Teaching For Diversity and Inclusion Fall Webinar Series
Building Inclusive Classrooms in an Online Environment
Aug. 14 at 1 p.m.
Description: In this webinar, participants are introduced to strategies that will help them more effectively build virtual classrooms that foster a sense of inclusion. Strategies focus on course content design, policies, discussion management, and technology.
Facilitators: Dr. Cassander L. Smith, associate professor, department of English and UA Provost Faculty Fellow for Diversity and Inclusion, and Dr. Nathan Loewen, assistant professor, department of religious studies and faculty technology liaison, Office of Educational Technology
Registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/116412911151
Teaching With Tension: A National Election, A Pandemic, State-Sanctioned Violence and Strategies for Talking about Race in Our Current Moment
Sept. 25 at 1 p.m.
Description: This webinar addresses the extent to which attitudes about race, impacted by our current political environment, have produced pedagogical challenges for university faculty. The classroom is not a hermetically sealed space. Students bring into the classroom anxieties, prejudices, predispositions, ideas about social and political current events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, which has anti-Asian implications, the November elections, and police shootings of unarmed African Americans. These issues inform how students engage course content. In this webinar, faculty discuss strategies for addressing hot-button topics in the classroom. Through small group discussion, participants will exchange strategies and create dialogue about the struggles and joys of teaching topics that address racial difference and teaching in racially diverse spaces. They will engage questions such as the following: What teaching strategies work well (or fail) to help students navigate our current moment? How does rhetoric about post-raciality complicate the ways we historicize race or talk about race and current events in our classes? In what ways have students’ thinking about race provoked “new” ways for contextualizing the study of race? In what ways have both students and teachers negotiated racial issues as both individual and social phenomena and as pedagogical and humanistic imperatives?
Facilitators: Dr. Cassander L. Smith, co-editor of Teaching with Tension: Race, Resistance, and Reality in the Classroom (Northwestern University Press, 2018), and Dr. Mary Meares, associate professor, Communication and Information Sciences and facilitator for UA Faculty Learning Community “Communicating About Race and Diversity”
Registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/teaching-with-tension-strategies-for-talking-about-race-tickets-118964009555
Culturally Responsive Teaching in the STEM Classroom and Beyond
Oct. 13, 2020, at 1 p.m.
Description: This webinar focuses specifically on faculty in the STEM fields and offers strategies for teaching and mentoring undergraduate and graduate students with a focus on culturally responsive engagement. The webinar will present strategies for combating implicit bias, creating more inclusive lesson plans, and recruiting and retaining diverse students. Also, participants will discuss effective models of allyship as it relates to working with students in lab settings.
Facilitator: Dr. Laverne Melón, assistant professor of biology at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, and Dr. Tess L. Killpack, assistant professor of biology at Salem State University in Massachusetts, both co-authors of “Toward Inclusive STEM Classrooms: What Personal Role Do Faculty Play?” published in the journal Life Sciences Education (October, 2017).
Registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/culturally-responsive-teaching-in-the-stem-classroom-and-beyond-tickets-118469648909
When the Multitudes Come: How to Channel Student Activism to Build Strong Networks of Allyship in the Classroom — POSTPONED
Nov. 19, 2020, at 1 p.m.
Description: In the wake of the brutal murder of George Floyd on May 25 by Minneapolis police, many Americans–across the racial spectrum–shared in outrage and articulated a desire to work toward anti-racism and social justice. Racism has become a dominant social problem with many compelled to act. How might this renewed commitment to racial justice manifest itself in our classrooms, in students eager and ready to dismantle systems of racial injustice? Often, we encounter students who resist discussions about race. Given the current climate, we very likely will encounter students who are ready and willing to talk about and engage with race. What do we do when the multitude actually comes? In this webinar, participants learn strategies for channeling student activism to maximize the classroom experience.
Facilitator: Dr. Utz McKnight, chair, department of gender and race studies, and professor of political science
Registration: https://how-to-channel-student-activism.eventbrite.com
For more information, contact the Division of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at diversity@ua.edu