Moderated by Dr. Shelly Clevenger

PART 1

Ka’Lyn Coghill, Virginia Commonwealth University

 Creative Ways to Engage Your Syllabus using Black Feminist Texts, Media, and Music 

 Black Feminist texts, media, and music are great ways to engage your students. By using these texts and different mediums you will tap into all learning styles and create a syllabus that is relatable to your students.  This presentation will show participants different ways that they can incorporate these into their classes.

Trauma-Informed Course Design: Plan Your Course and Create a Visual Syllabus with Principles from Psychotherapy and Graphic Design

Tsvetina Kamenova. University of Massachusetts Lowell

The structure of a course sets the stage for students’ experience and engagement throughout the semester. A clear and effectively communicated course structure can save time and decrease frustration for both students and instructors while leaving space for more meaningful engagement with the material. In this workshop, we will look at trauma-informed principles applicable to course structure that aim to create this clarity about expectations and set the stage for learning by promoting psychological safety in the classroom. We will then see examples of syllabi that use visual design principles to help communicate course expectations. Participants will have a chance to interact as a group and experience how these ideas can be used with a variety of teaching styles and philosophies. Upon completion of the workshop, an editable syllabus template will be sent to each participant.

Transformative Justice through Experiential Learning: Lessons Learned from a Pen Paling Project with Incarcerated Individuals

Daniela Jauk (University of Akron) & Azzurra Crispino (Texas A&M University)

This workshop is a space to share experiential learning strategies in the criminal justice classroom. We are kicking off the workshop with a presentation about a collaborative Online Service Learning project for prisoner support through penpaling we have carried out with 80 students in two classes in 2021. We present logistics, challenges, and findings from a preliminary evaluation of the project, but are also interested to learn how YOU engage and inspire your students with hands-on assignments for transformative justice, prison abolition, and anti-carceral feminisms.

PART II

Sarah E Murray, Roanoke College

Culturally Responsive Teaching at Hispanic-Serving Institutions

Culturally Responsive Teaching describes the recognition and constructive use of students’ unique cultural learnings and perspectives in order to connect previous knowledge to new classroom concepts and theories (Hammond 2014). This approach is vital when teaching a racially and ethnically diverse student body, such as those found at federally designated Hispanic-Serving Institutions. This interactive session will help participants identify their own cultural reference point and provide tools to widen one’s cultural aperture in order to improve the classroom environment and teaching overall.

Katie Ratajczak, Sam Houston State University

Creating Opportunities for Agentic Learning

Providing opportunities for choice in the classroom can encourage student engagement with course materials, particularly for students who may struggle with traditional course structures. Multiple avenues for providing student’s agency in their learning will be discussed, including in individuals’ assignments and entire course set-up

Joan Antunes, Towson University

Managing difficult conversations

This part of the workshop will discuss teaching for change. Specifically, the idea that when discussing charged topics like immigrants and CJ, systemic racism, the policing of Black and Brown bodies, for example, that frequently facts alone don’t seem to matter. We can provide data, statistics etc. but internal change, educational growth is going to occur slowly. So how do we, as educators, promote this growth, remaining open (not necessarily impartial) but permitting discourse and more importantly facilitating difficult conversations that can be triggering? How do we, in effect, create an environment that is cohesive, honest and fosters learning starting at different baselines? Strategies on how to manage difficult conversations about heated topics will be presented. Specifically, how to foster positive and meaningful discourse when opinions are going to vary and background, culture, SES and other characteristics may have already shaped perspectives.

Getting Reel: Using Films for Teaching Theory in Criminology

Rebecca L. Morrow, Ph.D., Assistant Professor in Criminal Justice at Tarleton State University

In this workshop, Dr. Morrow will share findings from her Scholarship on Teaching and Learning project which used movies to teach and apply criminological theory and policy.  Utilizing Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development (1978), this study compared an in-person, synchronous section with an asynchronous, fully-online section to measure confidence and learning and application of criminological theories.  By combining using a wiki format along with peer review, students were able to focus on movies (of their choice) to experiment with how to apply theory and policy.   This session will consist of a hands-on workshop for how to apply this format in classes and a discussion of the findings from the study.