Teaching the Pandemic
March 29th, 4-5pm, on Zoom

Though some of us who teach at CUNY have spent the past two years largely shut in, the world outside our window has fundamentally changed. This is true in varied and vexing ways: open streets in New York City have become a permanent fixture, our immigration policies have become more restrictive, policing is ostensibly surviving a crisis of legitimacy, housing precarity has tipped well past the point of emergency, and public health is grappling with a lack of pubic trust.

Can we teach these transformations in real time? How can we make sense of and converse with students about the upheavals we are witnessing and experiencing?

The TLC invites CUNY instructors to meet to exchange readings and classroom exercises through which we can “teach the pandemic.” We recognize that teaching has the potential to make sense of the world around us: when students and instructors get excited about the material, about the theories they are building and testing, there is a magic that happens. Acknowledging that many of us feel burnt out by the pandemic, we are looking to rekindle some of this magic. We aim to create a space for instructors to come together and make connections across disciplines.

Join us for an informal but timely conversation about strategies to keep our teaching connected to worldly events. The working group is open to instructors who have developed tools and sourced relevant readings on contemporary transformations, as well as instructors who are looking to integrate pandemic perspectives into their course in the future. The pandemic-relevant readings and assignments we assemble will be shared publicly as a live bibliography on the CUNY Academic Commons.

Join us on Tuesday, March 29 at 4-5 pm on Zoom. Click the link below to register: https://gc-cuny-edu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIpc-qgpzwtG9QvWhTvamO6X52BzAmuBjrx