Pedagogy Circles are open to faculty, administrators, staff, and students at Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges. They are facilitated by TLI Student Consultants, aim to support cross-constituency dialogue, and offer a space for members of the community to explore how they are acting on and working toward anti-racism, diversity, inclusivity, and equity within and beyond classrooms.
The idea of a “Pedagogy Circle” was developed by a department at Bryn Mawr and two Teaching and Learning Institute (TLI) student partners through the Summer Pedagogical Partnership Program work and the fourteen, one-time, small-group conversations offered through the Liberal Arts Collaborative for Digital Innovation (LACOL) in the Fall of 2020.
The Pedagogy Circles replace the Open Pedagogy Conversations, which were started in the fall of 2014 at the request of a faculty member. As the name suggests, these were open discussions of any pedagogical issues that faculty and staff members wished to explore together. We discussed faculty-proposed topics such as: question-framing and discussion facilitation; developing effective assignments; organizing effective presentations that are useful not only for the presenter but for the entire class; communicating about and using office hours; and more.
inCirle painting by Lauren Lattimore, Bryn Mawr College Class of 2021