The following schedule is subject to revision. View workshops below and register for workshops here.
Workshops are open to all Graduate Center students and faculty, unless otherwise noted.
Week One: August 9-13
Wednesday, August 11
Morning Session: 10:00-11:30 AM
A: Mixing Modes of Instruction
Laurie Hurson and Katie Uva
This workshop will present ideas for designing courses that incorporate multiple instructional modes, including face-to-face, online synchronous, and asynchronous work. It will explore the challenges that come with fewer built-in opportunities to gauge student comprehension in-person, and strategies for creating well-structured courses that offer opportunities for multiple forms of engagement.
B: Improv for Academics: Getting Comfortable with Your Discomfort and Building Classroom Community
Atasi Das
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 being skills that would help us as instructors in front of the classroom, these skills, when transferred to the classroom, can increase student engagement and foster group collaboration and communication.
Afternoon Session 1:00-2:30 pm
C. Building spaces for creative and experiential teaching and learning
Inés Vañó García
Why not (re)think of our assignments more creatively where students can engage with the course material in a multimodal way? In this workshop, we will build spaces to explore other possibilities beyond the traditional text-based assignment, and experiment with creative multimodal alternatives including audio (podcast, storytelling) and visuals (zines, timelines, gifs). We will also discuss how these creative and experiential learning assignments could potentially produce artifacts with audiences beyond the classroom.
D. Abolitionist Pedagogy
Atasi Das, Miranda Fedock, Talisa Feliciano, Cristine Khan, Fernanda Blanco Vidal
The Abolitionist Pedagogy Working Group at the TLC spent the past year unpacking the meanings behind abolitionist pedagogy. We aimed to create and promote practices shaped by abolitionist pedagogy to explore in the CUNY classroom.
This session will be an open meeting of the group where we will discuss excerpts from two texts: We Want to do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom by Bettina L. Love and Pleasure Activism by adrienne maree brown. We welcome any GC students and faculty members interested in participating in the conversation to join us.
Week Two: August 16-20
Tuesday, August 17
Afternoon Session 1:00-2:30 pm
E. Opening up your Teaching with Digital Pedagogy
Laurie Hurson
What do we mean by “open” teaching? And how does “open” relate to “digital pedagogy”? This workshop will introduce the foundations of open digital pedagogy including OER, remixed assignments, and model courses from the CUNY Academic Commons, a teaching and learning platform used to host courses across CUNY.
F. Fostering Mental & Emotional Well-being in Our Classrooms
Miranda Fedock and Talisa Feliciano
The long and short term impacts of living in this global pandemic has deeply shifted our relationships to ourselves and each other. As we enter year 2 of the pandemic, how can we as CUNY graduate students and educators better support our students’ and our own emotional needs? What are some practical ways to promote mental and emotional well-being for our students and ourselves in our classrooms? How can we adopt some of the concepts of trauma-informed pedagogy in order to better serve ourselves and our students through another semester of distance learning?
Wednesday, August 18
Morning Session: 10:00-11:30 AM
G. Podcasting in Teaching and Learning
Zahra Khalid and Agustina Checa
This 75-minute workshop will discuss the pedagogical promise of podcasts: from using podcasts as an alternative to lecture videos, to building them into student projects. We will also cover podcasting basics, such as which softwares to use, and offer tips for creating engaging podcasts.
H. Alternative Approaches to Grading, Assessment, and Effective Feedback
Luis Henao Uribe
Grading is often perceived as a necessary evil, an imposition of the system more than a meaningful pedagogical choice. Grades generate anxiety on students because they carry concrete consequences to their academic and professional paths. It is often a burdensome task for instructors that consumes time with unclear benefits for the learning process. This workshop would explore how to incorporate other evaluative practices such as assessment (low stakes, self-assessment, peer-assessment) and feedback (meaningful and purposeful) to help us achieve our teaching goals in a more just and efficient way.
