Breaking the Ice: Using the Cephalonian Method to Create Inclusive Learning

Many educators’ goal is to create an inclusive atmosphere of inquiry that provides an avenue for all voices. This session presents the Cephalonian Method as an active learning technique that can help educators and presenters create learning experiences that are inclusive, stimulating, and engaging.

Join us for an asynchronous discussion to learn about the Cephalonian Method, how it was used to discuss scholarship as a form of communication and information privilege, and review the student experience with this active learning technique.

Stigma in Basic Needs

Obstacles to achieving basic needs impact a large portion of UCSD students. This presentations seeks to address these stigmas, provide solutions, and educate the community on the resources UCSD offers. Tackling food insecurity, housing insecurity, and achieving financial wellness are central to this mission.

Rest as Resistance: A Workshop on Self and Communal Care

'Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.' Audre Lorde. In this session, participants will explore how systems of power and privilege are enabled through a toxic grind-and-hustle culture, exacerbating the burnout and fatigue that already exist in our marginalized communities. Building on the ideas of “Rest as Resistance,” three AAPI women unpack how self and communal care can be used as a form of protest to dismantle systemic inequities and oppression.

Love and Justice, or How To Keep a “Beautiful Orange Fruit” from “Shriveling Up”

In this session, presenters will examine how poetry encourages us to be advocates for social justice by teaching us to listen better, to accept difference, and to understand others’ experiences. More specifically, presenters will discuss their educational strategies and learning outcomes for a student-driven poetry reading group, which meets weekly in Spring 2021, that explores how we care for ourselves and our peers while confronting systems of oppression. Students participating in the reading group will then share their experiences directly, and presenters will solicit feedback or ideas for future iterations from attendees.

Can Students Enact Change on Campus? A discuss among student leaders, professors, and administration on general education requirements

In this session you will hear from Ria Coen Gilbert on her research analyzing the discrepancies between general education requirements among the seven college and how they affect students' four-year graduation rates, their student debt, and time to career. Following the presentation, everyone will receive a map of avenues to create change on campus and will evaluate the best approach to the general education requirement injustice. Overall, students and administration will have the chance to discuss the issues of hierarchy and bureaucracy that often prevent students from enacting change on campus, and try to work together to find a solution.

Imagining Trans-Affirming Higher Education

We will communally produce knowledge through imagining what trans-affirming higher education has/does/can look like. This collaboration will discuss justice-oriented teaching and learning from the perspective of educators and students. We each bring individual expertise and lived experiences to share. As a learning space, we’ll collectively create trans-affirming educational resources. As a community space, we intend folks to take away affirmation, compassion, and confidence allowing them to continue fighting gender-oppressive systems independently and in community towards liberatory justice. While not exclusively an affinity space, there will be space for trans participants to create their own breakout room for safety and healing.

Growing Change: Learning & Teaching for Justice Through an Ecology Lens

This workshop will explore how lessons from ecology may be applied in spaces where teaching and learning occur. More specifically, we will examine how the connections between individual agents in natural ecosystems support the health and maintenance of the ecosystem as a whole. This workshop will encourage students to see their worlds as complex ecological landscapes where strong connections and relationships can foster opportunities for all to succeed. Attendees can anticipate to be involved in many ways including opportunities to reflect on personal experiences, interact with others, and build a vision for what justice in education looks like now and in the future.

The Self-Actualized Black College Student

Navigating academia is fraught with pitfalls. Tapping into our internal wisdom and calling on the lessons of our ancestors, we will provide strategies for fellow Black college students to develop a personalized iterative framework to define their own success. The Self-Actualized Black College Student claims space, speaks up, excels, and is empowered to be their best self. This interactive workshop is designed for Black undergraduate and graduate students with the goal of inspiring them to employ creative and sustainable solutions to thrive.

All Our Relations: Building Alliances to Decolonize and Humanize Science at UCSD

This session aims to further collaborative relationships across the humanities and sciences at UCSD. This session discusses how the UCSD campus is a productive site to experiment with the following: how are decolonial and anticolonial methods of study and being in community imperative to ethical scientific practice? What exactly does decolonizing and humanizing science at UCSD mean, and what would this look like from a student-centered approach? By exploring these relationships across (counter)hegemonic ways of thinking, this session seeks to answer: what futures might emerge from research that requires us to be in community?

Indigenous Science Studies Working Bibliography

Antiracist Writing Instruction: Identifying Challenges; Brainstorming Solutions

In our presentation, members of the Analytical Writing Program and Dimensions of Culture Writing Program will lead a discussion of how these two programs are currently working towards establishing antiracist pedagogies in their classes. Participants will join break-out groups that will explore an assigned element of antiracist pedagogy. Participants will then rejoin the larger group to share their observations.

Latinx Student Experiences at UCSD

As part of the Mexican Migration Field Research Program with Professor Abigail Andrews, we are conducting a study investigating the experiences of Latinx students at UCSD. This research investigates belonging, institutional barriers to inclusion and better ways to serve Latinx students through in-depth interviews and surveys. Our student researchers will share research data, interview quotes, and prevalent themes arising through this work. We will work with the audience in two activities, one centered around gaining feedback and recommendations from the audience, and the other intended to think about individual and collective actions to support inclusion for Latinx students at UCSD.

Accessibility on My Mind: Inclusivity in Higher Ed during COVID-19

We will engage with disabled student narratives depicting challenges, obstacles, and hardships during COVID-19 online learning while using these narratives as a launchpad to collaboratively identify and/or develop solutions that can be implemented by faculty and staff “tomorrow”. This session aims at identifying access issues and developing simple yet practical solutions that can be implemented immediately.

Mentoring Students with Marx

Mentoring is one of the most effective methods instructors have at their disposal for addressing the specific types of barriers to learning and academic success created by the current public health crisis. This session turns to an unlikely source for a theory of mentoring focused on helping instructors develop the competencies they need to provide students from historically marginalized backgrounds the support they deserve: Marx’s 1844 Paris Manuscripts. Marx’s manuscripts will be used as a springboard for a conversation in which undergraduate student panelists will share their views on mentoring and their experience both being mentored and serving as peer-mentors.