Resources from the 2023 Fall Forum: Teaching Now

The 2023 Fall Forum: Teaching Now on September 22nd provided an opportunity to connect with colleagues from various disciplines around the central question: What does it mean to be an educator in 2023? The Forum was highly interactive, and involved many opportunities for dialogue and sharing. Thank you to everyone who attended! We’ve included below the slides from each session alongside the session abstracts, as well as some photos at the bottom of the page. It’s impossible to capture an event like this in just slideshows and text, and we hope to continue the generative energy in other programs and events this fall.

CoP/I: Results, Reflections, and Future Potentials – Kim Bobier, Erica Morawski, Jeannie Joshi

Communities of Practice/Inquiry (CoP/I) is a mini-grant program from the Center for Teaching and Learning that first ran as a pilot in Spring of 2023. Four communities gathered several times over the semester to pursue a common practice or inquiry.

Re/Search analyzed research as an activity unrelated to outputs. The aim of this group was to find a way to communicate to students the value of exploration, of changing direction, of contradicting our own ideas, and of questioning what we’ve found during the research and writing process. Deep Listening, despite being small, made considerable strides in facilitating the practice of profound listening using the Case Clinic Protocol. To scale its work, the group wonders if a training module could be developed based on their methodology, which could be made available to other faculty members and students across the university? Reconsidering the Term Project, an HAD-based group, explored practices of running a term project in courses and attended to questions of research, inquiry, creativity and student support. There was also the Film/Video Decolonial Pedagogy Community of Inquiry Fellowship. 

In addition to sharing the overall results of faculty flourishing and increased trust within their communities, we’ll also use this session to explore take-aways, resources, further questions for inquiry and specific practices that were generated within the CoP/I first semester groups.

Storytelling Games Now – Nat Mesnard

Teaching in 2023 is about collaboratively telling new stories. Taking inspiration from independent tabletop roleplaying games, this workshop will explore how these games can inspire innovative pedagogies that resource students to tell these stories: pandemic trauma, hope in the face of climate grief, and tumultuous, evolving relationships with institutions, ecologies, and one another. In this workshop we will explore examples of tabletop roleplaying games from queer, independent designers, and look at designs from tabletop game developers for safety tools that aim to support groups of players in exploring ways to encounter and cope with tragedy, grief, and oppression without harming players in the process. When are these tools the most effective, and how can we borrow them for use in creative classrooms? After exploring and discussing the games themselves, we’ll roleplay together, telling pieces of our own stories, and imagining how this structured form of play might inspire equitable and transformative storytelling across disciplines.

Open Sessions

In the first Open Session of the Fall Forum, the CTL led a collective reflection exercise as the participants worked in small groups to think through a series of questions. Each small group was given one starting question, and worked with that question for 20 minutes. During that time, the groups were asked to generate a second question based on the content of their discussions. 

This second generation of questions was then rotated throughout the room, and the same process took place again, resulting in three generations of questions including the initial set provided by the CTL.

On the slides to the left, we have recorded the generations of questions, showing some of the thought processes brought out by the unique group of participants who attended the Forum. We are thankful to our colleagues for contributing in this way!

 

Group Office Hours: Self-Care is Student Care – Christina Katopodis

In this interactive workshop, Dr. Christina Katopodis, co-author of The New College Classroom (Harvard UP, 2022), will share strategies for building an engaged, supportive, peer-to-peer learning community online and in person through group office hours. Not all students know the purpose of office hours, and too few come to office hours regularly, missing out on opportunities for mentoring. We need to go beyond listing office hours in terms of available days and times to invite students to come to our office hours and share the purpose and intention of office hours with them to give them the tools they need to succeed. Participants in the workshop will craft their own clear and transparent statements about office hours for their students. They can put these statements on their syllabi.

Relocating Conversation – Ellen Berkovitch

This will be a participatory dialogue about encouraging unexpected encounters. Last year at Reporting the City class, we activated a community engagement site with the Walt Whitman Branch of Brooklyn Public Library. The library attracts homeless residents sheltered nearby, but we hadn’t anticipated the arrival (by bus, sent by the governor of Texas) of Spanish-speaking migrants, mostly Venezuelan. Our class time in the morning (9:30-12:20 a.m.) found us taking to the library sidewalk because the patrons/constituents inside were few. There we met community members who reported short-term complaints like noisy, uncaring neighbors. One described a failing local health system. We encountered several residents of a nearby shelter for domestic violence survivors who all said they’d been wrongly placed (?). What was to occur in this context? A pedagogy of verification and accountability? Or a practice in which all that is not known is the seed.

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