2024 Teaching & Learning Symposium Showcase
Visit the UW Teaching & Learning Symposium digital showcase to explore the diverse array of reflective, evidence-based teaching projects produced by UW faculty, staff educators, and graduate instructors. The Showcase highlights the remarkable pedagogical innovation and creativity happening across UW’s three campuses. Projects showcased include a professor who used poetry in her nursing course and a computer engineering team who examined digital disparities in engineering education.
Theme
This year’s Symposium focused on the theme of “Empowering students.” The theme acknowledges that our classrooms, like the world around us, are filled with power dynamics – novice/expert, student/instructor, listener/doer, marginalized/privileged. How does or should power shape learning environments? What are ways to acknowledge, redistribute, and responsibly use power in the classroom? How can our teaching practices empower students?
Keynote address and panel: “Empowering students through our teaching”
Tuesday, April 16, 2024 | 1:00-2:30 pm | Walker Ames Room KNE 225 (Zoom option available)
The event will begin with a keynote address by Professor Cate Denial, immediately followed by a panel discussion with UW faculty about how to empower students through our teaching practices. Register today.
Address by Cate Denial, Knox College
What does it mean to “empower” students? What kinds of power are routinely denied to them, or used to limit their aspirations? What does it mean to meaningfully share power with our students? Empowering students involves attending to the issues of justice and injustice at work in their lives, believing them when they tell us about their experiences of higher ed, and believing in them as co-creators of our classroom communities. Professor Denial approaches these issues by prioritizing kindness in her teaching – a kindness that transcends the ‘let’s get along’ dictates of being nice.
Cate Denial is the Bright Distinguished Professor of American History and Director of the Bright Institute at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois and author of the forthcoming book, A Pedagogy of Kindness (2024). A Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians, she is the winner of the American Historical Association’s 2018 Eugene Asher Distinguished Teaching Award and consults on pedagogy in the U.S., U.K., and Australia.
Panel of UW Educators
Directly after Professor Denial’s address, a panel of UW educators will engage in a discussion with the speaker about the power dynamics in their classrooms and how their teaching empowers students, followed by a Q&A with the audience.
- Kevin Lin – Assistant Teaching Professor (Computer Science), UW’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering
- Maya Smith – Associate Dean for Equity, Justice and Inclusion and Associate Professor (French), UW’s College of Arts and Sciences
- Rachel Song – doctoral student (Social Psychology), UW’s College of Arts and Sciences
Questions?
Please email teaching@uw.edu.