Date and time: September 26, 2024 at 6-8PM
Place: The Graduate Center, Skylight Room
Description
We can transform a broken educational system into an empowered, collaborative learning community. In a collaboration with CUNY Climate Hub and NYC-EJA, Dr. Shelly Eversley’s students in her “Climate Justice” course recently produced short documentaries that aired on CUNY TV. In this work, students conducted community-engaged research and developed the skills to become thoughtful leaders in a rapidly-changing world. As educators, we can facilitate collaborative and professional learning that supports more just, equitable, and sustainable futures.
The CUNY Peer Leaders program (CPL) empowers students to be changemakers, amplifies their voice and celebrates the successes the leaders have achieved and are striving toward. CPL is housed under the Humanities Alliance and was created by the Futures Initiative which connects classroom learning with local, community knowledge. Active learning methods that honor students’ knowledge and nurture their potential are what make every CPL session transformative.
The future of learning is co-creation. Students in Dr. Christina Katopodis’s courses at Hunter College have co-created as much as 60 percent of their syllabi. Dr. Katopodis developed a process for students to invest in learning by collaborating to design classroom agreements and course materials. Co-creation positions students as agents of their own learning.
In this Futures Initiative (FI) event, the first in our ten year anniversary Futures series, participants will immediately come away with active learning tools and co-creation strategies they can use to transform learning for the public good.
Speaker biographies
Dr. Shelly Eversley is Professor of English and Interim Chair of the Black and Latino Studies department at Baruch College, City University of New York (CUNY), where she designed the Bachelor of Arts in Black and Latino Studies. She is also Professor of English at The Graduate Center (CUNY), and Co-Director of the Futures Initiative. Her recent institutional leadership includes her role as Faculty Co-Director of the Mellon Foundation’s Transformative Learning in the Humanities initiative at CUNY and Academic Director of CUNY’s Faculty Fellowship Publication Program. Her teaching and publishing focuses on literature, feminism, and Black Studies.
Dr. Christina Katopodis is Mellon Senior Research Associate at the CUNY Humanities Alliance. She is the former Associate Director of Transformative Learning in the Humanities and founder of Engaged & Ready. She is the winner of the 2019 Diana Colbert Innovative Teaching Prize and the 2018 Dewey Digital Teaching Award. With Cathy N. Davidson, Katopodis is author of The New College Classroom (Harvard University Press, 2022), which is the winner of AAC&U’s 2023 Frederic W. Ness Book Award.
