Category: Pedagogy
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Accessible Syllabus for Transformative Learning
WHUM 10100 Course Syllabus Draft (Distance Learning Edition) City College of New York Instructor: Nik Valdez, they/them/theirs Class Meeting: Office Hours: —- or by appointment Email: — COURSE DESCRIPTION City’s stated purpose of this course goes as follows: We will travel through history and around the world in the hope that we can […]
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Presentation of Decolonial Self in Academic Life (Distance Learning Edition)
On the week of March 9, 2020, the City University of New York announced that it would transition to distance learning, in response to the COVID-19 outbreak in New York City. Already, individual classes were beginning to make the switch from physical classroom meetings to online video conferences. (Official online instruction by CUNY was […]
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I Learn in Experience: Reflections As Student-Writer Human
Critical reflection on my experience as a student in unexciting classrooms enabled me not only to imagine that the classroom could be exciting but that this excitement could co-exist with and even stimulate serious intellectual and/or academic engagement.” — bell hooks, Teaching to Trangress As a first-year graduate student, I found myself needing to reorient […]
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The Single Most Essential Requirement in Designing a Fall Online Course
Let’s start the week [updated 7/20/2020] by repeating that a summer of planning for better online learning this Fall will be wasted if we do not begin from the premise that our students are learning from a place of dislocation, anxiety, uncertainty, awareness of social injustice, anger, and trauma. So are we. This is the […]
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Creating learning environments where all students feel understood and valued
Participants: Dree-el, Yaneth, Nathalie, Offer In order to inform culturally responsive and sustaining practices in the classroom, educators benefit from understanding the myriad ways in which their students experience the world. In this manner, they can better serve their students and ensure an equitable, responsive education for all. To understand culture and its intersection with learning we felt that […]
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Down Shifting: Resisting Over-Productivity and the “Teacher as Martyr” Syndrome in the Pandemic
This teacher-scholar is TIRED. The kind of tired that I can feel behind my eyeballs; the kind that no amount of uninterrupted sleep, vigorous exercise, or walking breaks will banish. This teacher was tired long before the pandemic crept in while we were sleeping and, seemingly overnight, sent us all into our various homes and […]
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(Re)Becoming the Gatekeeper (sort of)
Circling around the experience of that fishbowl discussion (see “Naming the Elephant”) was my feeling of both arrival and not-quite-there-yet. Over the course of that hour-long fishbowl, my students stopped looking at me for validation and eventually forgot I was there. Sounds like a strange thing to wish for in your own classroom, but it […]
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Critical Digital Pedagogy: Strategies for Remote Instruction
On the morning of Monday, March 9, I reached out to a supervisor suggesting that we begin thinking about offering a virtual version of NYU’s Intro to Programming tutoring lab. At the time, my concern was primarily for immunocomprised staff and students. CSCI-UA.0002 (Introduction to Computer Programming in Python) enrolls many hundreds of NYU students […]
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Naming the elephant (or, how I learned to do the obvious and get out of the way of the conversations my students really wanted to have)
It matters how you enter a room. Particularly when you’re the teacher and you’re trying to set a tone for the rest of the semester. And particularly when the tone you’re trying to set is the disruption of the power dynamic inherent in any classroom. I’ll stop using […]
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“Learning Outcomes” in a Time of COVID: What Happens When Students Say What They Aspire To?
What happens if we give up the idea that our course should begin with a prescriptive list of “learning outcomes” and offer students the chance to express their own? Even if you are at an institution that requires you to submit your outcomes in advance (as many do), you can simply put those on the […]