Synchronous Sessions

For the 2021 Teaching Community Conference, some of the presentations will be live sessions. To receive a link to attend these sessions please register for the sessions you wish to attend using the links provided. 

Integrating Theatre in French Language and Literature Class - Dr. Sanda Badescu

In searching for new ideas and approaches of how to involve students in the process of learning, theatre can be a very useful and powerful tool. Theatre play can be used in a language class or in a literature class, and the purpose is that students read, analyze and if possible, memorize lines in a second language, plus interacting with each other. This technique is a way of understanding a character, a social context of the play and then, which lay the ground for a possible written essay or an oral presentation. The method can be applied in in-person classes and cand be adapted to online teaching as well. I would like to focus on a specific course, French theatre of the 18th century, and how students can use their reading and speaking skills to develop a deeper knowledge of the play and of the language through theatre playing in class.

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“A Fireside Chat”: Rethinking Care and Community - Dr. Ann Braithwaite, Dr. Andrew Zinck, Dr. Greg Doran, and Dr. Shannon Murray

Since summer 2020, when we learned we were going remote for the 2020-21 academic year, four of us have met outdoors every few weeks (sometimes huddled around a fire pit for warmth) to talk about what and how we’re doing, both in our teaching and more generally. More than a just forum to share online teaching tips, however, this group quickly became an unexpected community—one that not only offered us a way out of the house, but that became a space of deep reflection about the ways in which our ideas about care and community were changing in their meaning and importance for all of us—in our “classrooms,” with students, with colleagues, and in thinking about teaching and learning more generally. This roundtable discussion will explore how these terms circulate now, for us, in these many registers. To say we’ve been rethinking care and community is not to suggest that everything we’ve done has been “successful”; indeed, all of us who’ve prided ourselves on our classroom successes over the years have faced numerous “failures” this year. But questions we want to explore further include: Just what do these words mean—and don’t mean? How have we tried to enact them and with what results? How has our little community enabled us to practice other forms of community and care? What will we bring with us into next year and a return to face-to-face teaching? Our aim is not to suggest or mandate what care and community must look like or how it must be practiced. Rather, we ask what new avenues are revealed by rethinking terms we’ve previously taken for granted, and what we will do with them now.

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