn more about how the Core and Cardinal Experience projects, and how they hone crucial and marketable skills for students’ lives after Fisher. This story is the first in a three-part series in 2025 shining a light on the evolution of research at Fisher.
The Core
Since Fisher’s founding, the Core Curriculum has been an integral part of the University’s undergraduate experience designed to equip students with the necessary breadth and depth of knowledge to address the evolving challenges of modern life and work, and it has seen revisions through the years. Coupled with the Fisher Outcomes (vetted by national employers and through the American Association of Colleges and Universities), the Core ensures students are prepared for what comes next.
This most recently revised iteration of the Core enables students from their very first semester to engage in small learning communities that introduce them to their peers and the diverse disciplines of the liberal arts. The three sections of the Core - Foundation Courses, Exploration Courses, and Culmination Courses - prepare students to achieve the Fisher Outcomes throughout their academic journey.
The Culmination Courses are the “developmental pinnacle” of the Core where students integrate their prior experiences both within the Core and within their respective disciplines into one final experience that encapsulates their overall educational journey. The Cardinal Experience provides students with an opportunity to collectively apply the skills and knowledge that have been built throughout the length and breadth of their undergraduate experience, incorporating knowledge and skills developed and honed both in the major and in the Core.
Research: The core of the Core
“Research is a part of a lot of our majors, and of course, the Core. It’s not an ‘extra’ thing that students do, it’s part of their pathway,” said Dr. Ann Marie Fallon, dean of the School of Arts and Sciences. “When revising the Core, we went back and looked at student progression. A lot of seniors were taking 100 and 200 level courses just to finish credit hours and weren’t necessarily having a true culminating experience. We wanted to do something much more intentional to ensure that students paused to look back at all the things they have learned, reflect on our values as an institution, and think about their own values that will propel them forward and into their next chapter. It is what the core of a Fisher education should be.”
Fallon notes that Fisher faculty intentionally pursue grants, fellowships, and other research opportunities in an effort to get students involved.
“That is what is special about the kind of research we do. Undergraduate research is incredibly influential in helping students understand the power of producing knowledge, deeply understanding a topic, and applying to a different arena,” Fallon said. “It exercises brain development and other valuable skills - it is one of the most important pedagogical tools that we have. To be able to do it at a small institution in pretty big ways is both unique and powerful, and giving students the incredible opportunity to be publishing with their faculty members is an experience that will stay with them.”
So, by design, every single Fisher student will go through the Cardinal Experience before they graduate, providing them a valuable opportunity to bring together all of their learning around the Fisher Outcomes that have been “scaffolded in through the Core.”
Dr. Michelle Erklenz-Watts, a professor of education for 17 years, designed a Cardinal Experience that takes students on a deep dive into the educational landscape both in Rochester and around the United States. Throughout the course, students acquired and applied theoretical knowledge and problem-solving skills to discern the ethical aspects and complexity of schooling, all with the goal of investigating - and proposing - solutions.
“I was excited to bring this topic to all majors, through the Core, to see how they relate from their various perspectives. Our first weeks in class are an exposure to the current state of education in our country and locally. Simultaneously, I ask the students to look at the Fisher Outcomes and ask themselves what story they can tell about how they have learned that outcome and rate their confidence in that in an effort to help them think about what skills and dispositions they may still want to develop,” she said.
Erklenz-Watts also spends time having the students think about why someone in their major should care about educational disparities, challenges them to think about their own next step after their undergraduate experience. In doing this exercise, it helps students refine their goals for the course, what they want to focus their research on, and what their final product for the course will look like.
“They each choose their own topic within this issue, then choose to make a small group or work independently. So far, I have seen marketing plans and campaigns, law proposals, business proposals, TED-style talks, podcasts, websites, and more as the final product - each chosen by students to build their knowledge and skill sets,” she said.
Erklenz-Watts said the experience truly helps to build independent thinking and self-confidence. “This is not a traditional class in that the professor stands in front of the class to share their expertise. It’s more that I’m a facilitator/mentor standing beside the class to share my expertise and guide them to build their own. I would often redirect the students back to their original review of outcomes and values to help them answer their own questions. Then they can self-reflect and see what they need to do, set a plan to do it, and accomplish it - skills and dispositions that will serve them well in academic and personal growth.”
She also stresses to students that no matter their chosen career, education impacts everyone, either personally or professionally - or perhaps both.
