TLISI offers Georgetown University faculty and staff from all campuses the opportunity to explore strategies for excellence in teaching and learning. This year’s Institute will focus on several topic areas, including effective teaching and learning practices, inclusive pedagogies, technology-enhanced learning, Ignatian pedagogy, cross-institutional and cross-departmental collaborations, and more.
We hope you’ll join us in our efforts to make TLISI "green"! We’re partnering with the Office of Sustainability to reduce the environmental impact from this year’s Institute by providing compostable materials and expanding our recycling presence. Each registrant will also receive a free aluminum water bottle upon picking up your name badge at registration. You can help us Go Green by bringing your reusable water bottle back with you each day, as we will be limiting our supply of single-use plastics throughout the week. Stop by our information table anytime Monday-Thursday to learn about ways that you can help your office Go Green!
Many of our courses include a goal to help students engage diversity and inclusion with an eye toward understanding and changing the systemic forces that create inequity. At a foundational level, doing so means to interrogate the sources that created and perpetuated the ideas that continue to prevent equity—many of which show up in the canons of our respective disciplines.
Sections of Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia are fundamentally racist and deeply problematic. However, because Jefferson held the pen, his ideas mattered and thus contributed to the systemic forces that continue to perpetuate inequity. We will use my experiences teaching “the ugly bits” of Jefferson as a case study to examine the following:
1) How may revisiting canonical, and yet deeply problematic, figures and texts aid in our work of engaging diversity? 2) If there is utility in working on these texts, not for the purpose of revering them, but for the purpose of critiquing them, does this utility outweigh the potential trauma it may cause students or the inadvertent reinforcement of these figures as canonical? 3) How do we communicate to students the reasons why we are reading these canonical, yet problematic, figures and texts?
