On May 20–22, the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS) hosted the annual Teaching, Learning & Innovation Summer Institute (TLISI). Faculty, staff, and graduate student instructors from all Georgetown campuses explore strategies for excellence in teaching and learning. Each year, TLISI focuses on the most prominent issues in higher education, with the 2024 institute featuring sessions on generative AI, dialogue and free speech, and experiential learning.
Team members from the Red House presented on elements of transformative learning central to our work, including experiential opportunities, dialogue and arts based pedagogy. In their session “Our City is Our Classroom: Experiential Learning Integration at Georgetown,” Randy Bass (Executive Director) and Susannah McGowan (Director of Curriculum Transformation Initiatives) facilitated a workshop on the theory, practice, and design of experiential learning programs at Georgetown, specifically at the Capitol Applied Learning Lab (CALL). Ijeoma Njaka (Senior Learning Design for Transformational & Inclusive Initiatives) co-facilitated the session “An Immersive Dialogue Workshop with In Your Shoes,” which allowed participants to experience the performance-based dialogue methodology in which participants have deep, open conversations around a given topic and then present one another’s perspectives.
Other sessions included “Trauma-Informed Practices for Teaching and Learning,” “Learning to Live with AI: Enhancing Writing and Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines,” “Embodied Education for Ecological Belonging,” and “Teaching Georgetown’s History with Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation.” These sessions touched on a variety of topics at the forefront of transformative education today.
The Red House is proud to have co-sponsored TLISI 2024, bringing students, staff, and faculty together around educational innovation. We are committed to preparing the Georgetown community and higher education broadly for the ever-changing demands of the world’s most pressing issues.