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Graduate students Philippe Meister, Austin Harrington, and Colin Payton will be presenting their work at the colloquium.

Austin Harrington and Colin Payton

Stand Up! Social Justice Pedagogy and Education for an Engaged Citizenry

James Baldwin, in his “A Talk to Teachers,” said that while living in dangerous times, an educated citizen will not simply obey the rules of a society but choose to “look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions…” (2008, p. 18). Yet, as teachers, we witness education as an institutionalizing process; to our students, we the teachers are the orotund voices of an institutional machine. In this presentation, we offer a pedagogy where Baldwin’s choice remains for our students. Simply, we encourage students to democratically disobey against us. In these exercises, students are confronted with acts of educational/institutional injustice — inequality, racism, sexism — and are asked to speak out against authority. Our hope is that students gain the ability to think critically about injustice and then perform acts of empowering resistance within and beyond the classroom.

 

Philippe Meister

Conceptualizing a Student-Centered System to Support Student Development

Iowa State uses programs such as Mapworks from Skyfactor and EAB SSC to influence issues of student success. Iowa State also has various programs and initiatives such as the ISUComm ePortfolio system that influence the student experience. My presentation works at the intersection of student success and student experience by discussing a concept of a student-centered educational and professional development platform called CourseLink.

CourseLink is a proposed educational-professional development platform that generates a visual output that is a combination of a portfolio, transcript, and resume. Its novel contribution is the visual display of development experiences. It generates a node-network visualization that helps students visualize connections between their academic development experiences.

This presentation will present the recent efforts to conceptualize CourseLink and open up a discussion about how writing programs could be involved in building student-centered systems that help students receive academic guidance, develop a professional identity, and use their education to find a career.