Presentation Topics

Thinking with the term “flash fiction,” I call my endeavor “Flash Humanities” because my goal is cover relevant topics in a short amount of time, trying to condense a course-worth of ideas and materials into an hour, half-day, whole-day professional development workshop or interactive presentations. The topics and concepts are rooted in the humanities (particularly critical theory) and dialogue with current (and hopefully relevant) topics and issues in education. Below are titles and summaries of available active learning sessions.

Titles:

        1. "Humanizing the Classroom: Building Community Inside and Outside the Classroom"

        2. "Precarity, Affect, and Empathy: Understanding Student Needs" 

        3. "Narrativizing the Self: Representation, Identity and Language"

        4. "Leading from the Side: Vertical versus Horizontal Leadership Strategies"

        5. "Positionality: Thinking Where I’m at and Thinking Where My Students are at"

        6. "Narrativizing the Self: Representation, Identity and Language"

        7. "Normalizing Power and Performance in Public Education" 

Summaries:

"Humanizing the Classroom: Building Community Inside and Outside the Classroom"

Teachers are reminded to include daily lesson objectives in class. In many schools, stating those objectives at the beginning of the class are a requirement. While this is an important helping students be aware of and work towards the learning targets, how many of those objectives include a reference to building a sense of community in the classroom? This session covers the importance of building a positive learning community rooted in relationships, emphasizing practices that foment a sense of community among the students and educators. Using topics from the humanities, like the self and the other, positionality (i.e. where each person is at and comes from), and empathy as a springboard, the objective is to leave understanding how small but iterative actions may help strengthen community, an integral part to the learning process.

"Precarity, Affect, and Empathy: Understanding Student Needs" 

Social and emotion well-being is a term that is becoming more and more common in the educational setting. On one hand, we have heard terms like Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs where there is a certain threshold that must be met to help students exceed. However, students and families may not have those certain needs met. On the other hand, Bloom's Taxonomy becomes an educative model that guide our instruction. Nonetheless, Bloom's taxonomy presupposes that the certain threshold in Maslow's hierarchy of needs is met or that at least, a particular social-emotional one. This session covers how to help students socially and emotionally using the concepts of precarity, vulnerability, affect and empathy to institute small teaching strategies and use cognitive, affective and emotional frameworks to help support students, their families (and your colleagues). 

"Leading from the Side: Vertical versus Horizontal Leadership Strategies"

 How do you see yourself in the school? Are you a teacher? Are you an administrator? Are you a staff member? How do you think about your relationship with others in the building, with colleagues, with your students, with your staff? In this session, we will cover the concepts of horizontal and vertical thinking. Horizontal thinking goes beyond the top-down approach that thinking vertically often entails. Rather than thinking from a framework of difference and often, hierarchy, that vertical thinking presupposes, the objective of this session is to examine the ways in which leadership in the classroom and in the school is based in relationships rooted in mutual respect and representation, as well as recognition of the collective efforts that foster student success. 

"Positionality: Thinking Where I’m at and Thinking Where My Students are at"

"Meeting students where they are at" is a phrase that teachers and administrators may use or hear within the educational setting. What exactly does that mean? In education, this may be differentiation of instruction to meet each individual learner's need. From a theoretical framework, this phrase relates to the concept of positionality, a term that calls attention to our individual and unique presence, place and intervention in our realities. Recognizing one own's positionality can be one of the first steps in "meeting students where they are at." This session uses the concept of positionality to formulate an ethical stance on how educators meet students at their level while, at the same time, considering their own position, that is, recognizing how their experiences, education and identity enters into the equation. 

"Narrativizing the Self: Representation, Identity and Language"

Career centers on college campuses will sometimes talk about your personal branding, that is, what what you want potential employers to know about you. In other words, what the college career center staff is saying is: what is your narrative? This is where literature in dialogue with critical theory can help dig deeper into questions of the construction of identity, representation and language. In this session, I discuss how narratives shape, construct and represent us--particularly in the context of teachers, administrators, staff, students, and parents. To do so, I interweave the concepts of subjectivity (i.e. our identities), narrativity, discursivity, semiotics (language and its meaning) with issues relevant to public education. My intended objective is to have you leave understanding how narratives influence daily practices and understandings in the classroom, as well as be familiar with teaching and behavior management strategies that incorporate narrative. 

"Normalizing Power and Performance in Public Education" 

In one of my classes I pose the question to my students, who has more power in shaping individuals, the college professor or first-grade teacher (my wife is a first-grade teacher). This may be a false dichotomy, but I argue to my students that the first grade teacher has more power in shaping who students are. Teachers have the important role of teaching children to be students and learners. Looking at it from another perspective, the teachers as directors are teaching their students how to act. Think "I do, We do, You do." The classroom is the stage, or the space of the performative. Generally when we think of performance with regards to education, we are thinking about standardized testing and student achievement. However, in this session, using a framework of performativity and performative studies, this session's goal is to have educators understand where the performative resides in the educative process and leave understanding how performance can help create an environment conducive to learning and student success.