Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

What does excellence in teaching mean for us at PCC? How we do we support faculty in their professional development around the art of teaching? Please join Katy Ho, VP of Academic Affairs as she hosts a listening session to hear what your thoughts are around teaching and learning. Throughout this year Katy has been hosting open sessions about this topic with faculty, staff and students across the district. Conversations will help inform how the college can move forward in supporting becoming a true learning organization and the efforts around YESS – Yes to Equitable Student Success.

Katy Ho

Contract grading is form of assessment in which students’ grades come from an agreement between the student and the instructor, shifting more agency and power toward the student compared to a traditional teacher-centered classroom. In this interactive workshop, we’ll discuss Asao Inoue’s framework for contract grading as an anti-racist assessment practice, review some of the possible forms of contract grading, share student responses to contract grading, and explore some of the tensions between contract grading and disciplinary or institutional norms. Participants will generate a grading contract they could use in their own classrooms.

Jessica Johnson, Allison Gross

Bias in the college classroom results in a chilling effect on student success, retention, and goal attainment. Professional training and exploration of implicit bias, microaggressions, and micro-affirmations can help us be more socially and culturally responsive to our students as we work to build authentic relationships which serve as the foundation of our instructor-student relationships. In this interactive presentation, participants will define, understand and unpack implicit bias, and explore concepts such as intersectionality, cultural humility, cultural sensitivity and microaggressions. Additional concepts such as intent vs. impact will also be addressed. Participants will be given an opportunity to apply what they have learned and receive tips for moving forward to strengthen their Social Justice lens.

Traci Simmons

An interactive session to provide information on the Autism Spectrum. An engaging discussion between the student panel and audience will address practical and effective strategies that promote positive communication between the student and instructor using real world examples.

Daynia Daby, Ruth McKenna, Jennifer Margolis, Shasti McLaughlin

Using the restroom is a basic human need we all experience. For transgender and gender diverse students, finding a safer and accessible restroom can be a challenge that affects success in college. In this session we will explore how restroom access is impacting PCC students from negative health consequences to missed class time. We will review the All-User Campaign and next steps at PCC. We will also utilize discussion scenarios to build best practices for making restrooms more accessible across the district. Additionally, there will be significant time built in for questions and answers.

Mae Stephenson, J Gibbons, Kole Render

Saara Hirsi and Abdi Mohamed are refugees from Somalia. Both completed ESOL, high school equivalency, and got AA degrees from PCC, and went on to graduate from PSU. Saara and Abdi also have disabilities – Saara is blind, and Abdi has paraplegia from a spinal cord injury. As activists, they have been working to shed light on the systemic discrimination that refugees with disabilities face in Portland.

With many gaps in process and services, this population is often made to feel they don’t belong. The session will identify institutional and attitudinal barriers experienced by refugees with disabilities, from the first point of contact in Portland, at home, education and employment. Learn how to support these students at PCC, and to help affect change in the community.

Saara Hirsi, Abdi Mohamed

You will explore where your identities intersect across 18 different systems of oppressions. You’ll think through the everyday privileges that each of your identities gives you, as well as understanding how your oppressions intersect with all your other identities. You’ll get an initial glimpse into issues of visibility/passing/perception as well as oppressions that create a rift between family members and those identities that are passed down familial lines. You’ll explore some of the contrasts and similarities between the dynamics of each of the 18 oppressions. You’ll spend a large portion of the time working in groups of 3, and will hear about 20-30 minutes of lecture/guidance from the presenter.

Jimena Alvarado

Teaching in a Community College is a challenge. There isn’t one factor alone that explains how to improve the learning experience for the diverse population of students we work with. If we are to promote YESS (Yes to Equitable Student Success) we need a robust and integrated approach that takes into account more than just how or what we teach. We will introduce the theory of Reciprocal Determinism (Bandura, 1978), composed of three factors; the individual or cognitive factors, the environment, and behavior influence. Each of these can shed light on our challenges as educators and on the variables that complicate and enhance the success of students. As an educator, you will add to your teaching tool box with this session.

Monica Schneider, Shirlee Geiger

Explore issues of those at the margins of academia. How much power do we have given our current socio-political climate? What is the neoliberal influence in higher education? What ability do adjunct faculty have to create culturally responsive curriculum and explore different pedagogical approaches within PCC’s structure? This session takes place in an part-time-faculty-only space.

Miguel Arellano Sanchez, Lisa George

Who gets to speak up in class, and whose voices are not empowered in free-form discourses?
Participants will learn about several methods for creating equitable classroom discussions and choose one group discussion format to engage in.
Our facilitators will guide participants as they listen and reflect on successes, struggles, and opportunities for growth in developing classroom environments that ask everyone to consider critical perspectives.

Participants will leave understanding several discussion techniques for any class that includes sharing perspectives on a topic, raising critical questions about a text, debating a hot topic, or simply asking questions in a whole class setting.