Lizzie Fitzgerald ’25, a sustainability major with a minor in global health and history, developed the idea to explore environmental education opportunities specifically for students in the Rochester area and what she hypothesized as part of her research proved to be the exact opposite.
For Fitzgerald, this experience challenged her personal and academic growth because the topic was unfamiliar to her. “I was nervous going into this class as I am not an education major and I had no real prior knowledge of the school system and disparities within it. This class has reinforced the interdisciplinary aspect of my sustainability major, and I can now see how many different fields I could work in with my degree.”
She also credits the experience for encouraging her to intentionally connect with the external community providing her with valuable contacts. She even received a job offer from Rochester Ecology Partners, the organization that runs the WildWonder program, a program she learned about through her research.
Dino Begovic ’25, media and communication major, chose to research how legislation has created educational disparities, specifically focusing on the No Child Left Behind Act and the Gun-Free Schools Act. An aspiring film director and producer, he created a video message for his final product to present his research findings and to visually share his analysis of the issues.
“This project has significantly changed my perception of civic engagement and the education system. I’ve always had this mentality that making change is out of my control. This course has helped me understand that making change is important and making change is possible,” said Begovic.
Dr. Anthony Siracusa, assistant professor of history, led his students through a deep dive of the Social Gospel movement in Rochester between 1880 and 1920. During the course, students focused on three elements of the movement: immigration, religious leaders, and the battles between laborers and employers, researching prominent religious leaders who called for a more just and peaceful society.
“The vast majority of working-class people during this period were recent European immigrants, and often both Catholic and Protestant ministers intervened and called for more just living and working conditions for this population. Our students mapped out the churches, labor sites, neighborhoods, and social service centers where all this took place in early 20th century Rochester,” said Siracusa.
According to Siracusa, by the time students arrive in this part of their Fisher career, they have already learned many of the Fisher Outcomes and understand the diversity of human experiences. So, the complexity of the issues and proposed projects offer students a challenge they can be confident pursuing. His class conducted primary source research and worked together to “produce new knowledge” about the Social Gospel movement, presenting their final product as an ArcGIS story map.
“The students’ work contributes to the scholarly research around history in Rochester, the history of the labor movement, and religious history more broadly. They really enjoyed the opportunity to build an interactive map to represent this complex history. They were able to ‘think in place,’” said Siracusa. “One student remarked that after doing research about a single building for a whole semester, in this case the labor lyceum where Rochester socialists met in the early 20th century, they would never look at a single building quite the same way. To me, this was an amazing take away because students could see the depth of stories that lay in every corner of life and society.”
Ian Klenk ’24, who is now enrolled in law school at the University at Buffalo, said the class had a perfect mix of experiential learning, direct original research, and classroom discussion about a topic that everyone found interesting.
“Everything that I did, from the primary research to the development of our final presentation, allowed me to practice critical skills for the workplace. Even now, in law school, I am relying on the research and writing skills I developed at Fisher as I work on my assignments,” said Klenk. “I was also excited to further develop my interpersonal skills: working well with a team towards a final project is necessary for any job, and it takes experience to learn how to professionally engage in teamwork.”
The Future
When thinking about the Cardinal Experience, and the topics and projects tackled each year, the evolution of societal issues will remain top of mind. Fallon noted that one of the things faculty continue to discuss is being able to integrate continuous themes that grow from the Core, exposing students to some “big ideas” in their learning communities and then opt in to learn more.
“That way, when they get to this experience later in their Fisher career, they already have some content background and can then really think about how they would solve the issues presented. Ideally, these would be continuous topics that rotate every three to four years so students can work on these issues over time and in an evolving way building on the work of the previous generation of Fisher students,” she said. “We won’t solve these problems overnight and in just a year. The more we can get students engaged in big questions, the more feedback we will get from students; feedback that could impact society and make a difference as they embark on their careers with this experience in their rearview.”
Thanks to Fisher’s roots in the Rochester region, as well as its ties to service work in the community, Fallon said that the University is well poised—and on the way—to being a national model for how the liberal arts can be integrated with strong outcomes-based education to prepare students for the “complicated world.”
“We encourage students to see the Cardinal Experience as a pathway to tackle in-depth questions and produce knowledge with real-world impact; to see it as more than just a credit hour box to check,” Fallon said. “Because many of our students build their lives and careers in the region after they graduate, they can be ongoing contributors to this community in a way that is meaningful and tangible; that is the power of Fisher. We have the opportunity in Rochester to be one of the leading centers of public engagement; in many ways, we already are.”