Afternoon Session 1:00-2:30 pm
I. Using Manifold in the Classroom
Robin Miller & Wendy Barrales
Join the Manifold Team for a 1-hour workshop to learn how Manifold is being used by instructors and students across the CUNY system. You will learn how you can use a Manifold project to teach public domain texts, build custom digital course readers, and publish student work all with the option to embed multimedia resources and use Manifold’s robust annotation and commenting feature to help instructors and students “meet” in the margins of a text.
J. Cultivating Participation & Engagement
Katie Uva
A classroom where students participate and invest their attention, curiosity, and passion is a universal goal, but as teachers how can we make it a reality? This workshop offers an introduction to some key strategies to support student participation and engagement. We will explore what participation and engagement really mean, and the different forms they can take in a class. We’ll also try out strategies for fostering discussion, crafting effective questions, and enabling students to take the lead and direct elements of the class.
K. Whiteboarding
John Zayac and Jason Block
We will discuss different methods for doing what would normally be done on a classroom chalkboard. We will describe the best way to carry out each method, as well as the necessary and optional software/hardware required. The methods discussed will range from low-tech (filming yourself at a physical whiteboard, filming a piece of paper as you write) to the higher-tech (using a zoom/blackboard digital whiteboard, using an infinite space whiteboard, using collaborative whiteboards).
Afternoon Session 2:30-3:45 pm
L. Balancing Time: Managing Workload & Taking Care of Yourself*
Fernanda Blanco Vidal and Miranda Fedock
Are you exhausted or overwhelmed? Losing track of time? It’s not just you! Now more than ever, GC graduate students and educators need a robust toolkit to balance time and energy between responsibilities. This workshop considers the complexities of juggling time and priorities across multiple responsibilities as graduate students and instructors, such as teaching, coursework, research, self- and communal-care, and others. Attendees will be invited to reflect on ways to balance time and the importance of rest and care as forms of resistance.
*This workshop is open to GC students only.
M. Building your Course Website on the CUNY Academic Commons
Anthony Wheeler
The CUNY Academic Commons is an open educational resource available to all CUNY members, enabling us to create groups/websites, fostering community across CUNY’s 25-campuses. This workshop will conduct an overview of the Commons as an open digital platform, emphasizing building linked course groups/sites for teaching and learning.
Thursday, August 19
Morning Session: 10:00-11:30 AM
N. Translating “academic” texts for video pedagogy
Mike Mena
We will discuss general strategies for creating video lectures to be viewed asynchronously. This includes ideal length of videos, how to curate/select material, and what it means to “translate” academic texts into video explanations and “reading guides.”
O. Incorporating Science Communication Principles into Your Coursework
Afternoon Session 1:00-2:30 pm
P. Teaching with Discord or Slack
Q. Accessibility and/or Trauma-informed/relational Pedagogy
Miryam Nacimento and Francisco Medina
With the return to in-person teaching and the hybridization of the Fall semester, we invite faculty to think with us about how can our pedagogy be responsive to the grief, stress, and the trauma of students stemming from the pandemic and pre-existing disparities. We will focus on what aspects of online-teaching we should expand on and sustain as we transition to fully in person, including recognizing issues of accessibility and mental health that were perhaps not noticeable in online teaching.
Afternoon Session 2:30-3:45 pm
R. Restorative Approaches to Evaluating Student Work
Chy Sprauve and Atasi Das
In this workshop, participants will develop evaluative pedagogical practices (grading, face-to-face meetings, other course feedback) that acknowledge the varied needs and experiences of students while drawing out the goals of the course in student work. This workshop also invites instructors to reflect upon their own pedagogical practices as instructors and supports the development of an evaluative approach to course work that is rooted in the restorative and affirmative.
S. Collaborative Digital Projects on the Commons
Anthony Wheeler
Using sites on the CUNY Academic Commons, faculty and students have implemented a wide range of collaborative projects that utilize diverse digital literacies over recent years. This workshop will look into some examples of how to implement digital tools for collaborative projects (such as digital art, history/archives, videos, and podcasts) into your Commons courses to foster greater interactivity amongst course participants.
Register for all workshops here.
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