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TLC Workshops and Events, Fall 2025

What is the Teaching Statement?

Wednesday, September 17th. 4PM. On Zoom.

Teaching Statement Peer Review?

Wednesday,September 24th. 4PM. In person, Room 3317

The teaching statement is an important artifact in the academic job search. It can deepen a hiring committee’s sense of who you are as an applicant and show how you enact your values as an educator. In these workshops, we’ll discuss the role of the teaching statement within the application process, explore what makes a strong statement, and discuss how to approach the rhetorical challenge of crafting this document. We’ll examine sample statements from various disciplines, and work  through a range of approaches. This first workshop will take place online. Attendees will have a week to draft their own teaching statements, and then can attend an in-person peer review workshop to get feedback on their drafts from TLC staff members and Graduate Center classmates.
Register for one event or both at https://cuny.is/tlc-f25.

Freedom Dreams & Classroom Ecologies, Part One

Tuesday, September 30th. 3-5pm. Table in GC Lobby.

“We can choose: We can go on building and destroying until we either destroy ourselves or destroy the ability of our world to sustain us. Or we can make something more of ourselves. We can grow up. We can leave the nest. We can fulfil the Destiny, make homes for ourselves among the stars, and become some combination of what we want to become and whatever our new environments challenge us to become. Our new worlds will remake us as we remake them.” – Octavia Butler, Parable of the Talents

Freedom…Joy…Thriving…Possibility…Play. Where do you find these moments in your classrooms? What kind of world and educational environment do you dream of? How do we hold onto and lift up these practices when worlds are ending, lives are endangered, and learning is seen as more of a threat than a fundamental, universal right?

Stop by our table in the lobby on Tuesday, September 30th between 3:00-5:00 pm.  Share a moment, an activity, a whispered hope, an image, a poem, a song. Your contributions will provide the foundation for future conversations, programs, and art projects at the TLC.

No registration necessary! 

AI Basics and Policy Statements

Wednesday, October 1. 2:30-4pm. On Zoom.

This workshop will provide a brief introduction to generative artificial intelligence and help instructors craft thoughtful and responsive policies for their classes. Together, we will work to demystify AI basics through interactive visualizations and hands-on tinkering, followed by discussion of sample policy statements and their implications across disciplines. Participants will begin to draft syllabus language that represents their values as teachers and offers clear guidance on attribution, use cases, and a working definition of critical AI literacy.

Freedom Dreams & Classroom Ecologies, Part Two

Wednesday, October 15th. 4-6pm. In-person, Room 3317. Pizza will be served.

Let’s keep freedom dreaming! Join the TLC for pizza, collaborative art making, and discussion of how we might hold onto dreams and joy in and across our teaching contexts. Connect with each other across departments and disciplines while we pause and reflect on where we are in the semester and year, and make space to imagine new worlds.

Register at https://cuny.is/tlc-f25.

Critical Play with Large Language Models

Thursday, October 16. 2:30pm-4pm. On Zoom.
Co-sponsored with the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Certificate Program.

In this session, participants will engage with large language models (LLMs) as sites of critical inquiry and creative exploration. We’ll explore techniques for revealing the boundaries, biases, and unexpected behaviors of these systems through structured play and exploratory probing. Through collaborative exercises in adversarial prompting and comparative evaluation across models, participants will learn to design assignments that encourage students to interrogate AI outputs and develop critical understandings of LLMs and their social and material implications.

Register at https://cuny.is/itp-labs-f25

Open Discussion: Navigating “Politics” in Our Classrooms

Tuesday, October 21. 11:30am-1pm. In-person, Room 3317.

