Since Fall 2017, our Center for Teaching Excellence and College of Liberal Arts have been hosting a series of workshops on inclusive pedagogy. The series focus on innovative and high-impact teaching practices to promote diversity and inclusion, increase student retention, as well as encourage student engagement in civil dialogue. Although the primary audience group of this series are faculty members, the workshops are open to graduate students as well. Since many doctoral students have the goal to work in a Tier-1 Research University upon graduation, this kind of events are actually very informational and eye-opening for those who rarely get to involve in the administrative-level pedagogical discussions on campus. In other words, this is kind of a peek into the faculty and administration-level concerns. Although we don’t usually talk about these issues as graduate students, many of us will face them in the near future. So I highly recommend these workshops for graduate students who want to know more about our university and just higher education in the United States in general.
 
The series continued for Spring 2018. Past workshops include:

• Facilitating hot topics in classroom: how to facilitate controversial topics and discussions to encourage civil dialogue and promotes learning;
• Creating inclusive classrooms for LGBTQ+ students: how to better support these students in classroom and how certain practices can impact learning;
• Aggie disability awareness: how to promote strong dialogue about issues and information surrounding disability, and how to work with individuals with disabilities;
• Enhancing first-generation student engagement and retention: how to design projects and curriculum to help build social capital and increase the retention of first-generation students;
• Designing International and Cultural Diversity (ICD) and Cultural Discourse (CD) courses: how to re-design existing ICD and/or design new CD courses that can align with the newly updated undergraduate core curriculum requirements.

 
For the current schedule, please see the Spring 2018 Faculty Programming Guide
 
Or you can contact Dr. Srivi Ramasubramanian (Associate Professor, Communication), who is the coordinator of this workshop series, at sviri@tamu.edu

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Mingqian Liu
Mingqian is a fourth-year doctoral student in the Department of Architecture