The Ph.D. Program in History

at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York

GC Events

November 15 TLC: Socially Conscious Pedagogy and Hashtag Syllabi

Socially Conscious Pedagogy and Hashtag Syllabi
Thursday, November 15th
Room 3207
4:15-6:15pm

Hashtag syllabi have become a popular and public means of organizing and educating around complex social issues as they arise and in their immediate aftermath. Most of these projects result in lists of articles, books, films, television shows, and other texts curated to help a public learn more about a topic or theme at the heart of a political or cultural event. They are often crowd-sourced by scholars, activists, educators, and artists in response to events that urgently require new knowledge to understand, facilitate better conversations and deeper thinking, or better inform political action. Model hashtag syllabi include #Fergusonsyllabus, #Standing Rock Syllabus, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, The 2017 Women’s March, Beyonce’s Lemonade, Solange’s A Seat at the Table.

While the work of creating these syllabi has increased the circulation of important and relevant resources, we wonder how the thinking at the heart of these projects might be even better situated and used in our teaching. How might looking at the how these syllabi are constructed help us critically engage with the difficult topics of our time? How might this work become more usable in research and teaching across CUNY?

Building upon and connecting to last year’s programming on developing a socially conscious pedagogy, which Teaching and Learning Center Fellow Sakina Laksimi-Morrow has written about here, the TLC invites guests to join us on November 15th to explore how hashtag syllabi help can educators think about the role of activism in their work. We’ll discuss how and why hashtag syllabi emerge, what they’ve done well and not so well, and how we might make the thinking that’s gone into creating them more visible and usable in our teaching during these challenging times.

Please RSVP for this event at http://cuny.is/tlc-registration.