The University Worth Fighting For Spring Symposium: Pedagogy, Research, and Social Change
Monday, April 3
William P. Kelly Skylight Conference Room
10 – 6
Public Google Doc
Join faculty and students from this year’s team-taught courses, Futures Initiative Peer Mentors, and the Humanities Alliance for this daylong symposium celebrating their work that connects student-centered learning to institutional and social change.
Please RSVP here. This is especially important if you will be joining us for lunch.
Program
10:00 – 10:10 Welcome & Introductions
Welcome by Cathy N. Davidson
Opening remarks by Master of Ceremonies Kalle Westerling
10:10 – 11:00 “Dimensions of Childhood”
Experience interactive stations based on thematic concepts related to the social construction of childhood designed by faculty and students from Martin Ruck and Erika Niwa’s “The Social Construction of Childhood.”
11:10 – 11:30 “The Future of Sexual Health Care in the US: Issues Worth Fighting For”
Diana Romero and Ananya Mukherjea discuss their course, “Social Inequality & Health Disparities,” including points of political priority for leading the ongoing struggle for robust sexual and reproductive healthcare provision in the US.
11:35 – 12:00 “Connecting Graduate Education and Community College Teaching”
Through the Humanities Alliance, CUNY is developing new ways for doctoral programs and community colleges to work together to amplify humanities education, and support equitable access to and diversity within higher education. Elizabeth Alsop and Kitana Ananda will address the opportunities and challenges of connecting graduate education with student-centered community college pedagogy.
12:10 – 1:00 “Education as Liberation, Education as Forming Publics”
In the doctoral seminar “The Public and Publics,” students, co-instructors Amy Chazkel and Setha Low, and the visiting scholars they have brought into the class have inquired into the meanings and uses of the concept of the public as an analytical construct in both scholarship and in political life, past and present. Doctoral students Miranda Fedock, Matthew Finck, and Claudia Crowe will lead a discussion that brings these questions to bear on the theme of education, in two senses: education as forming publics, and education as a public resource. They will use the classic liberationist text, Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), and the field of critical pedagogy that it largely inspired, as an entry point.
1:00 – 2:00 Lunch
2:10 – 3:00 “Fostering Connection, Renewal, and Leadership through Peer Mentoring”
Join the undergraduate Futures Initiative Peer Mentors from across the CUNY campuses and Peer Mentoring program directors Lauren Melendez and Mike Rifino for this interactive session to discuss how peer leadership can help students in a dispersed commuter system like CUNY foster connection and promote student success.
3:10 – 4:00 “Student-Centered and Active Learning”
This highly interactive session will feature mini-lessons for teaching psychology to undergraduates, designed by graduate students in Patricia Brooks and Jill Grose-Fifer’s “Seminar and Practicum on the Teaching of Psychology.”
4:10 – 5:00 “Teaching Race, Gender, and Intersectional Theory”
This interactive session led by graduate students in Cathy Davidson and Michael Gillespie’s course “Teaching Race and Gender Theory in the Undergraduate Classroom” will highlight the ways that race, gender, and intersectional theory can be introduced in general education humanities courses and also modeled in the world beyond. Graduate student participants will be joined by undergraduates from Medgar Evers College.
5:00 Closing remarks by Katina Rogers
5:00 – 6:00 Reception and Structuring Equality book celebration rm. 3317
