pedagogy

 Call for Papers

Fan Studies Network North America Virtual Conference 2020

October 13-17, 2020

For this year, we have decided to host the virtual-only Fan Studies Network North America over five days in October to encourage participation and access, and to limit Zoom mental overload. The conference will combine synchronous and asynchronous conversations. Rather than traditional papers, we will have virtual workshops, salons, and posters.

The regimes of Whiteness, heteronormativity, androcentrism, able-bodiedness or Eurocentrism have for a long time constituted the frameworks of ‘proper’, ‘successful’ or expected social conduct, organising in a normative way social communication, relations and spaces. The regimes have been shaping social life, state policies and institutions, or fields of science and arts. Social practices are imbued with preconceptions concerning race, sexuality, gender, health or ethnicity which have become so commonsensical that it takes a lot of critical effort to go beyond the normative context.

The 118th annual conference of the Pacific Ancient & Modern Language Association (PAMLA) will be held from Thursday, November 12, to Sunday, November 15, 2020, at the Sahara Las Vegas Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada.

Strategies for Teaching Climate Change in the First-Year Writing Classroom:

This session investigates the teaching of climate change themes, focusing on the first-year writing classroom. It will invite instructors whose courses have incorporated these themes to share their pedagogical strategies with those who are new to the use of climate change themes or who would like to improve their existing pedagogy.

Humanizing Online Teaching
A Virtual Symposium
Sponsored by the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

Join AEPL and register for the symposium at http://aeplevents.org

Wednesday, July 22, 2020
11am - 5:30pm Eastern / 8am - 2:30pm Pacific

via Zoom

The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic has dramatically if not irrevocably altered our world in ways that we are only now beginning to realize. Academia has been one of the areas profoundly impacted by this global disaster. Hiring freezes instituted at universities, structural retrenchment, and newly arisen budget crunches have ensured that the academic job market will be beset by uncertainty for the foreseeable future. Even before the onset of this crisis, the academic job market was precarious at best and non-existent at worst.

Building off GSC’s successful 2019 session, “Bridging the Praxis Gap,” which largely addressed pedagogical issues, this session aims to address an even wider variety of gaps in what is taught in graduate school and the critical skills needed to survive in academia and professional life beyond. We are particularly interested in ways to bridge traditional notions of graduate school with active leadership training frameworks that seek to develop engaged graduate students who could take the reins and influence positive change in various contexts in and out of academia.

NeMLA 2021: Philadelphia, PA. March 11-14, 2021

As we move forward in this new normal, there is an urgent need, at both national and global levels, for critical investigations into the humanistic, scientific, and social scientific impacts of the coronavirus, both societally and in academia. It’s possible, likely even, that your current research and teaching focuses are not directly related to epidemiology. Regardless, your research and/or teaching has undoubtedly been affected by the pandemic. Now is a key moment to lean into the many robust opportunities for teaching developments and enhancements.

In the 1930s and ‘40s, crime fiction was often published on cheap paper made of wood pulp, and this reputation as faintly disreputable has stayed with it, pursuing it into creative writing classes in which “genre-writing” has traditionally been discouraged. This panel invites creative writers as well as literary scholars to consider crime writing—true crime, mystery and detective fiction, suspense fiction, and film or television drama—in the context of creative writing pedagogy. Is crime writing inherently disreputable? Does this genre have a place in the creative writing classroom?

While universities have long been a space for cultivating generations of academics, researchers, and intellectuals, they have never been exempt from the dynamics of power that underlie any institution based on interpersonal relations. Recent strides at improving inclusivity—for example: greater diversity among faculty and student populations, or increasing numbers of sociopolitically- and culturally-cognizant programs—belie the reality that universities operate along ideological lines that can (re)produce inequities and social hierarchies.

Study abroad is frequently imagined as a transformative endeavor during a student’s university experience. Students often begin their studies with a tentative roadmap of courses guided by their future career goals, and, if the stars align, they will study abroad in their third or fourth year. Studying abroad is often encouraged in foreign language programs, but is traditionally framed as a parallel experience to their at-home semester. While of course the linguistic, cultural, intellectual and personal benefits of this experience have always been recognized to be invaluable, the long-lasting impact of the study abroad path is often not fully optimized.

This roundtable at NeMLA (Northeast MLA, Philadelphia 2021) will explore humanities courses that incorporate service learning as a way to respond to climate change. Given the exigency of global warming and the stress it places on our local communities, it becomes increasingly vital to leverage the humanities through focused civic engagement.

This is a call for proposals for people who want to talk about sex from their own perspective. Once the deadline ends (12/31/20), I will select 6-7 proposals and, along with their authors, continue to develop a play about sex that will have a staged reading in New York as well as be used as script where I teach. Furthermore, this play will be offered to drama therapists and/or sex educators to be workshopped with their clients and/or students. 

The play will be developed based on a series of questions that I will share with those selected at a later date. I am ONLY interested in personal accounts that help advance a mature and uninhibited talk about sex. 

As of this writing, we find ourselves about ten days into international protests following the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Protesters the world over have made specific calls to action: acknowledge that black lives matter, educate yourself about social and racial injustice, and change the legal system that allows these heinous acts to go unpunished. In thinking through how we in the field of educational theatre can proactively address these needs, I reminded myself that there are many artists and educators who are already deeply engaged in this work.

Submissions Information: We seek papers for a panel titled "Critical Approaches to Tradition and Innovation in Graduate Humanities Education" to be held at the Northeast Modern Language Association's 52nd annual convention in Philadelphia, PA, March 11-14, 2021. Please submit abstracts of 300 words here: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/18735. For questions or concerns, please contact Jo Grim at jcg314@lehigh.edu or Sam Sorensen at sms416@lehigh.edu. We look forward to reviewing your proposals!