Workshops & Events
One of our goals as a Center is to foster innovative, evidence-based teaching and learning practices and critical reflection through workshops, reading groups, and invited speakers involved with national and international research on higher education.
Workshops & Events are free and open to all faculty and staff teaching at Elon, and are designed for instructors working in a range of teaching and learning contexts.
Descriptions for current and past CATL offerings can be found below.
Upcoming 2023 Events
April 2023
Epistemic Asphyxiation: Whiteness, Academic Publishing, and the Suffocation of Black Knowledge Production
Tuesday, April 11th, 12:00 – 1:00pm | Rm 200K, LaRose Student Commons
Join us for a session with our partners in the Office of Inclusive Excellence Education and Development, Student Life, Black Employee Resource Group (BERG), and Black Lumen Project.
Blackness in the white imagination engenders anxiety-producing responses, and, as such, epistemic asphyxiation are the rationalized attempt(s) to restore a normative pattern of breathing, that is, coherence to a white western epistemological ideal. This presentation contributes to the function of anti-Black technologies in and beyond higher education, with specific attention to the academic publishing process. Further, it endeavors to draw out otherwise possibilities for minoritized faculty existence in the wake of anti-Blackness.
Dr. Wilson Kwamogi Okello (he/him) is an accomplished early-career artist and transdisciplinary scholar who draws on Black critical theories to advance research on student/early adult development theory. Most immediately, he is concerned with how Black critical approaches make visible the epistemic foundations that structure what it means to be human and imagining otherwise possibilities for Black being therein. He is also concerned with how theories of Blackness might reconfigure understandings of racialized stress and trauma, qualitative inquiry, critical masculinities, and curriculum and pedagogy. Dr. Okello is a sought-after speaker and consultant; he has delivered over 150 invited keynotes/talks/performances across the United States and internationally. Among other early career awards, he received the 2022 Council on Ethnic Participation (CEP) Mildred Garcia Award for Exemplary Scholarship by the Association for the Study of Higher Education, and he was named a 2022 Emerging Scholar by the American College Personnel Association. Dr. Okello is an assistant professor of higher education at Penn State University, where he is a research associate at the Center for the Study of Higher Education.
- To register for the session, go here.
Discussion Series: Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking The Stress Cycle
Session 1: Tuesday, March 21st, 4:30 – 5:15pm | Belk Pavilion, Rm 208
Session 2: Tuesday, April 20th, 4:15 – 5:15pm* New Time | Belk Pavilion, Rm 208
Burnout happens to everyone at some point or another, and results from repeated or prolonged emotional, mental, physical, and work-related stress. Faculty burnout exacerbated by pandemic-related stressors affect not only their mental well-being and classroom instruction but also overall health.
Join Elon’s Faculty Fellow for Wellness and Well-being (Dr. Svetlana Nepocatych) in a guided book discussion where we will read “Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking The Stress Cycle” by Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski, engage in dialogue focusing on experiences of burnout, stress, strategies, connection and growth, and create a space where you can meet new people on campus.
- Registration closed.
Past Fall 2022 Events
September 2022
Resisting the Student Disengagement Trend
Tuesday, 9/13, 12:30-1:45 pm, Moseley 215
In this interactive workshop, facilitated by Olivia Chopin, CATL Associate Director & Associate Professor of French, we will discuss how the context of the past two years has created challenges for engaging students in the classroom–from a hesitancy to speak up in discussion to a tendency to fall behind in assignments. Together, we’ll discuss strategies for motivating our students to re-engage with our courses and their classmates. Lunch will be provided for those who pre-register.
Reading Group: You Are Your Best Thing: Vulnerability, Shame, Resilience, and the Black Experience
Wednesdays, 9/21 & 10/19, 4:15-5:15 PM, Belk Pavilion 200
How are BIPOC students navigating these highly tenuous racial times? How might their responses to racialized trauma show up in academic spaces? The edited collection, You are Your Best Thing (2021), explores the lived experiences of BIPOC folx and their relationships with vulnerability, shame, and resilience. This collection, edited by activist Tarana Burke and researcher Brene’ Brown provides stories that “give our humanity breathing room” and helps validate the diverse responses to racialized trauma. Please join us to discuss how the stories within this text can help faculty and staff better understand the lived experiences of our BIPOC students.
This two-part discussion, facilitated by Vanessa Drew-Branch, CATL Pedagogy Fellow & Associate Professor of Human Service Studies, is intended for those who have read the book or listened to the “Unlocking Us” podcast episode with Tarana Burke & Jason Renolds. The discussion will assist instructors and staff as we consider ways to support our students as they navigate their ever-changing world and the collegiate experience.
Using SoTL to explore student learning in your course
Wednesday, 9/28, 12:30 – 1:45 pm, Belk Pavilion 200
Are you curious about the student experience in your course? Are you trying a new teaching approach or assessment this term and want to know how it is impacting student learning? Integrating the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) into your teaching practice can offer you an opportunity to examine the impact and effectiveness of your pedagogical choices. Whether you’re new to or experienced with SoTL, join us for a session where we will share our questions about student learning and explore what data is available for us to better understand the effectiveness of our teaching practice.
Prior to attending, participants should take time to reflect on their own courses and any curiosities they’ve uncovered while teaching as we will be drafting our own questions and identifying forms of evidence to explore during the SoTL process.
October 2022
Co-sponsored Reading Group: What Teaching Looks Like: Higher Education through Photographs
Tuesday 18, 4:15-5:00 PM
What Teaching Looks Like (Horri & Springborg, 2022; download and read for free) delves into higher education—the challenges faced by students, faculty, staff, and administrators alike from all variety of institution types and across campus sectors—in a way that has not been done before.
