Monday

Workshop Session One

1.A: Building and Managing a Classroom Community

Lais Gomes Duarte and Sakina Laksimi-Morrow
What makes a classroom feel like a community? For many teachers, this is an ongoing goal as we work to foster an environment of interconnected learning and camaraderie. Learn about different strategies for–and challenges to–creating this kind of active learning community. We will discuss ways to alleviate the pressure of being “the authority” by developing or refining your teaching persona. We will explore ways that you can help students form a sense of shared purpose in the classroom with you and their peers.

1.B: Teaching with Open Educational Resources

Laurie Hurson
Many CUNY students are hard pressed to afford college, let alone expensive textbooks. Faculty can choose to design courses that move away from costly textbooks and teaching materials in favor of no-cost solutions called Open Educational Resources (OER). This workshop will introduce attendees to OER, discuss how to find and evaluate these materials, and work through the pedagogical opportunities opened up by the integration of OER into teaching and learning.

1.C: Improv for Academics: Getting Comfortable with Your Discomfort

Mei Ling Chua
This workshop explores strategies for working with and calming the nerves that often accompany public speaking and interaction in the classroom. We will draw on principles and exercises from improvisational theater. Improv is a theatrical practice that is performed live and constructed in the moment. Improv exercises emphasize cooperation, generosity, comfort with spontaneity and responsiveness to unexpected situations. In addition to helping instructors in front of the classroom, these skills, when developed with students, can increase engagement and foster group collaboration and communication.

1.D: Managing Your Time

Ryan Donovan
Managing your time means balancing teaching, research, your course-load, and sometimes other work. This balance requires its own kind of intentional, ongoing effort–for instance, how can you handle lesson planning when you’re in the middle of writing a seminar paper? This workshop will offer strategies to help you balance your responsibilities as a teacher and a graduate student. Topics to be covered include deliberate planning of your research and teaching agendas, managing class preparation, and dealing with procrastination. You will leave this workshop with a plan to manage your time… and maybe even have some nights and weekends off.

1.E: Teaching Science Labs @ CUNY

Naomi Lewandowski
This workshop will provide the essentials for running a lab course, ranging from technical to creative aspects. We will cover the management of the laboratory facility, and the students within the space. We will also discuss managing relationships with faculty (CLTs, professors), and accommodating the needs a diverse audience, as well as developing your ‘teaching persona’. The workshop will be structured as an open discussion, so come prepared with any questions or concerns you might have!

Workshop Session Two

2.A: Building and Managing a Classroom Community

Kaitlin Mondello and Avra Spector
What makes a classroom feel like a community? For many teachers, this is an ongoing goal as we work to foster an environment of interconnected learning and camaraderie. Learn about different strategies for–and challenges to–creating this kind of active learning community. We will discuss ways to alleviate the pressure of being “the authority” by developing or refining your teaching persona. We will explore ways that you can help students form a sense of shared purpose in the classroom with you and their peers.

2.B: Expanding Your Pedagogical Toolkit

Asilia Franklin-Phipps
Looking for creative instructional practices to enliven your classroom? Interested in learning ways to structure student engagement with course materials? Energetic class discussions can help connect emerging thinking to the reading students are doing. A supportive classroom community can reduce anxiety about learning, and create space for reflection and intellectual engagement. These are essential components for courses that we wish to resonate beyond the final exam. The goal of this workshop is to help build and expand your pedagogical toolkit with a range of activities that assist in facilitating these kinds of experiences in our classrooms.

2.C: Improv for Academics: Getting Comfortable with Your Discomfort

Mei Ling Chua
This workshop explores strategies for working with and calming the nerves that often accompany public speaking and interaction in the classroom. We will draw on principles and exercises from improvisational theater. Improv is a theatrical practice that is performed live and constructed in the moment. Improv exercises emphasize cooperation, generosity, comfort with spontaneity and responsiveness to unexpected situations. In addition to helping instructors in front of the classroom, these skills, when developed with students, can increase engagement and foster group collaboration and communication.

2.D: Decolonizing Pedagogy

Sakina Laksimi-Morrow
As the decolonial paradigm gains traction in the world of education, we pause to consider what that means in CUNY, how it is connected to larger discourses and practices by educators and scholars, and the ways we can conceptualize of a teaching practice that is aligned with goals and principles that are decolonizing. This session will first offer space and resources for discussion on decolonizing research and teaching methodologies in academia, both imagining the possibilities and problematizing our positionalities of a decolonial practice in the classroom. The second part of the workshop will dive into how we select texts (and other materials), asking how the voices and narratives we choose to privilege is one method among many to engage in decolonial pedagogies.

2.E: Teaching as an International Student

Lais Gomes Duarte
Teaching as an international student can be a challenging and enriching experience. As international graduate students instructors, we often juggle many unknowns when we engage CUNY classrooms. This workshop is designed to help new instructors learn about the U.S-based university system as a whole, and the CUNY system in particular. Together we will explore questions, concerns and useful strategies shared by experienced international student instructors. This knowledge and connecting with experienced instructors can make navigating the American educational system and CUNY in particular easier and more joyful.

Tuesday

Workshop Session Three

3.A: Facilitating Discussion

Avra Spector
Class discussion offers the opportunity for students to draw on each other’s expertise and work collaboratively to investigate problems, ideas and questions central to the course. Through structuring dynamic class discussions, instructors can activate multiple modes of student engagement, create space for both verbal and non-verbal communication while building class community and empowering students to put into practice a range of communication and interpersonal skills. In this workshop, we’ll consider strategies for generating and supporting face-to-face and online class discussion as a way for students to explore, synthesize, and apply course content.

