Yale Center for Teaching and Learning

Learning Community: Teaching as Embodied Practice ( 3 of 4)

Event Series 

Audience 

Graduate & Professional Students, Postdoctoral Fellows

Event Time 

Thursday, April 20, 2023 - 1:30pm to 3:00pm

Location of Event: 

Online via Zoom

Event Description 

When developing our teaching practices, it is all-too-easy to treat our instruction as strictly an abstract and intellectual endeavor. But it is not some abstract entity that teaches or that learns–it’s us and our students. Teaching is an embodied practice with many stakeholders and one that pulls from the limited time and resources our finite selves have to offer. We move through pedagogical spaces in ways that cannot be decoupled from aspects of our embodied selves which invariably shape our experiences and perspectives. Race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and disability status all influence how we mold pedagogical spaces and, in turn, how they mold us. This learning community is a space for instructors from any discipline to reflect on pedagogical questions emerging from a serious and deliberate consideration of what it means to be an embodied self. How do my experiences shape the particular commitments I bring to and challenges I encounter as a teacher? How and to what extent should consideration of the embodied self change my teaching practices? Sessions, while anchored by shared short readings and prompts, will communally balance open-ended reflection with discussion of concrete practices to bring back to the classroom and integrate into our teaching practices. Contact Chelsea Connelly (chelsea.connelly@yale.edu) or Nick Fisk (jeffrey.fisk@yale.edu) with questions.

Note: this learning community will meet over Zoom.

This group counts as a learning community for the Certificate of College Teaching Preparation, and all graduate/professional students and postdoctoral fellows are welcome to join.