Dimensions of Culture
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- Learning / Teaching for Justice Conference
In celebration of Thurgood Marshall College’s 50th Anniversary, the Dimensions of Culture Program hosted a conference in Spring Quarter 2021 that explored learning and teaching for justice in higher education. We ultimately asked: what does just learning and teaching look like in and beyond the classroom?
In centering this question of learning for justice especially beyond the classroom, the organizing committee was proud to announce poet and author Saeed Jones as the conference’s keynote speaker. Saeed Jones is the author of the memoir How We Fight for Our Lives, winner of the 2019 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction, and the poetry collection Prelude to Bruise, winner of the 2015 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry and the 2015 Stonewall Book Award/Barbara Gittings Literature Award. Saeed Jones’s writings help us consider how learning for justice emerges from our complex and intersecting lived experiences.
We intended for this conference to be active, interactive, and inclusive—a space for educators to be students, and for students to educate, recognizing that “teaching” is not done just by academics for students in lecture halls but occurs in residential halls/apartments, academic advising sessions, student organizations, campus centers, and other formal and informal learning communities across the university, and that educators do, and must, learn from their students.
The conference prioritized practical and interactive sessions that shared strategies and practices for cultivating equity, inclusion, and anti-racism throughout higher education, from the perspective of students, educators, and administrators across the disciplines. To create these transformational encounters, we selected active learning sessions—not professors reading papers from the lectern or panelists talking past each other, but rather sessions that engaged with an audience and drew out varied perspectives.
To that end, conference sessions included student voices—either as presentation participants or through student panels.
In convening the Learning/Teaching for Justice conference, we were proud to host over thirty interactive sessions that engaged with but were not limited to the following themes and questions:
This program is supported in part by a co-sponsorship from the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion. Any views or opinions expressed in this program are solely those of the speaker(s) and/or organizer(s) and do not necessarily represent those of the Office of the Vice Chancellor.
The Office of the Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs is proud to co-sponsor this Thurgood Marshall College Program.
We would like to thank The Office of the Executive Vice Chancellor for Undergraduate Education and The Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Education for their support for this Conference.
Please send questions to docinfo@ucsd.edu.