SNF Paideia in collaboration with the Critical Writing Program is very excited to host award-winning educator Felicia Rose Chavez (author of The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop) for a mini-residency at Penn. Felicia Chavez will be sharing two faculty workshops (lunch provided!) and one student-facing program with us on September 10 and 11. Faculty of all disciplines are warmly invited to register for one or both workshops. Both workshops are 90 minutes long, with 30 minutes for lunch at the beginning.
Workshop #1: Adapting Our Teaching Habits
So much of teaching is about inheritance, about reinforcing the way it’s always been done. Many of us can’t even articulate why we teach the way that we do, beyond tradition serving as a rite of passage. Every one of us carries this inheritance into the classroom, through our choice of dress, demeanor, curriculum, and evaluative measures. Where we’re from (and how we “read”) influences our relationship to, and assumption of, inherent rights, benefits, and advantages. If “the way it’s always been done” hurts and marginalizes a subset of our students, how might we adapt our teaching habits to actively achieve plurality? This interactive session draws on storytelling, freewriting exercises, and discussion to prompt us to interrogate our academic and cultural inheritance with the goal of discovering possibilities beyond traditional teaching models.
Information on Workshop #2: Disrupting Student Bias and registration details are available here.
About Felicia Rose Chavez
Felicia Rose Chavez is an award-winning educator with an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Iowa. She is author of The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom and co-editor of The BreakBeat Poets Volume 4: LatiNEXT. Felicia’s teaching career began in Chicago, where she served as Program Director to Young Chicago Authors and founded GirlSpeak, a feminist webzine for high school students. She went on to teach writing at the University of New Mexico, where she was distinguished as the Most Innovative Instructor of the Year, the University of Iowa, where she was distinguished as the Outstanding Instructor of the Year, and Colorado College, where she received the Theodore Roosevelt Collins Outstanding Faculty Award. Her creative scholarship earned her a Ronald E. McNair Fellowship, a University of Iowa Graduate Dean’s Fellowship, a Riley Scholar Fellowship, and a Hadley Creatives Fellowship. Originally from Albuquerque, New Mexico, Felicia currently lives in Seattle, Washington.
Note: Faculty of all disciplines are warmly invited to register for either or both workshops. Both workshops are 90 minutes long, with 30 minutes for lunch at the beginning.
For questions, please reach out to Sarah Ropp (sropp@upenn.edu) or Aurora MacRae-Crerar (aurorama@upenn.edu).
