Looking back now on five years of using SI leaders, I know I will never go back. Why? Grades are up, and so is retention, but I would really never go back to being that solo teacher in the front of the classroom. I prefer the noisy, happy, imperfect collaboration of working with SI Leaders who are closer in age and experience, and digital footprint to my students.
Care and joy should be at the center of all people’s lives regardless of their work. This need is especially significant for academics, like so many others who work with the demands of unpaid labor and have few boundaries between work life and personal life. “Slow scholarship” produces the nurturing spaces that all academics deserve and is a model worthy of our collective action.
Discord is a community-based platform that can be used to encourage organic interactions amongst students in a virtual environment. This post discusses how Discord can foster an online community, whether you’re teaching online or in-person.
There has been so much work in our college lately addressing anti-racist pedagogy and culturally sustaining pedagogy that I thought it would be fruitful to go to the mother of the movement. But I also didn’t want to read her by myself. I know my colleagues and wanted to read with all of you. So along with the library, CETLS and the Race, Equity and Inclusion Coordinating Committee, we started the bell hooks Book Club.
The overlapping crises of public health and police brutality prompted me to think about trauma-informed pedagogy as a way to both grieve the losses and celebrate resilience. The collaborative project, “From Pandemic to Protest: We Remember,” was designed to provide students with an opportunity to reflect on the events of 2020-2021, using digital tools to commemorate the experiences of their communities during the Covid-19 pandemic and the racial-justice protests.
During this time of so much stress and change, it’s great to have a quick game to get your students laughing and energized. I’m going to recommend two of my favorite quick, no-cost games: Powerpoint Jeopardy and Mad Libs.
Although I can see why some of my colleagues would choose to work on something new for a book, finishing my dissertation (almost ten years ago now!) was like giving birth to a first child, so I wanted to see that project grow and mature beyond infancy. But I also had a lot of work to do.
This semester, many of us will be returning to teaching in person for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic. We’re excited to see our students and colleagues in person, and at the same time nervous and unsure of what to expect. For this blog post, we asked BMCC colleagues who have already been teaching in person to share their experiences.
Ultimately, I want students to walk away from my class having had a positive experience in which they have learned things that stick with them on some level. My experimentation with ungrading is helping me and the students I teach shift our thinking away from grading toward learning.
Patrizia Comello Perry and Berenice Darwich, both professors in the Modern Languages Department, discuss how they adapted their department’s annual colloquium to the circumstances of the pandemic, giving voice to BMCC student experiences.