How do you approach discussing (or not discussing) politics and/or current events with students? What concerns do you have in doing so? On the one hand, as educators we want to be responsive to our students and the world around us. The news seems to illuminate daily a crisis that affects our and our students’ lives. On the other hand, sometimes our classrooms are an escape from the outside world, a place of learning on specific topics that our students signed up for. On top of this, it increasingly feels risky as an adjunct professor to share political beliefs with students. Join the GC Teaching and Learning Center for food and an open discussion to build community around the following questions:

  • What pedagogical approaches do/can you draw on when addressing politics in the classroom?
  • What risks do you face and resources can you draw from as an adjunct professor?
  • What concerns/questions/support do you need from the TLC and others moving forward?

Register at https://cuny.is/tlc-f25.

Teaching with the CUNY Digital History Archive

Monday, November 3. 3-5pm. In-person, Room 3317.

The CUNY Digital History Archive (CDHA) is “a counter-institutional archive” that centers CUNY’s histories as a site of organizing, learning and transformation, including the fight for Puerto Rican studies at Brooklyn College, the Save Hostos campaign, the Student Liberation Action Movement group at Hunter, and so much more. Over the years, educators have used CDHA materials in their classrooms across disciplines and departments, from SEEK to history to English and more. CDHA offers materials that can be used in any classroom that strives to engage students around their place at CUNY and the radical histories of CUNY we need to remember now more than ever. In this workshop, we will spend some time looking at example lesson plans and assignments that use CDHA materials. Then the bulk of the workshop will be spent designing and workshopping our own CDHA-related lesson plans and assignments.

Register at https://cuny.is/tlc-f25.

Sanctuary Classrooms? The Promise and Limits of Pedagogy in an Age of Border Revanchism

Friday, November 7. 2-4pm. In-person, Room 3317.

CUNY’s classrooms are sites where immigration politics are lived day to day, and where the barriers they create might be reinforced or unsettled. In an era of border revanchism, when non-citizens are under attack, how can we foster belonging and refuge for all students in our classrooms, even as some face real threats?

This workshop begins from the premise that educators have limited but meaningful agency to cultivate different ways of sharing space and power with students. The idea of a “sanctuary classroom” points to this possibility. Together, we will trace how sanctuary has been taken up by cities and campuses, and consider what happens when the concept is scaled down to the classroom. Through a series of exercises, we will think together how teaching can create small but powerful spaces of pluralism in a broader climate that is increasingly hostile to those ideals.

By the end of the session, participants will sketch an individual sanctuary plan for their own courses: concrete practices and experiments they want to try, limits they anticipate, and ways to push against them. The aim is to generate strategies that are specific, flexible, and usable in our classrooms, while also being honest about the real limitations we face.

Register at https://cuny.is/tlc-f25.

Embodied Knowledges: Teaching Discussion & Skillshare

Tuesday, November 11. 11:30-1pm. In-person, Room 3317. Lunch will be served.

• Are you ever uncomfortable or anxious in front of the classroom?
• Do you sometimes wonder if your students could be more engaged?
• Do you think about how your students perceive you? Do you wonder what you don’t know about them?
• Have you considered how your teaching has (or hasn’t) changed over time?

Trusting our experiences in the classroom as learners and teachers helps to make us better practitioners. The bodies and multi-faceted identities that we teach with are key to that experience. Using the framework of queer pedagogy, let’s consider the varied ways our and our students’ bodies exist in the classroom and how we relate to each other in that space. What do we know now that we didn’t before? What have we always known? This workshop is an opportunity to reflect on and share what we have learned through our cumulative hours in the classroom. Join us for a discussion about the embodied experience of being a CUNY student/teacher and how that has developed your thinking about teaching and pedagogy. Then, get ready to swap skills, techniques, and strategies based on your individual experience and knowledge.

Register at https://cuny.is/tlc-f25.

Co-Developing with Generative AI

Tuesday, November 18. 2:30-4pm. In Person, New Media Lab.

This workshop will explore how large language models can be used as a collaborator in coding and building digital scholarship. Participants will gain hands-on experience with AI tools for programming and development basics, while simultaneously reflecting on the ethical challenges and contradictions that come with working alongside generative AI in our research and teaching.

Register at https://tinyurl.com/nml-co-dev