Upcoming Events
Contemplative Pedagogy Lab | Wednesday, Oct. 30 | 1-2:30 ET | 10-11:30 PT
Julia Zay, The Evergreen State College | Jaime O’Connor, The Washington Center for Improving Undergraduate Education
Contemplative pedagogy offers an opportunity to slow down and become more present, using a range of practices from meditation and mindfulness contexts, experiential learning, and close reading and observation techniques used across academic disciplines. Join us for this 90 minute experiential exploration of contemplative and attention-shaping practices and develop a plan for incorporating these techniques in the classroom.
Do you have a teaching dilemma? Get unstuck through cooperative consulting with colleagues.| Thursday, Nov. 21 | 2-3:30 ET | 11-12:30 PT
JuliA Metzker, The Evergreen State College | Sonja Wiedenhaupt, The Evergreen State College
In this workshop we will use a teaching dilemma you are experiencing to practice a step back consulting protocol. Through this experience, you will develop ideas for implementing this protocol as a fruitful and generative practice. Consider a dilemma you are anticipating or in the midst of that you are prepared to share. For example:
-You anticipate a difficult conversation with a student or a colleague , and you aren’t sure about how to proceed.
-Students are in conflict with each other and it’s impacting the learning environment, and you’re trying to decide how to navigate the situation…
-Students are challenging something about your approach in the classroom, and you aren’t sure how to respond…..
Past Events
Recordings for many of these workshops are available via Slack.
Climate Across the Curriculum | Friday, Sept. 27 | 1-2:30 ET | 10-11:30 PT
Anthony Levenda, The Evergreen State College | Michael Joseph, The Evergreen State College
Climate change intersects with all aspects of our lives. Helping students connect the dots between intersections of climate change and the variety of topics they investigate in their undergraduate programs is an immense opportunity to educate the next generation of climate leaders. This workshop introduces the growing importance of ‘Climate Across the Curriculum’ and helps participants develop strategies to integrate the subject of climate change into any topic or discipline they are teaching. The goal of the workshop is to help reduce barriers for faculty to include climate as topic into their teaching; develop a faculty learning community to share resources; build momentum on our campuses for climate-focused learning; and to start to make plans and commitments to include climate change topics in your curriculum. As educators, we have a responsibility to help our students navigate and address the climate crisis. This workshop will help us figure out how we can do that.
Emergent Strategies in Prison Education | Wednesday, May 15 & Wednesday, May 22, 2024
Facilitated by emareena danielles, author and educator; JuliA Metzker, Director of the Washington Center
What are the strategies you use to create and adapt learning experiences for incarcerated students? In her book, Emergent Strategy: Shaping change, changing worlds, adrienne maree brown offers a visionary approach to change in a rapidly changing world. As teachers, one of our greatest hopes is that our students leave our classrooms believing in their ability to navigate those rapid changes, and build satisfying lives. In this two-part series, we bring the principles of Emergent Strategy to carceral classrooms, exploring how they offer both students and teachers a richer, more connected experience.
Earth Day is Every Day: Making Meaningful Climate Impact with Campus Communities Year Round | Thursday, April 25, 2024
Facilitated by: Rachel Beth Egenhoefer, University of San Francisco
While many campuses and communities gear up to celebrate Earth Day, to truly address the climate crisis, we need sustainable changes to be made every day, not just on Earth Day. This workshop will explore ways to engage students and campus communities beyond yearly spectacles that can address both student engagement and climate impact. We will look at individual and collective action, impacts of behaviors, habits of college students and how that can shape future behaviors.
Embodiment Online: Bringing Our Bodies to Zoom | Friday March 22, 2024
Facilitated by Timothy Corvidae, The Evergreen State College
It can be hard to connect with each other on Zoom. It can be hard to connect with ourselves, on Zoom. To feel that we are really all there. Let’s experiment together with inviting our bodies into the frame. We’ll try out a variety of brief movement and awareness building activities, aligning each with underlying theory and discussing how and when to use them with students. The focus is on quick interventions that can fit in and around other online class activities, to enhance social presence and restore attention. We’ll play together, stretching the limits of those little squares we spend so much time in.
Pedagogy of Kindness | Thursday, February 8, 2024
Facilitated by Wajeehah Aayeshah, University of Melbourne, Washington Center Visiting Scholar
In this workshop, we would explore and develop our understanding of the shape of kindness in educational settings. Participants, as fellow educators, will be invited to reflect on their experiences and practices of kindness. This reflection will contribute to a discussion about pragmatically embedding kindness in everyday educational life. For this, we are going to use a ‘Framework of kindness’. Grounded in pedagogy of kindness (Denial 2019), this framework takes the immersive practices of ‘decolonisation of education’ (Brown, Kelada, & Jones 2020) and the idea of ‘Restorative Practice’ (Morisson 2015) and applies it to all relationships within the academia, and not just that of teachers and students. In the framework of Kindness, ‘decolonised restorative practice’ needs to be implemented in the whole academic eco-system.