Overview
Maja Anderson is a Visiting Lecturer at Cornell University, where she teaches Moral Psychology in Action. She is also an Instructor at Tompkins Cortland Community College, teaching Field Production and Digital Media, Portfolio Development, Digital Storytelling, and teaches the graduate course Storytelling Across Media: Experience, Making, AI and Data at Radford University. She also has a fifteen-year history at Cornell managing interdisciplinary and community-engaged programs like the Milstein Program in Technology and Humanity and the Laidlaw Program in Leadership and Research. She is currently the Student Development Project Manager at Cornell's David M. Einhorn Center for Community Engagement, managing the redesign of the center's student development student-run and peer-mentorship programs and the Pre-Orientation Service Trip (POST), a community-engaged program that brings incoming first-year students together with local partners through immersive service and reflective learning experiences.
Research Focus
My research examines how human-centered design, community-engaged learning, and creative, co-created assessment practices, including multimodal and collaborative deliverables, cultivate student agency, intrinsic motivation, and meaningful interpersonal connections. I explore how community-engaged pedagogy, when integrated with innovative, student-centered learning modalities, reshapes learning processes and outcomes, particularly in contexts marked by complexity and uncertainty. Central to this work is examining how educators can design curricula, teaching practices, and learning systems that promote autonomy, shared authority, and self-directed learning, while equipping students to engage ethically and creatively with “wicked problems” and complex global challenges, including those emerging in an AI-mediated educational landscape.