Peer Learning Community (PLC) Cohorts - Center for the Advancement of Teaching

Interdisciplinary Cohort #1 (August 10th – August 21st)

Lauren Miller
Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish

Carmen Pérez-Muñoz
Assistant Teaching Professor of Spanish

Interdisciplinary cohort 1 will run from August 10-14 and 17-21, with one, one-hour Zoom meeting each day. Specific topics covered will be guided by member interests, but we hope to work on projects that are directly applicable to faculty members’ fall courses given our later dates. We are especially interested in mastering Canvas, creating online community, Zoom, and video creation. We also hope that these dates will allow our community to stay in touch and support each other as classes begin and throughout online teaching.

Interdisciplinary Cohort #2 (August 10th – August 21st)

Nikki Elston
Assistant Teaching Professor of Counseling

This peer learning community will run the week of August 10-14 and August 17 -21, with one, one-hour meeting each day. Our interdisciplinary group will allow us to hear new ideas and activities from a variety of departments. In this group we will focus on how to build community online, talk about a variety of methods to facilitate online learning, do some hands-on course development in Canvas, and share our excitement, fears, doubts, and worries about this change in course delivery. And last, but not least, (just in case you weren’t sold on the first part) maybe you’ll meet some new colleagues and develop an interdisciplinary partnership that changes your world.

Interdisciplinary Cohort #3 (July 27th – August 7th)

Stavroula Glezakos
Associate Professor of Philosophy

This peer learning community will meet M-F for an hour each day during the two weeks. During the first week, we will discuss articles about online teaching, review the 2020 Spring survey feedback from WFU students and faculty, and look at some examples of lectures and course materials. During week two the focus will be on developing and getting feedback from other group members on our course materials.

We will make use of tools like Zoom, Canvas, hypothesis, and Google Docs (and can introduce others if faculty would like to try them out or share them) so that we can practice and learn together.

My aim is to give us all an opportunity to share successes, challenges, and ideas, and to support each other as we prepare to head into this unusual teaching year.

Interdisciplinary Cohort #4 (July 13th – August 14th)

Wake Forest professor David Phillips poses for a photo on Tuesday, April 12, 2011. Phillips teaches East Asian Languages and is a director of the new Humanities Institute.

David Phillips
Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities

Our interdisciplinary peer community will start with introductory sessions focusing on pedagogy approaches to online course design. We will transition to workshops focused on topics customized to the interdisciplinary and discipline-specific needs of our learning community, which currently includes faculty from the Documentary Film Program, Interdisciplinary Humanities, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Our last unit will explore two topic areas: first, the interplay between pedagogy and online technologies and platforms, and second, strategies for assessment including qualitative and quantitative assessment strategies.

Learning community members will be constructing a shared knowledge base in Google Drive during our three-week session and sharing content they’ve posted to their Canvas course sites. Our peer learning community sessions will be divided into three modules:

Module 1: Online Course Design and Pedagogical Strategies
Module 2. Online Opportunities and Resources in Interdisciplinary and Discipline-specific Course Design
Module 3. Practicum in Building Online curriculum, Applying Technology and Assessment

Interdisciplinary STEM Cohort (July 27th – July 31st; August 10th – August 14th)

Lucy D’Agostino McGowan
Assistant Professor of Statistics

My learning community is STEM focused. My background is in biostatistics and the participants are all from the Biology and Chemistry departments. The first week will be “learning heavy” – we will spend 17 hours “learning / reading” and 3 hours in synchronous discussions about the content. The second week will be “design heavy” – we will spend 17 hours designing our courses based on what we have learned in the first week and 3 hours discussing the process / progress in synchronous discussions.

Interdisciplinary ZSR Cohort (July 13th – August 14th)

Amanda Kaufman
Learning & Instructional Services Librarian

Summer Krstevska
Research & Instruction Librarian

This group is structured using a 5-week/8~ hours per week model and is especially suited for faculty who might find it difficult to commit to 40 hours over a 1-2 week period. The current cohort consists primarily of ZSR Librarians. We plan on having online catch-ups/work aheads for anyone that needs to miss a week for vacations.

We plan on 2~ synchronous sessions per week for 1-1.5 hours. The rest will be asynchronous work and time for you to work on your own course. Topics covered will include: differences between online and face to face and strategies to make the transition; strategies for student engagement; building community; backwards design and assessment; choosing technology; trauma informed pedagogy; Universal Design for Learning and other strategies for equity, accessibility, and inclusion; and 1 on 1 workshopping with cohort leaders

We are going to run July 13th-August 14th. Synchronous sessions are being held on:

Antiracist Teaching Across the Disciplines in an Online Setting (July 13th – 31st)

Ben Keating
Assistant Teaching Professor of Writing

Wake Forest associate dean and professor of English Erica Still poses in her office in Reynolda Hall on Wednesday, October 30, 2019.

Erica Still
Associate Dean for Faculty Recruitment, Diversity, and Inclusion;
Associate Professor of English

In this collaborative learning community, we begin with a grounding in antiracist pedagogy in order to take a critical approach to teaching. We proceed from the notion that just as ideologies and biases around social identity inform in-person classes, they operate in online teaching and learning spaces as well. It is our job to locate, analyze, and resist such exclusionary and discriminatory assumptions and practices, and antiracist teaching is a way to do that work. We conceive of antiracist teaching as a process that demands ongoing adjustment based on local and disciplinary contexts. We invite you to join us as we design online/blended curricula that accounts for such dynamics around privilege and racism in higher education. In the first week we’ll consider definitions of antiracist pedagogy and its role in various disciplinary spaces. The second week we’ll consider the intersections between antiracist pedagogies and best practices in online teaching, and we’ll finish with a third week focused on community-building from an equity-minded perspective.

We will spend 10 hours in synchronous sessions over the three weeks: 3 in the first week (July 13-17), 4 in the second week (July 20-24), and 3 in the last week (July 27-31). The specific meeting times will be determined based on participant availability.

Intersectional Online Pedagogy (July 20th – August 7th)

Kristina Gupta
Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

This interdisciplinary peer-to-peer learning community will offer two components: 1) an introduction to the nuts and bolts of online teaching for members who need it; 2) a critical examination from an intersectional perspective of issues of equity and justice in regards to online teaching, with a focus on the context of COVID-19, the economic recession, and nationwide protests against police violence. Topics to be covered in the first component include: best practices for online teaching, choosing the right technology, and student engagement and community building in online teaching. Topics to be covered in the second component include: accessibility, gender and sexuality online, racial justice in online teaching, and taking care of ourselves and our students during COVID-19. All interested in social justice and online teaching are welcome.

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