By weaving together a unique collection of documentary photographs of modern teaching and learning at US colleges and universities with research-based discussion of the state of engaged learning, the book teaches readers to think through and with photographs in new ways, offering insights and perspectives with the potential to change teaching, administrative, and support practices for the better. The project not only reflects the state of how US institutions educate the next generation of thinkers and innovators, it informs what we could aspire to do as educators and reveals experiences and perspectives of today’s students in ways that are only accessible through photographs.
This reading group is co-sponsored by the Center for Engaged Learning (CEL) and the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning (CATL). The book is part of the Center for Engaged Learning’s Open Access series. For more information about the series and other resources, visit CEL’s webpage.
Co-sponsored Workshop: Inclusive Excellence in the Classroom: A Conversation about Pronouns and Gender
Wednesday, October 19th, 12:30 – 1:45pm, McEwen Engagement Room
Join Gender & LGBTQIA Center staff on International Pronouns Day to discover strategies for consistently affirming students of all genders, facilitating conversations about cisnormativity among your students, and promoting gender equity within your teaching. This discussion-based session will focus on learning about pronouns (including neopronouns), understanding the impact of correctly gendering and misgendering students, and creating tangible approaches that you can integrate into your classrooms and beyond.
November 2022
Speed Teaching Session: Pushing the boundaries of your classROOM
Monday, November 7, 12:30 – 1:45pm, Martin Outdoor Classroom
Teaching in alternative spaces can include holding class in an informal learning space like a park or outside under the oaks, or it can involve students engaging in active learning in environments specifically designed to provide experience in that location, like Loy Farms or any of the new outdoor classrooms around campus. Regardless of what you teach, where you teach can have a variety of impacts on the student learning experience. In this speed-teaching session we will learn from Elon colleagues about how they have embraced and utilized alternative outdoor spaces for their classrooms and share how you might expand your classroom to the outdoors and beyond.
Preparing to teach Winter Term
Monday, November 14, 4:00 – 5:15pm, Belk Pavilion 208
The format of Winter Term presents challenges and opportunities for both instructors and students. Whether you’re teaching a short-term intensive course for the first time or are considering how to improve your course, jump-start your thinking by talking with colleagues about how they keep their students engaged, design a coherent term, find time to assess student work, and otherwise leverage the possibilities for meaningful learning.
Past Winter/Spring 2023 Events
January 2023
Panel Discussion (Online): Refocusing Your Teaching After a Challenging Term
Tuesday, January 10th, 12:15 – 1:15pm | Zoom
Panelists:
Svetlana Nepocatych (Associate Professor of Exercise Science)
William Schreiber (Assistant Professor of Psychology)
Barjinder Singh (Associate Professor of Management)
Teaching can be a vulnerable process, where we open ourselves, our beliefs, and our thinking to others in a public way. Within that process, we often experience a range of feedback on how our work is going. This feedback can be informal and formal and arise from students, our colleagues, or our own reflections. But what happens when this feedback forces us to re-examine or completely re-think what or how we are teaching? Join us for a panel discussion where colleagues will share their own stories of receiving critical feedback and consider how we can sit with the discomfort of critical feedback, and strategies for moving forward in our teaching.
Workshop: Course Syllabus Reboot
Thursday, January 26th , 9:00am – 12:00pm | Belk Pavilion 208
Get a jump start on the spring semester with a course syllabus makeover. This interactive workshop will offer strategies for re-tooling your syllabus for the spring semester. We will collaboratively explore ways to design a syllabus that maximizes the teaching and learning experience for faculty and students alike. Whether you are creating a course from scratch or revamping an old one, we will discuss tips for designing an engaging syllabus and provide plenty of worktime, space, and food along the way.
February 2023
Workshop: The wave of Artificial Intelligence in HigherEd
Thursday, February 16th, 12:30 – 1:30pm | Zoom
You’re probably wondering if we typed this description ourselves or if we used ChatGPT? This might be the same question you’re asking yourself as you read student work this term. Join Teaching and Learning Technologies, Belk Library, the Writing Across the University, and the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning and together we will explore what ChatGPT is, how it functions, and how we might use this tool to support learning.
Speed Teaching: Teaching with Podcasts
Monday, February 27th, 4:00 – 5:15pm | Zoom
In an age of multimedia consumption and production and different ways of interacting with knowledge, this Speed Teaching session will showcase faculty who use podcasts in their teaching. How can podcasts provide a supplement to course readings and offer different ways of engaging students? How can students showcase their own learning by producing podcasts? If you’re looking to shake up the monotony of traditional reading and writing assignments, join us to learn more about how podcasts can promote student learning.
March 2023
Listening then Libations : A Podcast Discussion Group on “Rigor”
Friday, March 31st, 4:00 – 5:15pm
Given the debates on the word “rigor” that have appeared in the Chronicle and Inside Higher Ed over the past year, what do we really mean by this potentially problematic but also enticing word? Participants will listen to podcasts from the series “Dead Ideas in Teaching and Learning” and discuss and debate what we really mean when we talk about rigor. Please listen to Season 5, Episode 2: “Rigor as Inclusive Practice” with Jamiella Brooks and Julie McGurk, and then pick another episode from the series that interests you: 3. “Rigor as Engagement;” 4. “Rigor as Liberation;” 5. “Rigor as Equity;” 6. “Rigor as Skill Building;” 7. “Rigor as Assessment from the Student Point of View.” We’ll debrief and debate and decide how to reclaim and reframe rigor for ourselves.
Past Events:
To view more of our CATL events, see below for previous years.