Belonging and Beyond: Using Future Histories to Reimagine Teaching and Learning
March 27–29, 2025
Program Schedule
Convened by: Candice M. Lowe Swift, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Africana Studies, and International Studies; Eréndira Rueda, Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of Latin American and Latinx Studies; Alison Cook-Sather, Ph.D., Mary Katharine Woodworth Professor of Education at Bryn Mawr College and Director of the Teaching and Learning Institute at Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges; and Caleb Elfenbein, Professor of History and Religious Studies at Grinnell College and Associate Dean for Faculty Development and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, past director of the Center for the Humanities.
This program offers educators and students an opportunity to use “future imagining” methodologies to generate radically inclusive and exciting teaching and learning spaces in higher education.
Abstract
Through this in-person workshop faculty organizers offer college educators and students an opportunity to use “future imagining” techniques to highlight the implications of belonging and mattering in higher education. We will also think about how we might strengthen the relationship between institutions of higher education and the broader societies in which our institutions are embedded.
Drawing on Afro-Futurist texts and methodologies, the sessions in “Belonging and Beyond” build on one another. The sessions will provide collaborative opportunities to acknowledge where we are situated in the current historical moment, document the value of our work and the values that guide that work, creatively articulate hopes for a brighter world through future-history storytelling, and support concrete planning toward those futures. This workshop builds on the successful outcomes of a workshop funded by the Alliance to Advance Liberal Arts Colleges (AALAC) that was co-organized by faculty from Vassar, Bryn Mawr, and Grinnell Colleges, in January of 2025. From the standpoint of our desired futures and our practical needs in the present, the aim of this workshop is to assist educators and students in combining our knowledge and efforts in ways that highlight the importance of higher education and the impact of the work that we do on our campuses.
To help facilitate our collective imaginings, the practices that we develop, and the community that we are building, Worldbuilders Errol King and Tony Patrick will share a periodical from the year 2050 which was generated by conversations from the AALAC workshop. Dr. Antero Garcia and Dr. Nicole Mirra, editors of the inspiring resource, Speculative Pedagogies: Designing Equitable Educational Futures, will provide a keynote address for workshop participants.
Participants who wish to collaborate on projects after the workshop concludes will have an opportunity to do so via an online learning platform that will allow participants to continue to share ideas, document our worlds, highlight our experiences, and build community around our emerging pedagogical practices and other responses to the contemporary moment.
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