MYFest 24 Schedule

This session will be a case study of how College Unbound worked with students to develop their institutional policy on the use of generative AI for students and faculty. From there, the session will explore through conversation, activities, and sharing how we can think and learn with students about how to critically use generative AI in general and in our respective disciplines.

For details, see the MYFest Readers Theater website https://sites.google.com/view/ccreaderstheater/myfest24 All ages welcome!

TBA

During my own personal journey to find belonging, it has been instrumental to be involved in, to create, and to nurture communities of practice and transformation. The mathematical foundations of networked ecosystems, with its relational and complex adaptive systems perspective, has informed this STEM community building work. However, for many years, undertaking social justice meant personal activism, teaching, service, and education research and excluded “mathematics research.” But mathematical and computational research for social justice is now gaining exciting momentum. Our greatest challenge and our greatest opportunity is that we are both shaping the future of mathematics, computation, STEM and STEM education as well as redefining the community that should shape it. Creating mathematical research communities for social justice offers an exciting moment to build an inclusive and mutually supportive community focused on nurturing belonging, collaboration, interdisciplinarity, openness, and innovative mathematics.

This session will be hands on where you'll get the chance to draw/create art. Though there is absolutely no experience required and it is open to all skill levels, we ask that you prepare to be fully immersed! This means preparing a few materials in advance and blocking out time in your schedule for the entire session so you can get the most out of this experience. Neuro-Art is a form of sketching or doodling that can be used to relax and shift perceptions and experience around a particular issue, belief, emotion or bodily sensation. This introduction will show the simplest method/technique in order for you to have an insight into the process. It will not give you a complete experience of the full method, but is designed to offer a sense of the possibilities so that you can go and explore further for yourself or with a trained therapist if you enjoy the practice. This is an interactive session and you will get the most benefit if you engage with the process and let it unfold.

Join us for this reflective and creative workshop based on the Higher Education for Good chapter, Counters to Despair. This collection of prose poems will form the basis of our thinking and actions. How do we manage to outwit or outrun our creeping despair in the face of so much gone awry in education and the world? What stands between us and despair? And even more importantly, how do we build and sustain counters to despair that keep us moving towards more peace, equity, and care in ourselves, our institutions and the world. We'll use structured dialogues, free writing and open dialogue to articulate, share and bolster our defenses against despair.

This interactive workshop will open a dynamic conversation about open and liberatory education design. How does our work help to accelerate liberatory ed, or maintain current structures and slow it down? How might we start to envision important integration work in order to create a more powerful foundation for an anti-oppressive educational landscape - one that allows all learners to become self-actualized shapers of a more just and sustainable world?

Working together as a community, reflect on frameworks around partnership to explore building connections. This session will use interactive activities to collectively explore ideas and ideals around partnership. We’ll come away with an idea of some of the practical demands, emergent possibilities and possible tensions in working in partnership across institutions, communities and cohorts and begin to create our own contextual “elegant steps”.

A Bring Your Own Book (BYOB) Circle, is an opportunity for individuals to come together virtually to share their love of reading. Unlike a traditional book club, where everyone brings a commonly read book, these BYOB circles invite anyone to come with any book that they have read, or are currently reading, based on a central theme. With the support of a facilitator, these events are meant to create community, inspire new reading and learning, and engage with one another in fun and unique ways.

This session will start with a short mindfulness meditation and then a short discussion about the benefits and different types of journaling. We will have a short activity on the ways each of you can incorporate a journaling practice in your life. Afterwards the remainder of the session will be dedicated for journaling alone (but together) using prompts provided by the facilitator and beautiful, relaxing background music. Come and join us for a self case, wellbeing and joyful hour that you dedicate to your self. You can bring your family with you.