Dimensions of Culture
- Learning/Teaching for Justice Conference
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In celebration of Thurgood Marshall College’s 50th Anniversary, the Dimensions of Culture Program is organizing and hosting a CONFERENCE in Spring Quarter 2021 that explores learning and teaching for justice in higher education. We ultimately ask: what do just learning and teaching look like in and beyond the classroom? Deadline for session proposals has been extended to January 29, 2021 -- see below.
In centering this question of learning for justice especially beyond the classroom, the organizing committee is proud to announce poet and author Saeed Jones as the conference’s keynote speaker. Saeed Jones is the author of the memoir How We Fight for Our Lives, winner of the 2019 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction, and the poetry collection Prelude to Bruise, winner of the 2015 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry and the 2015 Stonewall Book Award/Barbara Gittings Literature Award. The poetry collection was also a finalist for the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as awards from Lambda Literary and the Publishing Triangle in 2015. Saeed Jones’s writings help us consider how learning for justice emerges from our complex and intersecting lived experiences.
We intend for this conference to be active, interactive, and inclusive—a space for educators to be students, and for students to educate, recognizing that “teaching” is not done just by academics for students in lecture halls but occurs in residential halls/apartments, academic advising sessions, student organizations, campus centers, and other formal and informal learning communities across the university, and that educators do, and must, learn from their students.
The conference prioritizes practical and interactive sessions that share strategies and practices for cultivating equity, inclusion, and anti-racism throughout higher education, from the perspective of students, educators, and administrators across the disciplines. To create these transformational encounters, we will select for active learning sessions—not professors reading papers from the lectern or panelists talking past each other, but rather sessions that engage with an audience and draw out varied perspectives. We will prioritize sessions that attend to our current socio-political moment, can be delivered through remote formats, and center the voices and experiences of students.
To that end, conference sessions will include student voices—either as presentation participants or through student panels that will frame and respond to the educator presentations. Proposals with student participants are therefore especially welcome, but proposals without student participants will be linked by conference organizers with student panels/presenters to help ensure that students’ voices are part of every session at the conference.
In convening the Learning/Teaching for Justice conference, the conference committee is especially interested in interactive sessions that engage with but are not limited to the following themes and questions:
Ultimately, this conference has as its goal the transformation of the UC San Diego academic community; by creating new connections and coalitions through promising educational practices that center justice and the student experience, we will affect material change at UC San Diego and beyond.
To propose a session at the Learning/Teaching for Justice Conference, please complete this form (http://bit.ly/learningforjustice) by 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time January 29, 2021. Participants will be notified of their acceptance within four to six weeks after submission. Organizers encourage a wide and creative range of proposed sessions.
These sessions can include:
Please direct any questions to Dr. Amanda Solomon Amorao, alsolomon@ucsd.edu.