by Michelle Liu
Congratulations! You’ve almost made it to the end of the quarter!
All your energy right now might be going towards supporting students in successfully finishing the quarter. If you’re reading this blog post and know that you don’t have the capacity to think about the near future right now, know that you can return to this blog post later when you are ready to start thinking about teaching next quarter.
The pause between quarters is so useful for thinking about what needs to be changed one quarter to the next, and what could change. For myself, I annotate my syllabus and assignments with a running list of things that need to change the next time I teach the course as a little gift to my future self so that the course will run more smoothly.
What could change is often less obvious, since for me, these kinds of changes involve tinkering with things that are already working fine. But I know that each time I teach, I’ve learned something from my students. I get ideas about how to help them better engage with assigned material, what I can do to try to make the classroom community even stronger, and how to connect my course to the ever changing cultural shifts that shape the stakes of teaching and learning.
The things that could change often relate to my taking a moment to think about the next quarter as yet another experiment with manifesting the vision of the PWR antiracist and accessibility praxis statement. What does it mean to do my part in a program that commits to “working together, with compassion and critical intention, to resist and transform normative systems within our university and program and to rebuild our teaching and learning communities to be more socially equitable, culturally sustaining, and just”?
Luckily, I know that I don’t explore this question alone. Each of us decide what happens in our classroom, but I feel fortunate to be part of a program and department that encourages us to think together through these decisions. Over the summer, Eric Ames, the chair of Cinema and Media Studies, shared with me resources from his pedagogical toolbox. From him, I learned about the Eberly Center at Carnegie Mellon.
While many universities, including our own, have teaching resources, the layout and presentation of resources and questions to think about at the Eberly Center website make particular sense to my brain. I particularly like their thoughtful presentation of “How to Center DEI in Teaching.” They too, like Gin Schwarz and Anselma Prihandita did in the SQ21 PWR workshops on assessment, see course design as built upon the triangle of learning objectives, assessments, and instructional activities. And each of these legs of the triangle are opportunities to make a course more inclusive to better build up intrinsic learning motivation in students. This building of a motivated classroom community to me feels so vital in reaching towards what a “socially equitable, culturally sustaining, and just” future could feel like.
What I find helpful about the Eberly Center’s layout of centering DEI in teaching is that they succinctly present the research that guides their advice along with concrete examples of what this research sounds like in the day-to-day of the classroom. In my conversations with Eric, both of us think that this site is helpful for newer and more experienced teachers alike. For myself in planning WQ 23 teaching, I’ve been thinking about deeper ways to bring “culturally responsive teaching” into my writing assignments so that students can see writing as the alchemic agent that transforms how they know and engage with difference.
There are a lot of websites out there about teaching, so certainly, use the ones that make the most sense to how your brain operates. But if you are looking for one or looking for another that presents a different format from UW’s own Center for Teaching and Learning, you might find a lot of worth out of the Eberly Center site. It’s teaching sites like these that remind why teaching is never boring—there is always something new to learn!