Make no mistake: the classroom is not apolitical. Whether consciously or not, we engage with political topics frequently in our teaching. Current events and the prevailing political climate in the United States compel us to confront these issues proactively. This workshop will look at how these external events affect our classrooms and how we might address them. Politics isn’t only what happens somewhere else, available for our critical scrutiny. We take a stand on political issues of class, race, and gender even when we teach seemingly innocuous subject matter. And there is also a politics of teaching itself — the unequal distributions of power and of educational and cultural capital, for example. This workshop will examine our responsibilities as teachers and how we can embrace the political character of educational contexts to improve our pedagogies.

All graduate students are welcome. This event grows out of concerns in the Education department and so may be most useful to students in related fields.

Counts toward the CETLI Teaching Certificate.