CCI Colloquium and Teaching Committees and Humanities Education Platform (HEP) is going to host a talk on transforming higher education through democratic teaching and evidence-based assessment by Dr. Christina Katopodis, the co-author of the award-winning The New College Classroom (Harvard University Press, 2022) and the managing director of the Academic Center for Excellence in Research and Teaching (ACERT) at Hunter College, CUNY.
Title: Transformative Design for Student Engagement by Christina Katopodis (Hunter College, CUNY)
Date: Wednesday, April 22, 2026
Time: 17.30 – 19.00 [Turkish Time- GMT+3]
Room: H-232
Online/Onsite Lecture
This is an online seminar. To request event details please send a message to department.
Talk Description:
How do we make the transition from the hierarchical, inequitable, output-driven academy we inherited from the nineteenth century to a higher education that empowers all students to be their own best selves, modeling a more democratic, flourishing, and just society? How do we make this transition in our own classrooms? In this interactive pedagogy workshop, Dr. Christina Katopodis, coauthor with Cathy N. Davidson of the award-winning book, The New College Classroom (Harvard University Press, 2022), presents what the latest science of learning tells us about democratic teaching practices and measuring what matters in our assessments. She shares teaching strategies that anyone can adapt easily and effectively in every field and grab-and-go activities that educators around the world are using successfully every day to ensure their students’ lifelong success—and to revitalize their own commitment to a better world.
Bio:
Christina Katopodis, PhD, is the Managing Director of the Academic Center for Excellence in Research and Teaching (ACERT) at Hunter College, CUNY. She is the former Associate Director of Transformative Learning in the Humanities and founder of Engaged & Ready, a project that empowers faculty with antiracist active learning tools to democratize their classrooms. She is the winner of the 2019 Diana Colbert Innovative Teaching Prize and the 2018 Dewey Digital Teaching Award. She has authored or co-authored articles published in Chronicle of Higher Ed, English Language Notes, ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture, Hybrid Pedagogy, Inside Higher Ed, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, MLA’s Profession, Times Higher Ed, and Zeal: A Journal for the Liberal Arts. With Cathy N. Davidson, Katopodis is co-author of The New College Classroom (Harvard University Press, 2022), winner of AAC&U’s 2023 Frederic W. Ness Book Award.
Katopodis’s website is: https://christinakatopodis.com/. Participants may find her blog posts, in particular, useful.
Humanities Education Platform (HEP) is an initiative co-founded by Sabancı and Bilkent universities in 2024 that brings together humanities instructors from higher education institutions in Türkiye and abroad. HEP is dedicated to fostering excellence in university-level humanities teaching and to creating shared spaces for the exchange of knowledge, experience, and pedagogical practice.