Pedagogies of Place: a faculty development workshop about teaching in Queens

This three day in-person workshop invites QC faculty to deepen our understanding of the place we call Queens, as a campus and as a set of communities and neighborhoods. Drawing from interdisciplinary approaches to place-based education and pedagogies of writing, we will explore how critical and reflective engagement with our local contexts can inform our teaching practices. The sessions will include a mix of hands-on activities, hearing from different people across campus, and time to work on projects.

Hosted by Writing at Queens and the Center for Excellence in Teaching, Learning, and Leadership, Queens College.

Co-sponsored by QC Library’s OER Initiative, funded by N.Y.S Open Educational Resources Grant.

Designed and facilitated by Lindsey Albracht (English), Eric Goldfischer (Urban Studies), Soniya Munshi (CETLL/Urban Studies), and Amy Wan (English), with support from Leila Walker (Library).

Pedagogies of Place Facilitators 

Lindsey Albracht (she/her/hers) works as the Co-Director of First-Year Writing and Part-Time Instruction and a Lecturer in the Queens College English department. Both her research and teaching focus on literacy, composition, and the teaching of writing.    

Eric Goldfischer is a Lecturer in the Department of Urban Studies at Queens College. He is a geographer by training, and his research and teaching interests focus on the intersection of housing justice, participatory-action research, urban space, and policing. Dr. Goldfischer is the Service-Learning coordinator in the Urban Studies Department, with a particular focus on teaching and facilitating the service-learning seminar (URBST 370/372) and guiding students through fulfilling service-learning placements with nonprofits, activist organizations, and government agencies. His writing has been published in journals such as Housing Studies, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, and Metropolitics. In his research, he has collaborated closely with groups led by those with lived experience of housing deprivation. Outside of academic work, Dr. Goldfischer began his career as a community organizer and is trained as a popular educator, and he believes that in the classroom setting, we are all teachers and learners alongside each other.  

Soniya Munshi (she/they) is the Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching, Learning, and Leadership (CETLL) and an Associate Professor of Urban Studies at Queens College where she serves as the Faculty Advisor for the Asian American Community Studies minor and co-Director of QCAP. Their research and teaching interests include gender, health, and disability justice movements in immigrant communities of color, with a focus on liberatory and transformative approaches to violence and harm; autoethnography and memoir; creative and participatory research methodologies; and critical, feminist, and ethnic studies pedagogies. She is based in Queens, the borough that raised her.

Leila Walker (she/her) is the Humanities and Digital Scholarship Librarian and an Assistant Professor in the Rosenthal Library where she oversees the Queens College Open Educational Resources Initiative. Her research interests include librarianship, OER, British Romanticism, pedagogy, and plant humanities. She held a Council on Library and Information Resources Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2015-2016, and she has been awarded a Pforzheimer Research Grant from the Keats-Shelley Association of America and the Emerging Scholars Award (Honorable Mention) from the Nineteenth Century Studies Association. Her recent scholarship has been published in or is forthcoming from Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Essays in Romanticism, Studies in Romanticism, Hybrid Pedagogy, European Romantic Review, and elsewhere. She is currently finalizing a digital scholarly edition of Elizabeth Kent’s Flora Domestica (1823) for Romantic Circles.

Dr. Amy Wan (she/her) is Professor of English at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center. She also currently serves as the Special Assistant to the Provost for Writing at Queens College. She earned her PhD in English from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and her MA from Binghamton University. Her research interests include composition and rhetoric, language policy, multilingualism, literacy, and public education, and she teaches courses about writing and the teaching of writing. She is the author of Producing Good Citizens: Literacy Training in Anxious Times (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014) and was awarded the Richard Ohmann Outstanding Article Award in 2012 for her College English article “In the Name of Citizenship.” Her writing has been published in College Composition and Communication, College English, Journal of College Literacy and Learning, Rhetoric Review, and Literacy in Composition Studies, among others.