OFIS: Communication as Praxis: Session IV

Tuesday, March 26, 3-5pm, Room C201

When intentionally practiced, communication can empower and validate students in our classrooms. This workshop will apply classroom communication theory and scholarship to our own approaches to intentional classroom communication. Guided by the process-based inquiry of the TLC’s Open Focused Inquiry Series, three Graduate Center student instructors will share a newly-developed activity or assignment and discuss how it reflects the thinking they’ve done about talking, listening, questioning, and responding in the classroom. Then, all participants will collaboratively work to articulate short-and long-term goals for improving aspects of intentional classroom communication, and identify forums through which to continue these conversations at the TLC and beyond.

In Session I of the OFIS, we focused on unpacking, questioning, and considering the impact of our four key terms: listening, responding, questioning, and talking, and generated a series of questions and three lines of inquiry. In Session II, we considered these points of inquiry alongside and through selections from bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress, and the digital resource “Teaching by the Case Method.” In Session III we connected the explorations made in the previous sessions to activities in the classroom, focusing on how our own classroom practices invite and impede communication.

To register for Session IV, click here. Please consider bringing an assignment or activity that you use or plan to use in your class as well as a laptop. Refreshments will be served.

Session IV is the fourth in a four-part Open Focused Inquiry Series that examines how we do (or do not) use intentional communication practices to encourage students as learners, interrogators, and producers of knowledge. This group draws from the scholarship of teaching and learning and our own experiences as graduate student instructors to explore the theory and practice of dynamic, intentional classroom communication. To learn more, and for participation options, click here.