2023-2024 Workshops

“Your Assignment Here: Anti-Racist Resources from WAC Fellows” 

Lehman WAC’s 2022-23 PhD Fellows shared their approaches to teaching and assessing writing with an anti-racist praxis. Presentations below:

• Samuel Steeple (Music): As an instructor of an introductory course for non-majors (Music Appreciation, or Introduction to Music), I have created a variety of low-stakes writing prompts that, unlike the formal expectations of a written paper, give students space to process class concepts and apply them to their own life experiences.  To break up the traditional lecture, I incorporate low-stakes writing prompts in most class sessions, with the goal of “writing to think”–instead of aligning their writing with the expectations of an outside reader, these prompts ask students to use writing as an extension of their thought process. Additionally, I assign short, informal blogs (200 words) with prompts that ask students to introduce their own favorite music in connection to the conversations and skills being used in our course. Though students are asked to produce written language, these prompts ask students to respond to or incorporate music and other media within their responses, a context which can be adapted to fit courses outside of music.
• Miriam Navas (Latin American and Iberian Literatures and Cultures): decolonizing the language and  inclusion of historically excluded scholars for the Self-identification of students
• Eliana Peck (Philosophy): first experience with equitable grading/ungrading and several assignments that show these practices
• Talya Wolf (Sociology): Marrying affect with skill-building – A lesson plan and worksheet that helped students to design research questions that are specific, answerable, and most importantly, exciting to them. The worksheet helps students narrow their broad areas of interests to specific research questions and identify key words that will help them search academic databases effectively and efficiently. In this way, I hope to foster student joy and intrinsic motivation as well as to arm them with concrete tools for academic success.
• Matthew Timmerman (Music): teaching writing through public-facing genres like the op-ed; will share reasons for using the op-ed and how to scaffold the op-ed as a writing assignment in various writing classrooms

More information here

“What’s in a Grade? A Workshop on Alternative Grading Practices.” Friday 3/17 from 11AM to 1PM on Zoom 

This workshop engaged participants in a conversation about the role of grades in teaching and learning by discussing care-based approaches to grading that challenge and reimagine more traditional grading systems and the white supremacist assumptions underlying “good grades” and “poor performance.” Presenters shared examples of alternative grading (collective rubrics, labor contracts, practices of ungrading, etc.), and discussed with participants how alternative assessment could be implemented in their classes and assignments as well as the challenges it might pose to their disciplines. Attendees left the workshop with practical takeaways and meaningful reflections on assessment practices in their own assignment and course design, whether they decide to implement alternative grading in the future or not.
Facilitated by Sophia Hsu, English; Sarah Ohmer, Latin American & Africana Studies; and Austin Bailey, Graduate Center English.

More information here

2021-2022 Workshops

Spring 2022 WAC Series. Writing Community Histories: A Workshop with the Bronx County Historical Society Archives. A 2-part Workshop (ZOOM & IN PERSON) 

Facilitated by Vani Kannan (Assistant Professor of English) and Steven Payne (Archivist at Bronx County Historical Society)
Day 1: May 18, 2022, 3:30-5:30 (ZOOM): Introduction to the Archive’s Digital Collections

• How can archived Bronx histories ground our classrooms in local, national, and international currents of social justice organizing? 
• How is local history tied to the work of anti-racist pedagogy? 
• How can we both amplify the archive’s histories and potentially become part of them?

This workshop introduces faculty to the Bronx County Historical Society Archives, and offers a space to brainstorm public, multimodal writing assignments that draw from its holdings. Located at 3313 Bainbridge Avenue, the archive offers a rich resource of local social justice organizing. For example, it houses the papers of local Black feminist communist activist Angie Dickerson and the papers of the organization White Lightning (a group that worked with the Young Lords and Black Panthers in the Lincoln Hospital takeover). See, for example, Steven’s Social Justice Collections Research Guide. Participants will brainstorm ways to link their writing assignments to the project of writing community histories by engaging with Steven and Vani’s call for “Community Notes,” soon to be published on the archive’s website; peruse the archive’s digitized collections as well as various digital interactive tools and points of access; discuss the intersections of multimodality, public writing, and archival pedagogy; gain tools for incorporating digital archives into their classrooms; tour the Bronx County Historical Society Archives; develop activities with archived materials; receive syllabus/ assignment development support; receive concrete strategies for designing public student projects using the archive’s holdings; and reflect on possibilities for going public with their own writing, and/or contributing to the archive.

Day 2: May 25, 2022, 3:30-5:30 (IN PERSON): The Bronx County Historical Society Archives, 3313 Bainbridge Avenue, Bronx, NY. 

The second workshop includes an archive tour, activities with archived materials, and syllabus/ assignment development support. Faculty will leave this workshop with concrete strategies for designing public student projects using the archive’s holdings, possibilities for going public with their own writing, and ideas for contributing to the archive.

Summer 2022 WAC Series. Life-Giving Practices Across the Curriculum: Learning from Audre Lorde and Ericka Huggins, A 3-part Workshop Series on ZOOM

Facilitated by Mary Phillips, Ph.D. and featuring Sunyata Smith, Ph.D.
June 10, 10am-1pm: Vulnerability & Compassion in Activist Scholarship & Writing Pedagogy
June 17, 10am-1pm with Dr. Sunyata Smith: Wellness Practices that Give Back in the Classroom and Beyond 
June 24, 10am-1pm: Putting Wellness Practices into the Curriculum

• How do we be well and do our work? 
• How do pleasure activism and Black joy shape your teaching and/or scholarship? 
• How do we sustain activist scholarship and writing pedagogy during the pandemic? 

In this Summer Series, participants will identify concrete needs for wellness in day-to-day environments, academic or otherwise, and practice self-reflective writing (in part with the goal of preparing to engage our students in these same practices); reflect on models of wellness practices in higher education, scholarship, teaching, and institutional environments; review resources to cultivate wellness practices; explore unique ways to make room for wellness work in the classroom; and set realistic and measurable goals to implement wellness over the summer and the following academic year.