Adjunct Summer Institute 2023 Call for Proposals
Small Teaching, Big Contributions:
Teachers Sharing Strategy
June 1, 2023, 9:30 am - 4:00 pm
Theme:
James Paul Gee argues that education should prepare us to be resilient people, proactive agents, deliberate learners, insightful observers, and good decision makers. Our ability to be these resilient and agentive learners and decision makers is based on the quality of our experiences. In the teaching and learning environment, according to Gee (2017):
[T]here are three features that are crucial for deep and long-term learning… The features are:
- The learner has an action to take in the experience
- The learner emotionally cares about the outcome of the action in the sense that something meaningful is at stake for the person in the outcome of the action.
- Something or someone helps the learner to know what things in the experience are most relevant and important to pay attention to in order to carry out the action successfully. Any real-world experience has a great many things in it that we could pay attention to, not all of which are equally relevant or important.
So to learn well we need action, caring, and well-managed attention. (11)
When we curate such experiences for our students, we help them build discernment skills that inform the personal and professional lives well beyond their time at FIT.
Big shifts in how our students think and understand their agency in the ways mentioned above frequently happen through small yet well-planned activities and classroom interactions. James Lang (2014) notes that “small teaching” focuses our attention on the changes we can make to our pedagogy today–changes that we can quickly implement to yield great results. For example, Gesa Kirsch details how she uses strategic contemplation in her courses to invite moments of silence that encourage reflection and connection between students’ experiences and the material (Royster & Kirsch, 2012).
Simple, small changes like this can have a big impact on what students take away from our lessons, and this ASI invites FIT faculty to share the teaching strategies that make a difference in your classrooms. FIT adjunct faculty who submitted presentation proposals will share their teaching strategies during the morning sessions. The afternoon workshops will focus on two issues that have emerged as significant teaching challenges this academic year: Student distress and disruption in the classroom and Artificial Intelligence's impact on teaching and learning.
Symposium Schedule
9:30 am Breakfast and Opening Remarks
10:00 am Faculty Presentation Session I
11:15 am Faculty Presentation Session II
12:15 pm Lunch and Discussion
1:00 pm Workshop I: Distress and Disruption in the Classroom
2:30 pm Workshop II: AI in Higher Education
3:30 pm Final Remarks and Culminating Activity
Proposal form is now closed. For more information about the form and the days' presentations, please Download the call for proposals.