Day 1
Live Sessions
The Anatomy of Learning: Leveraging Relationships to Inspire Engagement & Rigor*
with Michelle Pacansky-Brock
To navigate through these unknown and traumatic times, educators must be knowledgeable about how learning happens (and why it often does not). Recognizing the affective and cognitive dimensions of learning illuminates the need to understand our students as humans with rich, complicated stories and foster positive instructor-student relationships at a distance to ensure all students can achieve their full potential. This session illuminates how humanized online teaching provides a foundation of trust you can build upon to foster positive instructor-student relationships and inspire engagement and rigor.
Sending Cues of Trust Online*
with Maritez Apigo, Jennifer Ortiz, and Michelle Pacansky-Brock
What kind of cues does your online course send your students? Engage with this fireside chat to gain insights from CCC online educators about why cultivating trust in an online course is foundational to supporting our racially and culturally diverse students, especially in times of trauma. We will discuss strategies for building trust at a distance, as well as highlight deal-breakers that should be avoided.
Self-Guided Activities
Import the Getting to Know You Survey into Your Course
When you teach online, it is critical to develop strategies to discover the rich, diverse realities that each student brings to your course. Without doing so, you will lean more heavily on your implicit biases and make up what you don’t know about your students. Give your students the agency to speak for themselves and let you know how you can help them.
One helpful way to do this is the have your students complete a Getting to Know You survey in week one (and give them points for it – small successes like this are confidence builders). Be sure your students know their responses will come only to you and will be kept confidential. Assure them that you will use the information to support them throughout your course.
After your students complete the survey, review their responses. Enable the Notes column in the Canvas Gradebook and write brief notes about each student next to their name so you can refer to them throughout your course. The Notes column is only visible to you. This helps you identify your high opportunity learners and adapt your teaching to ensure they receive your high-touch communications.
View the following 2-minute video to learn how to import a sample Getting to Know You Survey from the Canvas Commons into your course.
Decentering Whiteness Reflections
Culture has visible characteristics (art, food, clothing) and invisible characteristics (values, beliefs). The more influenced you are by a culture, the more difficult it is to see. Often, culture is equated to the water in which a fish swims – it is always there but not perceived.
In order to decenter whiteness and cultivate inclusive learning experiences for our students, as well as organizational cultures that empower agency in all employees, a person must, first, be able to understand white supremacy culture. This reflective activity is designed to raise consciousness about the characteristics of white supremacy culture and antidotes that decenter them.
- Please download and read the article, white supremacy culture by Tema Okun, dismantlingracism.org.
- In a personal journal, please respond to the following prompts.
- Which characteristics of white supremacy culture can you see in yourself, your teaching/course, department, program, and institution?
- Which antidotes will you commit to living into in your teaching/course design and how will you do this?
- After privately responding to those questions, proceed to our digital bulletin board and share a general reflection about your takeaways from day one.