Facilitated by Enrique Sepúlveda, Assistant Professor, Ethnic Studies. Many students feel they don’t belong in the academic setting or to the larger university culture. This is especially true of first generation college-going students, immigrants, queer students and students of color. This presentation calls for professors to consider and address the larger social context in which our teaching and learning is embedded, via the power of narratives and the practice of storytelling.

Stories are personal, as well as social and communal. When deployed effectively they can help us to contextualize our experiences and emotions, especially experiences and feelings of displacement, transgression and social fragmentation that new students often experience. Integrating stories into our teaching can raise levels of consciousness and provide the connective tissue that allows us (faculty and students) to further explore and examine key questions pertinent to our disciplines.

Please join Enrique Sepúlveda as he narrates his educational journey from a near high school dropout to becoming a “university learner” with the help of professors who went beyond a technical view of teaching and learning that frames the learning process as simply a matter of content mastery and acquisition of technical skills. Using storytelling as a pedagogical tool to transform teaching and learning, Enrique will provide examples of how teaching and learning are situated in a social context, where learning is viewed as a feature of membership in a community of practice.