The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: Adapting Our Teaching Habits with Felicia Rose Chavez

The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: Adapting Our Teaching Habits

October 23, 2021

1:30-3:00 p.m. via Zoom

So much of teaching is about inheritance, about reinforcing the way it’s always been done. Many of us can’t even articulate why we teach the way that we do, beyond tradition serving as a rite of passage. Every one of us carries this inheritance into the classroom, through our choice of dress, demeanor, curriculum, and evaluative measures. Whether or not we’re aware, academic heritage has present-day weight and substance. It’s the same with cultural heritage. Where we’re from (and how we “read”) influences our relationship to, and assumption of, inherent rights, benefits, and advantages. As educators, this bias perpetuates our classroom policies. If “the way it’s always been done” hurts and marginalizes a subset of our students, how might we adapt our teaching habits to actively achieve plurality?

This interactive 90-minute session draws on storytelling, freewriting exercises, and discussion to prompt us to interrogate our academic and cultural inheritance with the goal of discovering possibilities beyond traditional teaching models.

Note from BOFLTE: We request all to give themselves time to log on, be present, and be on time to participate. We do not want anyone to miss out on this one day, allotted time we have with this presenter.

ABOUT FELICIA ROSE CHAVEZ:

Felicia Rose Chavez is an award-winning educator with an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Iowa. She is author of The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom and co-editor of The BreakBeat Poets Volume 4: LatiNEXT with Willie Perdomo and Jose Olivarez. Felicia’s teaching career began in Chicago, where she served as Program Director to Young Chicago Authors and founded GirlSpeak, a feminist webzine for high school students. She went on to teach writing at the University of New Mexico, where she was distinguished as the Most Innovative Instructor of the Year, the University of Iowa, where she was distinguished as the Outstanding Instructor of the Year, and Colorado College, where she received the Theodore Roosevelt Collins Outstanding Faculty Award. Her creative scholarship earned her a Ronald E. McNair Fellowship, a University of Iowa Graduate Dean’s Fellowship, a Riley Scholar Fellowship, and a Hadley Creatives Fellowship. Originally from Albuquerque, New Mexico, she currently serves as the Creativity and Innovation Scholar-in-Residence at Colorado College.

For more information about The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop, and to access a multi-genre compilation of contemporary writers of color and progressive online publishing platforms, please visit www.antiracistworkshop.com.