Group One: Pedagogy, Teaching to Transgress, and Intersectionality chose to focus our two-week workshop on strategies for cultivating vulnerability, critical inquiry, and liberatory pedagogy.
We integrated both individual and group activities into our learning practices, and we’ve included our collaborative syllabus, to which we welcome contributions.
Here, we’ve included a few strategies and notes from our planning sessions, as a primary goal of our approach was to demystify the process of developing and implementing pedagogy.
Guided Freewrite instructions:
In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks posits, “To teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most deeply and intimately begin” (13).
How do you envision that we as teachers can care for the souls of our students? Take five minutes to respond. The one rule we ask you to follow is that for five minutes you do not stop writing. Write whatever comes into your mind, but do not remove your pen from the paper during that time. This practice annihilates writer’s block and allows you to accomplish the task of writing without concerning yourself about the final result.
Collaborative Reflection
Chapter 5: Theory as Liberatory Practice
hooks emphatically articulates the necessity of living liberatory theories, of thinking and behaving in ways that foment liberation and disruption of the status quo. She provides an example of her own attempts to articulate her politics as a child (59-60), only to be shot down by her hetero- cis- patriarchal-family construction.
What theories/politics do you currently do in your non-intellectual life and work? Where could you enact/integrate your liberatory politics more? What structural and/or ideological artifacts are holding you back from living these politics?
Tentative Schedules:
Day 1 Schedule: Reflection Activities to Address Social Norms
Freewrite – Damele
Video/Reflection – Damele
Dynamic Syllabus presented to class – Jesse
Everyone bring quotes from TTT for collaborative syllabus
Day 2 Schedule: Creating a Dialogue about Social Norms
Exit Questions: Written Dialogue
Gallery Walk – Jesse
Close reading of 1 chapter from Teaching to Transgress- reframed so that the questions fall back on the student – reflection piece
Social Identity Chart/Pair share – Sylvia
Our messy collaborative notes.
We’ve also included the slideshow from Sylvia Beltran’s symposium presentation on identity & pedagogy below.