Academic Learning Communities
The Center for Faculty Development and Excellence (CFDE) is calling for participants for two Fall 2025 Academic Learning Communities.
Academic Learning Communities are informal seminars that are intended to
- engage faculty, graduate students, post docs, and staff in collaborative explorations of innovative research and teaching topics;
- bring guest speakers to campus to enhance the curriculum and learning; and/or
- help disseminate important research discoveries and innovative learning strategies to the broader community.
CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS
1. “Beyond Crisis”: Towards Frameworks of Liberatory Education
Fall 2025
Conveners
Vani Kannan, Emory Writing Program
Marina Magloire, Department of English
Julia Tulke, Institute for the Liberal Arts
Description
This ALC serves as a space to discuss a range of liberatory education frameworks, including critical and abolitionist university studies, counter-hegemonic work within institutions of higher education, popular education models for literacy and community organizing, and educational third-spaces. Together, we will read and discuss a range of texts and engage with guest speakers that include grassroots educators in the U.S. south, moving beyond the current rhetoric of “the university in crisis” to understand ourselves as part of longer genealogies of struggle.
The ALC will comprise four sessions and conclude with a zine syllabus workshop. Participants will be invited to share their work at a Spring 2026 off-campus event. We particularly encourage nontenured/contingent faculty, staff, and graduate students to apply.
Topics to be addressed include
- The potentials and limitations of Critical and Abolitionist University Studies, and the application of such frameworks to the historical legacies and contemporary institutional context of Emory
- Crisis narratives and the discursive mobilization of academic freedom
- Genealogies of student activism and insurgent education
- Grassroots education and educational third spaces
- Site-specific lineages of liberatory education at Emory, in Atlanta, and in the US south
Particulars
- The Seminar will in person and on Zoom from 2 to 4pm on the following Fridays: September 5, October 3, November 7, and from 2 to 5pm on December 5 (extended session with zine workshop). In-person meetings will take place off campus.
- The most tangible output of the ALC are the syllabus zines created at the conclusion of the semester as well as the off-campus event at which they will be shared along with broader reflections. In addition, we will create various opportunities for ALC participants to consider how they might integrate frameworks such as critical and abolitionist university studies into their pedagogical practice. Finally, we aim to cultivate intellectual and political community around our shared readings, conversations, and class guests, which we hope will generate new initiatives and collaborations within and beyond Emory.
- Each meeting will balance presentations by the facilitator or invited speakers with group discussions of relevant readings and presentations by seminar participants.
- Up to 20 participants will be accommodated and will include faculty, graduate students, post docs, and staff from across the university.
The deadline for application is Friday, August 30. Selections will be announced in early September.
2. “Ungrading": The Nuts and Bolts of Centering Student Agency in the Classroom
Fall 2025
Conveners
Megan G. Massa, Neuroscience & Behavioral Biology
Christine Ristaino, French & Italian
Description
No Child Left Behind and the subsequent test-taking/worksheet culture it fostered have taught students to focus on rote memorizing and studying for the test rather than the joyful leaning process itself. Grades, specifically, as extrinsic motivators draw attention and effort away from the messy, out of the box, and thought-driven process of learning in favor of stressful perfectionism and the gamification of coursework. Thus, pedagogical discussions and practices of “ungrading” have begun to take shape in an effort to redirect students from the current focus on grades to a more organic focus on learning itself. These alternative grading practices decenter grades and recenter learning to promote a growth mindset, inspire creative thinking, foster self-efficacy, develop metacognitive and life skills, and incorporate principles of purposeful teaching pedagogies (designed for learning and flourishing).
This academic learning community seeks to engage instructors, from ungrading novices to skilled ungraders, interested in exploring options for ungrading practices with the aim of developing actionable steps to incorporate alternative grading strategies into their course(s).
Topics to be addressed include
- What is ungrading? – a discussion of how alternative grading strategies promote student agency, creativity, wellbeing, learning, and growth and a deep exploration of the material at hand.
- Standards-based grading – setting and meeting the standard of promoting learning.
- Contract grading – allowing students to determine their own investment up-front.
- Labor-based grading – when effort is the goal, getting students to give their all as the outcome of ungrading.
- Collaborative/reflective grading – helping students to develop metacognitive skills such as goal setting and learning-to-learn.
Particulars
- The Seminar will meet in person from 1:00-2:30p on the following Fridays: September 12, October 3, October 31, November 21, and December 5.
- Possible outcomes of the Academic Learning Community include: the development of an ungrading plan implementable in a course of your choosing, the development of a community of innovative grading practices across Emory, and the use of findings and discussion to further a larger conversation on alternative grading practices in higher ed.
- Each meeting will balance presentations by the facilitator or invited speakers with group discussions of relevant readings and presentations by seminar participants.
- Up to 20 participants will be accommodated and will include faculty, graduate students, post docs, and staff from across the university.
APPLY HERE
The deadline for application is Friday, August 30. Selections will be announced in early September.
Previous Academic Learning Communities
Archived descriptions of Previous Academic Learning Communities between 2012 and 2025 are available for review.