Ithaca College

Monday, May 16, 8:30- 4:00 pm
319 Gannett Center   
                                                                                       
Please join us for a lively day with Lott Hill and Soo La Kim from Learners at the Center*, a community of teachers collaborating to inspire, design, and share inclusive, equitable, learner-centered instructional philosophies and practices.

“Making the classroom a democratic setting where everyone feels a responsibility to contribute is a central goal of transformative pedagogy.” – bell hooks

It’s become increasingly important to recognize the diversity of identities and experiences our students bring into the classroom, as well as to acknowledge our own specific subject positions as teachers. But how do we create a truly inclusive classroom given this multiplicity of identities and perspectives? How do we create spaces of trust, empathy, equity, and respect that are conducive to active participation and that lay the social-emotional groundwork for deeper learning for all our students? We feel at the heart of the answer is community building, not as icebreakers quickly dispensed with early on, but as pedagogical practice and a vital component of creating the kinds of inclusive spaces that Ken Bain describes as the “natural critical learning environment.”

This hands-on, minds-on workshop will provide engaging, practical, student-centered approaches for you to adapt for the diverse needs of your unique students, classrooms, and disciplines. Instead of standing in front of you and telling you to engage students, we invite you to dive in, engage, and experience the learning as students might, while reflecting together on what it means to teach with empathy, to understand students' points of view and make room in the classroom for the expression of multiple perspectives, experiences, and identities.

We will examine:

• What does it mean to design an inclusive and equitable curriculum and classroom?
• How can we foster or sustain inclusion in our classrooms and curricula?
• How should we rethink teaching practices in the age of global multiculturalism to engender excitement about learning?
• How can we ensure that all students are engaged or talk during in-class discussions?
• How do you get students to listen to each other and express their points of view while keeping a difficult conversation focused on the learning goals of the course?

*Lott Hill is a founding Senior Partner with Learners at the Center, LLC and the founding Executive Director of the Center for Innovation in Teaching Excellence at Columbia College Chicago. For nearly 20 years, Lott has been designing and teaching classes in service-learning, cultural studies, journalism, and creative writing as well as first-year and capstone courses. Lott’s fiction, poetry, and nonfiction have been published with numerous online and print-based sources including Metropolitan Universities, Adbusters, Spoon River Poetry Review, Peer Review, Advocate.com, and the 2nd Story Anthology: Briefly Knocked Unconscious by a Low Flying Duck.
*Soo La Kim is a founding Senior Partner with Learners at the Center, LLC and, until recently, was Director of the Center for Innovation in Teaching Excellence at Columbia College Chicago. At the end of May 2016, she will assume her new role as Assistant Dean for Graduate Programs in the School of Professional Studies at Northwestern University. Soo La began her career as an educator at the University of California, Irvine, where she taught courses in literature, writing, and interdisciplinary humanities and earned her Ph.D. in English in 2000. She went on to teach in the writing programs at Harvard and Princeton, and began her work in faculty development as Assistant Director in the Princeton Writing Program.

Individuals with disabilities requiring accommodations should contact Laurie Wasik at wasik@ithaca.edu or (607) 274-3734. We ask that requests for accommodations be made as soon as possible.