The Susan Ratner ‘86 Writing and Speaking Pedagogy Series and the Barnard Center for Engaged Pedagogy cordially invite you to a lecture and workshop on Friday, September 13th by Felicia Rose Chavez—educator, digital storyteller, and author of The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How To Decolonize The Creative Classroom. Sponsored by a Provost Innovation in Teaching grant and the Creative Writing Fellows program, this event makes space for students and instructors working across disciplines to interrogate their habitual modes of teaching and advising, with the hope of discovering possibilities beyond traditional teaching models. Please find the descriptions of each session below and be sure to RSVP here.

Felicia Rose Chavez is an award-winning educator with an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Iowa. She is author of The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom and co-editor of The BreakBeat Poets Volume 4: LatiNEXT with Willie Perdomo and Jose Olivarez. Felicia’s teaching career began in Chicago, where she served as Program Director to Young Chicago Authors and founded GirlSpeak, a feminist webzine for high school students. She went on to teach writing at the University of New Mexico, where she was distinguished as the Most Innovative Instructor of the Year, the University of Iowa, where she was distinguished as the Outstanding Instructor of the Year, and Colorado College, where she received the Theodore Roosevelt Collins Outstanding Faculty Award. Her creative scholarship earned her a Ronald E. McNair Fellowship, a University of Iowa Graduate Dean’s Fellowship, a Riley Scholar Fellowship, and a Hadley Creatives Fellowship.

Lecture: Friday, September 13th | 11 – 12:30pm | Lynn Chu classroom, Milstein LL002

Critique Across Disciplines

Critique is an intricate skill, from one-on-one thesis advising to peer review exercises, small group work, and large group workshop. Imagine if we empowered students to take charge of their writing by teaching them professional managerial practices, those real-life skills that best serve long-term, collaborative projects. By training students in how to summarize their projects, articulate constructive questions, and moderate their own feedback sessions, we acknowledge their accountability. Students go on to claim ownership of not only their work, but their working relationships with professors and peers. This session offers specific, practical take-aways to re-conceptualize critique across academic disciplines.

Workshop: Friday, September 13th | 2 – 3:30pm | Milstein LL001

Adapting Our Teaching Habits

So much of teaching is about inheritance, about reinforcing the way it’s always been done. Many of us can’t even articulate why we teach the way that we do, beyond tradition serving as a rite of passage. Every one of us carries this inheritance into the classroom, through our choice of dress, demeanor, curriculum, and evaluative measures. Where we’re from (and how we “read”) influences our relationship to, and assumption of, inherent rights, benefits, and advantages. If “the way it’s always been done” hurts and marginalizes a subset of our students, how might we adapt our teaching habits to actively achieve plurality? This interactive session draws on storytelling, freewriting exercises, and discussion to prompt us to interrogate our academic and cultural inheritance with the goal of discovering possibilities beyond traditional teaching models.