TA Day: Graduate Student Conference on Teaching

11:00AM to 11:15AM - Break

11:15AM to 12:15PM - 3.0 Concurrent Sessions B (Choose One)

3.1 Building Classroom Community

OR

3.2 Effective Writing Feedback

12:15PM to 1:00PM - Lunch Break

1:00PM to 2:00PM - 4.0 Keynote by Dr. Cornel West

Teaching from the Middle: What I Wish I’d Known as a TA Reflections on relational teaching, practical judgment, and the TA’s role in the teaching ecosystem

Cornel Grey is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Western University. His work brings together Black Studies, queer studies, critical public health, and feminist pedagogy to examine how communities create practices of care amid overlapping health inequities.

His teaching is guided by a Black feminist ethics of care that understands education as a civic practice rooted in reciprocity, curiosity, and social responsibility. Across his courses, Grey invites students to think critically across disciplines, connect scholarship to lived experience, and see learning as something that extends beyond the classroom. His pedagogy often takes shape through experiential and community-engaged learning, including community dinners exploring Black foodways, collaborations with local organizations, and public-facing exhibitions.

Grey’s research focuses especially on Black queer life across Canada, the Caribbean, and transnational diasporic contexts, including the afterlives of public health crises such as HIV/AIDS, COVID-19, and mpox. His work asks how Black queer life exceeds dominant narratives of crisis and pathology while taking seriously the material conditions that shape vulnerability. He was a Scholar Research Fellow with the BBQ+ Pedagogy Lab, and his work on teaching and pedagogy is forthcoming in Feminist Pedagogy.

2:00PM to 2:15PM - Break

2:15PM to 3:15PM - 5.0 Concurrent Sessions C (Choose One)

5.1 Quick Tips for Accessible Teaching 

OR 

5.2 Talking to Your Course Instructor about GenAI