The Teaching and Learning Center’s programs in Fall 2025 seek to address urgent and immediate concerns: presenting your teaching experience on the academic job market, dealing with the existence of generative AI in our classes, navigating difficult political conversations and contexts with our students, understanding the varieties of ways that knowledge is embodied by teachers and students, ensuring our courses are accessible, and harnessing CUNY’s activist histories for lessons from which students today can learn. Our programs will also engage more longterm but no less necessary topics such as deepening and preserving our capacity as educators for dreaming about freedom, uncovering the connections between parenting and teaching, exploring how queer pedagogies can create more compassionate, engaged, and resilient learning experiences, and demonstrating the possibilities of open infrastructure that support critical engagement with large language models scoped specifically for teaching, learning, and research.
These programs have been co-imagined and co-developed by the fellows at the Teaching and Learning Center—Danielle Bennett, Zach Muhlbauer, Janelle Poe, Jenna Queenan, Kristi Riley, and Jessie Stein—whose teaching experiences at CUNY are deep and varied, and who bring their research, activist, and scholarly commitments to bear on how they design learning opportunities for and with their fellow graduate student instructors. These projects represent a slight shift in approach, as we have learned that GC students are less interested in formal, structured workshops than they are in looser, freer flowing opportunities to engage and connect with one another. We’ll still offer workshops, but have sought ways to increase opportunities for conviviality and play. Holding and preserving space for joy is essential in this historical moment, and doing so can bolster our pedagogy.
We have additional events in the works which will be announced at a later date, but for now, please see our workshops and events for the fall, our Focused Inquiry Groups on “AI and Open WebUI” and “Queer Pedagogies” for the academic year, and a call for proposals for an edited volume on the relationship between parenting and teaching that will be produced over the coming months.
