A Pedagogy Reading Group
This is the landing page for an informal reading group on pedagogy at Boston University. We meet a couple times a semester to discuss anything and everything pedagogy and teaching. The intended audience is anyone teaching (or who will teach) courses at BU who wants to think more about their practice.
If you want to be added to the email list for this group (or if you
want to be removed from the email list), please send a message to
nmmull at bu dot edu. If you're interesting in leading a
discussion on a paper/book chapter that you read, or just a discussion
of the form "this is what I've been thinking about recently", please
send an message.
Fall 2024
For the fall 2024 semester we'll be meeting on Fridays 12-1PM in CDS 950. See the sections below for dates and topics.
2024-10-04 SIGCE 2024 Playlist
- discussion leader: Nathan Mull
outline: There were a bunch of interesting-looking papers out of SIGCE this year, I'd like to chat about some of the ones that caught my eye. The two main papers I'd like to discuss are
- Experiences of Undergraduate Computer Science Students Living with Mental Health Conditions
- Transforming Grading Practices in the Computing Education Community
They're kind of hard to read, but I'd like to more directly confront the challenges that students face outside of the courses I teach. I think there's a lot of space here to talk about our experiences, failures, and solutions (in any field).
We likely won't have time to discuss them but I also want to include these papers, which are more specific to computer science.
- Participatory Governance in the Computer Science Theory Classroom
- How We Manage an Army of Teaching Assistants: Experience Report on Scaling a CS1 Course
Though not perfect, I think they offer potential solutions to creating more accessible computer science courses, even at scale.
- Zoom link: past
2024-11-08 Trauma-Informed Teaching
- discussion leader: Tori Lee
- outline: We'll discuss trauma-informed teaching and mental health and try to take away some practical/actionable steps from our readings for things we can implement into spring courses, e.g., small steps we can take in planning our syllabi and assignments (acknowledging that CS courses typically don’t actually teach about sexual assault, but certainly teach to students who have experienced it).
- Zoom link: link
2024-12-06 Microintervention Strategies
- discussion leader: Anna Ward
- outline: We'll look at the first three chapters of Microintervention Strategies and discuss how these strategies can be applied to interacting with students and designing material
- Zoom link: link