February 19, 2020 | Cultivating Culturally Sustaining Practices: Perspectives from Early Career Teachers
Lee Huttner and Kevin Kudic, Queens College Urban Teacher Residency
The mentor-mentee relationship is important to develop for pre-service teachers as they continue to grow and strengthen their pedagogy. How do we best ensure that culturally sustaining practices are implemented into our classrooms, even while navigating the different structures in place that might impede that implementation? Our workshop will focus on the mentor-mentee relationship that developed as part of the New Visions Urban Teacher Residency program. We will present best practices that focus on building self-reflection, self-monitoring and self-regulation for first-year teachers. As we continue to give the tools to help first-year teachers grow pedagogically, we must also think about how to best find a compromise between different ideologies and hierarchical structures in
order to best serve all students.
November 12, 2019 | Building the STEM Pipeline: Diversifying Advanced Introductory Courses
Dr. Ruben L. Gonzalez, Jr., Professor of Chemistry at Columbia University, and Dr. Ann McDermott, Esther Breslow Professor of Biological Chemistry at Columbia University.
A demographic imperative challenges science educators across the educational spectrum to investigate the underrepresentation of women, lower-income students, and many communities of color in STEM fields and related professions. In many undergraduate science programs, first-year courses are positioned as both prerequisites and gatekeepers for competitive STEM-related programs. Our accelerated introductory chemistry courses typically attract students who are most likely to major and/or seek out research laboratory positions in chemistry or related fields, and the demographic makeup of these accelerated courses indicates the overrepresentation of White and Asian males. In a recent initiative designed to diversify the pipeline to advanced studies in chemistry, we implemented a number of interventions aimed at building a diverse class roster, overcoming stereotype threat, and supporting all students throughout the course. We collected students’ quantitative and qualitative feedback as well as metrics of student success (course grades and retention rates). At this workshop, we will examine some of the data and reflect as a group on the possibilities and challenges of interventions designed to make an elite first-year undergraduate chemistry course successful for a diverse range of students. We will conclude by discussing the implications of these kinds of interventions toward building more inclusive higher education pipelines throughout the academy.
September 25, 2019 | Defamiliarization as a Pedagogical Tool in Disrupting Cognitive Injustice in South African Higher Education
Dr. Zayd Waghid, Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Education, Cape Peninsula University of Technology in South Africa
Calls for the higher education curricula in South Africa to be transformed requires primarily a reform of the hegemonic spaces in which teaching in higher education takes place. Dr. Waghid argues for defamiliarization as a pedagogical technique in higher education, as a way of deepening students’ social, economic, political, and cultural awareness in relation to identity, language, and hierarchies of power.
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