Category: Blog

• Why I Teach with HASTAC: Platforms as Critical Pedagogy

  

  This post is part of a two-part series that considers digital learning platforms as an issue of critical pedagogy. HASTAC as Critical Pedagogy I teach students to write and research with HASTAC.org because I’m committed to critical, engaged, student-centered education that prepares students for the world beyond the classroom. For me, this involves both preparing students for…

• The Feminist Art of Writing About Teaching

  

  Danica Savonick, SUNY Cortland @danicasavonick Thursday, August 2 1:00 – 2:15 Digital Pedagogy Lab Institute Today I was honored to share some of my favorite writings about teaching with a group of passionate educators at the Digital Pedagogy Lab Institute in Fredericksburg, Virginia. I was so grateful to our participants, and for everything they refused…

• Dear Fellow Graduate Student

  

  Dear Fellow Graduate Student, As you well know, this is a rough time to be pursuing an advanced degree. We are underfunded, overworked, exploited, and devalued by a society that (to take just one recent example) attempted to tax our tuition waivers as income, which would have made graduate education untenable for most of us…

• Reflections on the dissertation, one year in

  

  This blog, a reflection on my dissertation project one year into the process, was originally produced as a talk for the 2016 Futures of American Studies Institute. It includes an overview of my dissertation (a snapshot of how I’m concurrently conceptualizing it, though it continues to evolve), some more specific work from the chapter on Audre…

• American Literature, American Learning Interview with Danica Savonick, Cathy Davidson & Jade Davis

  

  See a glimpse of the student-centered pedagogy that animates “American Literature and American Learning,” a new course offered by the Futures Initiative. Hear from Cathy N. Davidson, Distinguished Professor and Founding Director of the Futures Initiative; Danica Savonick, Doctoral Candidate in English and Graduate Fellow with the Futures Initiative; and Jade E. Davis, Associate Director…

• Gender Bias in Academe Republished by London School of Economics

  

  On March 8, Danica Savonick and Cathy Davidson’s “Gender Bias in Academe: An Annotated Bibliography of Importance Recent Studies” was republished by the London School of Economics and Political Science Impact Blog. Read the bibliography here.

• Creating Spaces for Conversation: Three Strategies

  

  In a recent blog post, Cathy N. Davidson wrote: “There are personal, cultural, learning, and social reasons people don’t speak up in class.  Students of color and women of all races, introverts, the non-conventional thinkers, those from poor previous educational backgrounds, returning or “nontraditional students,” and those from cultures where speaking out is considered rude…

• From Critical to Creative Pedagogy: Reimagining Assessment

  

  Where we have cultures of oppression & survival / we need a different way of measuring,” a student noted in a class taught by feminist, antiracist, lesbian, activist, warrior poet and educator Audre Lorde, in 1984. Systems of measurement and assessment are key indicators of what we value. If we want to change the system…

• Because nothing is sufficient, we must use everything

  

  “Because nothing is sufficient, we must use everything,” Rebecca Fullan recently remarked, which is how I’ve come to understand the relationship between academia and activism. Since beginning my Ph.D. program in English at the CUNY Graduate Center, I’ve struggled with the relationship between academic institutions and the grassroots, community-based, activist work that takes place on…

• Towards a Pedagogy of Equality

  

  Recently, I was invited by the Futures Initiative and HASTAC to offer opening remarks for a year-long conversation, The University Worth Fighting For, a year-long project designed to tie student-centered, engaged practices in our classrooms to larger issues of institutional change, equality, race, gender, and all forms of social justice. Here is an excerpt from my…