Learning Goals
Participants will:

• Understand a pedagogical, student-centric approach to developing trust between student and teacher in order to facilitate the learning of the material.  
• Learn concrete strategies during the first few weeks of the semester, gleaned from 17 years of experience, to enhance trust and, thereby, achieve higher academic success for all students. 

• Reduce the hierarchical and marginalizing chasm between student and professor. 

Seminar Description

How is a student supposed to learn subject matter when they’re not sure what benefit it will have for them? Worse, how can they commit to the learning process if they’re not certain the professor is genuinely there for their best interests? One of the central and critical necessities in the classroom is to develop a space whereby students fully trust the material and professor as components of their personal development.

Many students at CCP enter our classrooms skeptical about education: they mostly come from an unprioritized public school system, have experienced inequities in their first twelve years of school, and have been marginalized by the reductive hierarchy of the student/teacher dynamic. Add to this that many students enroll at CCP to increase their economic potential, then find themselves in required classes (both General Education and major requirements) about which they cannot identify the value. It is no surprise then, that, even on the first day of the semester, we meet a challenge that extends beyond the teaching of concrete academic material.

This conversation is a collation of 17 years of teaching experience, most of which, pedagogically, has been about earning student trust before sharing academic material. In short, if the professor mindfully and actively cultivates trust between themselves and the students at the start of the semester, it will be easier to communicate the course material and accomplish academic goals.

Participants will discuss class-tested, cross-curricular strategies to cultivate trust including: establishing genuineness, identifying students’ needs, articulating non-elected course values, pedagogical praxis, and other resources.