Eric Dodson, Margi Felix-Lund, Davida Jordan, Sandy Sampson

Practitioners can utilize Community-Based Learning (CBL) as a culturally responsive pedagogy with powerful transformational results, involving students as agents of social change, giving them tools in collaborative decision-making, team-building and problem-solving, and providing experiential opportunities to apply classroom learning to lived experience. For faculty, CBL is an opportunity to receive support from a professional learning community, explore innovation in course design, embrace discomfort as a learning tool, engage with the wider community in reciprocally meaningful ways, tap student expertise and creativity and build a more reflective practice of our core educational value.

Hannah Cherry, Catherine Thomas

Looking for some pro tips on pronouns? This workshop will utilize activities and discussion scenarios to explore best practices for learning new pronoun sets, incorporating pronouns into classroom and 1-on- 1 settings, and moving forward when we make mistakes. We will also cover basic terminology related to transgender identity. If you’re wondering how or why to ask (and answer!) “What are your pronouns?” this workshop is for you!

Mae Stephenson, J Gibbons, Kole Render

Ethnic Studies courses provide a comparative context for understanding the historical and contemporary experiences of racialized communities in the United States. This session aims to make the case for building an Ethnic Studies program at Portland Community College by examining the academic benefits of Ethnic Studies courses, the existing need for these courses at PCC, and models for incorporating Ethnic Studies courses into the General Education Requirements for the college.

Israel Pastrana, Liliana Luna, Eder Mondragón Quiroz

Collaborate to reduce stereotype threat and create a safer-identity environment in STEM courses. Identity work in STEM courses can improve student persistence and success. Reflect on elements of your own identity and how they have impacted your education and teaching. See an example from a math class and develop an activity that works for your class in this interactive session. This session will include personal reflection, creative group activities, cautions and further resources. Geared toward STEM faculty but all are welcome.

Cara Lee

This workshop will follow-up the session presented at last year’s Anderson Conference on nonviolent communication (NVC), providing additional information. Participants will discuss problems with interpersonal relationships they have experienced in the classroom. Then we will brainstorm how to address these problems using NVC. Participants will also play some games and participate in activities that can be used in the classroom to familiarize students with the concept of nonviolent communication.

Melissa Tennyson

In linguistically and culturally diverse classrooms, underdeveloped schema in perceived academic conventions often silence students until they acquire the experience and language of academic culture. Inviting students to explore meaning through “home” languages helps establish a “context of respect” (Elbow) for their previous experiences and underlying knowledge, allowing students to actively participate and contribute to the meaning-making of their own and the class as a whole. Identifying common practices of codemeshing and translanguaging, students also recognize that an academic environment benefits from their multidimensional knowledge and languages. This workshop will explore current debates and research, discussion of curricular choices that value linguistic and cultural diversity, and strategies for drawing out these many languages in classroom discussions.

Leslie Boyd

Students leaders of the Multicultural Center will share their learning from the social justice summer training. They will share the impact the training has had for them and their peers as well as how they plan to use it in the future. They will engage participants to practice the process of power analysis that can be applied in their roles at PCC as well as in their personal lives. The workshop will be interactive and the students will use games, video clips and small group work.

Rut Martinez-Alicea

Instructors will share examples from two community-based learning projects: “Student Advocate Outreach on Diversity issues and Acceptance“ and “Cultivating food justice through a community-based learning approach.”

Heidi Esbensen, Miriam Latzer, Alissa Leavitt

This session will present information on the impacts of trauma on the brain and behavior. It will also explore how experience can create negative cognitive filters or “head-tapes” that make success more difficult for those who have experienced abuse and neglect. The focus of the session will be on teaching resilience as a skill, rather than character trait, to help students overcome negative filters that impede their success. Activities will include identifying cognitive distortions, responding with empathy, and engaging tools that build resiliency.

Lisa J. Féinics

In this workshop, you will be invited to engage in a critical exploration of ways in which your classrooms or helping spaces can be made more inclusive. Through group discussions and experiential exercises, participants will have the opportunity to learn more about the concept of intersectionality, reflect on their own cultural values, preferences and blind spots, and assess how these combined aspects might impact their practices and interactions with students. Some common ways in which microaggressions, whether related to race, culture, gender, class, ability, age, or sexual orientation, impact students’ sense of belongingness, morale and engagement will be reviewed. Lastly, there will be an exploratory discussion of tools and strategies for making teaching/ helping environments, strategies and evaluation practices more inclusive.

Rohini Puri-Bose, Carlnita Greene, Isaiah Jones, Faith Curammeng

This workshop is will be especially targeting those PCC’s educators who have an increasing number of encore learners returning to the classroom in their 40s, 60s and beyond. Recent brain research has revealed critical structurally and physically differences between those individuals that changes the way each absorbs new information, changes the way they learn. Their respective brains are not better or worse, but they are certainly different. The take-aways will also include research into the effect of mindsets, both positive and negative, on the way educators educate and learners learn.

Roger Anunsen