On January 25-26, 2022, the Teaching and Learning Center will host its Mid-Winter Institute. This event is open to the entire Graduate Center community, and is designed specifically to help GTFs, adjuncts, and GC faculty prepare for teaching at CUNY during the Spring 2022 semester.

Many faculty will be teaching in person for the first time since March 2020, though we fully understand that the context and instructional modes for the spring may shift between now and the start of classes. This event will hold space for us to think collectively through a range of approaches in our classes. Please see the schedule below, and register for the Institute at http://cuny.is/tlc-winter-22.

If you have questions, please reach out to us at tlc@gc.cuny.edu.

January 25

From Zoom to the Classroom
10am-12pm

This workshop will invite participants to reflect upon the opportunities and challenges of going back to teaching in-person after two years of teaching online. We will discuss our feelings and anticipate what an in-person class might look like in Spring 2022. Together, we will strategize how to take what worked well in Zoom into in-person classes, and discuss how to translate assignments, exercises, and projects we’ve already developed for the upcoming semester. We can also explore how to incorporate asynchronous work, and video lectures to in-person classes.

Building Community in Your Classroom
1pm-3pm

What is community? What does it mean to build community? This workshop will provide a space to critically reflect upon the idea of creating community in the classroom by centering student voices. We will engage in discussions about what community means to our teaching both online and in-person. We will also consider practices that can foster student engagement and community-building.

Open Office Hours
3-5pm

Join staff from the Teaching and Learning Center to work through syllabus and assignment designing, discuss session planning and grading, work through technical issues with digital teaching tools, or to talk about anything else related to your spring teaching.

http://cuny.is/tlc-winter-22

January 26

Scaling Back: Building Flexibility in Small Steps To Address Burnout in Your Workload
10am-12pm

The past two years have been difficult for everyone in our learning communities. Educators feel strained by hefty course loads and hybridized instructional modes that require strenuous preparation. In this workshop, we will explore “scaling back” as a way to practice care and how and why we should consider it for our teaching practice.

Creating Accessible Classrooms
1pm-3pm

An accessible classroom is one in which all students can engage with the material and their classmates, and are supported in their pursuit of course goals. The context of the COVID-19 has made this more challenging. In this workshop we will think about accessibility through the context of disability justice—considering questions of ableism and frameworks for supporting sick, disabled, and neuroatypical students—as well as broader questions about how to teach in ways that recognize students’ access (or lack thereof) to basic material needs.

Open Office Hours
3-5pm

Join staff from the Teaching and Learning Center to work through syllabus and assignment designing, discuss session planning and grading, work through technical issues with digital teaching tools, or to talk about anything else related to your spring teaching.

http://cuny.is/tlc-winter-22