3.B: Unpacking Disability and Using UDL

Sakina Laksimi-Morrow
This workshop will explore the range of disabilities represented in the CUNY classroom, and the construct of disability itself. Participants will be asked to identify accessibility barriers they may have experienced and observed, and consider how an approach to course design can take into consideration issues of accessibility and inclusion. The workshop will offer opportunity for dialogue about disability perceptions and accommodations, resources available, and practical ways to mobilize universal design for learning (UDL) principles in course design.

3.C: Open Pedagogy: Teaching with the CUNY Academic Commons

Laurie Hurson
Teaching and learning is often invisible to those outside of our classes. In this workshop, we will introduce the CUNY Academic Commons, a digital platform hosted at the Graduate Center that can facilitate student-centered, collaborative teaching and learning. We will demonstrate how the CUNY Academic Commons supports open teaching, allowing instructors to host course materials including OER materials, facilitate discussion online, and craft assignments that task students with connecting course content to public discourses beyond the classroom.This workshop will introduce several models for open teaching on the Commons and explore various methods for integrating open teaching practices into a course.

3.D: Teaching Aesthetics: Presentation and Perception in the Classroom

Mei Ling Chua
This workshop explores the roles of aesthetics and design in how we present and perceive information. We will explore some basic aesthetic concepts and theories, and think through how these principles shape, inflect, and shift the emphasis and clarity of the materials that we use in the classroom. In tandem with the content of what we want to convey in our class, this workshop looks at additional dimension on how aesthetic and organizational factors–from how we structure visuals like slides and graphs, to how we shape the emphasis and focus in how we structure syllabi, worksheets or instructions–can help or hinder our communication and efficacy in the classroom

3.E: Troubling Race in the Classroom

Asilia Franklin-Phipps
Many college instructors struggle to engage students in complex thinking about race and racism. Such work is increasingly necessary, but the range of perspectives in many classrooms can make discussing such topics challenging for both students and instructors alike. Strong feelings and opinions, as well as divergent and disparate experience and knowledge, demand a thoughtful and creative pedagogical approach.These challenges can make dialogues about race and racial justice uncomfortable, emotional, and difficult. Together, we will consider both the challenges to and potential for engaging race in classroom spaces, ranging from how to address the unexpected, alarming comment to how to facilitate entire courses.

3.F: Mental Health and Well-Being

Lais Gomes Duarte
Teaching as a graduate student requires a great deal of intellectual, psychological and emotional labor. Yet, most often we concentrate our efforts on teaching academic skills, leaving little space to consider our students’ mental health, or our own. In order to learn most effectively, students must feel supported, understood and trusted. This workshop will share pedagogical practices that can help instructors build these values into their classrooms and courses, prevent re-traumatization and increase attention to student and instructor emotional well- being. We’ll learn about the framework offered by trauma-informed pedagogies and share resources that can allow us to acknowledge the vulnerabilities of students, to develop self-care strategies and to foster classroom environments where all can thrive.

Workshop Session Four

4.A: Incorporating Your Research into Your Course

Luis Henao Uribe
Academics often conceive of research and teaching as two separate practices that compete for our time. Connecting this work via class design can be productive for both instructors and students alike. For instructors, it helps us to develop facility talking about our work and provides feedback on our ideas. At the same time, it can expose students to current themes and debates within the discipline. This workshop will explore different strategies to integrate research interests into teaching, ranging from single class activities to broader course structures.

4.B: Designing Lesson Plans

Kaitlin Mondello
What will you do with the time allotted to each class period? More importantly, what will you ask your students to do in that time? This can feel like a daunting challenge when you first start teaching, where some of what you had planned takes less time than expected, leaving you scrambling to fill time, while on other days, your work together runs way over class time. Learn about some common activities and methods you can use in your class periods, as well as the common issues, including time management, that arise in lesson planning. We will consider different types and styles of lesson plans and the need for flexibility with your best laid plans.

4.C: Designing Arts-based Research Assignments

Sakina Laksimi-Morrow
This workshop will introduce participants to a range of arts-based research activities and assignments that can be used as a learning tool in the classroom. Mobilizing the arts can foster engagement, facilitate reflection, and leverage visual media to do research and produce works with students across disciplines. In addition to discussing different arts-based activities, participants will be invited to experiment and explore an assignment they might want to facilitate with their own students.

4.D: Open Pedagogy: Teaching with the CUNY Academic Commons

Laurie Hurson
Teaching and learning is often invisible to those outside of our classes. In this workshop, we will introduce the CUNY Academic Commons, a digital platform hosted at the Graduate Center that can facilitate student-centered, collaborative teaching and learning. We will demonstrate how the CUNY Academic Commons supports open teaching, allowing instructors to host course materials including OER materials, facilitate discussion online, and craft assignments that task students with connecting course content to public discourses beyond the classroom.This workshop will introduce several models for open teaching on the Commons and explore various methods for integrating open teaching practices into a course.

4.E: Being a Teaching Assistant

Ryan Donovan
This workshop will address the benefits of being a teaching assistant as well as offer strategies for dealing with the sometimes tricky nature of the position. We will cover how to work with the things you can control as a teaching assistant as well as the things you cannot. Time will also be spent on how you can effectively use your time with your students to engage them and enhance their learning outside of the lecture format. This workshop will focus on the many opportunities for expanding your pedagogical toolkit that come with being a teaching assistant.