Teaching Excellence Symposia

Each year, we host our Teaching Excellence Symposia to bring faculty and our VCU partners together to share ideas, strategies, and scholarship on teaching and learning. This annual event honors pedagogical innovatives, contributing to our broader faculty learning community, and getting us all energized for next steps to support student learning and belonging. The powerful discussions that occur during the symposia are a product of faculty to faculty sharing as contributors to the VCU teaching commons.

2022 Symposia

The 2022 event was broken down into two days, with a focus on general teaching excellence for the first part and inclusive teaching practices for the second. Attendees were able to choose from brief sessions where they learned about a variety exciting things their fellow faculty members have been implementing in their teaching practices. Members of the VCU community can access recordings from our spring 2022 symposium below.

General Teaching Excellence Symposium: Friday, March 25

Keynote: Maintaining Course Quality and Integrity Between Multiple Modalities with Mr. Michael Forder, Director of E-Learning for the VCU College of Health Professions and Dr. Jessica Kulak, University at Buffalo

This keynote ponders the challenge of concurrent teaching in face-to-face and online sections of a course. We will explore questions that instructors might consider when designing for multiple modalities. Finally we will look at a process and set of guides for designing courses with both student and faculty interests in mind.

View March 25 session recordings >> 

Inclusive Teaching Excellence Symposium: Friday, April 1

Keynote: Pedagogical Shifts Toward Recognizing the Cultural Wealth of Minoritized Students with Dr. Rebecca Covarrubias, Associate Professor of Psychology, University of California, Santa Cruz

Pedagogical approaches in U.S. systems of higher education privilege the cultural capital – knowledge, skills, and lived experiences – of dominant groups. This cultural privileging renders invaluable the cultural strengths and capital of racially- and economically-minoritized students. In this keynote, we will discuss research findings that document the ways in which some pedagogical approaches misrecognize the capital of minoritized students and how everyday meaningful shifts in our pedagogy can better affirm the cultural wealth of our students.

View April 1 session recordings >>

Our 2022 Symposia were co-sponsored by The Office of the Senior Vice President for Health Sciences and the College of Humanities and Sciences Leaders for Inclusive Learning.

2021 Symposia

Members of the VCU community can access recordings from our spring 2021 symposium below.

View 2021 Teaching Excellence recordings >>

View 2021 Inclusive Teaching recordings >>