pedagogy

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.

NeMLA Annual Convention

11-14 March, 2021

Philadelphia, PA

From the time government agencies and the press reported the emergence of a novel corona virus in late 2019, there has been a fundamental shift in the way we congregate, communicate, and educate across the world. Artists and educators have been called upon to reinvent their practice seemingly overnight. While we struggle to balance our personal health and wellness, our community contributions remain as vital as ever. In tribute to this reinvention, ArtsPraxis invites you to share your scholarship, practice, and praxis. As we’ve asked before, we welcome teachers, drama therapists, applied theatre practitioners, theatre-makers, performance artists, and scholars to offer vocabularies, ideas, strategies, practices, measures, and outcomes.

This panel at the 2021 NeMLA convention in Philadelphia, "Making Lit Lit: Forging Connections Between Student Experiences and Literature," will consider how to apply current pedagogical best practices to make literature and culture classes more relevant and engaging, and as a result, more fruitful.
 Presentations--which do not have to be read papers--can be on pedagogical innovations that have been researched and/or implemented in the literature and culture classroom, as well as on applied linguistics or other pedagogical studies that were not specifically on the teaching of literature and culture but could be applied to it (such as those on motivation/investment, needs analysis, TBLT, project-based learning, etc.).

52nd Northeast Modern Language Association Convention

March 11-14, 2021 / Philadelphia, PA

This roundtable will feature 5-minute papers/presentations that explore best practices for including community engagement within Humanities courses. Experiments with critical pedagogies and research programs, as well as creative and thoughtful engagements with regional and local communities, are especially welcome. The roundtable format features brief formal or informal presentations, leaving plenty of time for interaction and discussion between, and among, participants and audience members.

By June 26, please send a 200-word presentation abstract, a 1-page CV and A/V requests to Elisabeth Austin (elaustin@vt.edu).