2022-2023 Events Schedule

Teaching at Cooper: A History

October 12, 1-2 PM

A Cooper Union education has changed dramatically since the mid-nineteenth century, reflecting national and international currents not just in curriculum and pedagogy but in the social and political meanings of higher education. This panel discussion opens up key moments and ideas in the history of Cooper’s classrooms and offers our community an opportunity to reflect on our past in order to imagine our future.

Participants:

Fabiola Barrios-Landeros, Assistant Professor of Chemistry
Peter Buckley, Associate Professor of History (retired)
Steven Hillyer, Director, The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture Archive
Robert Topper, Professor of Chemistry
William Villalongo, Associate Professor of Art


 

Online Strategies for Inclusive Teaching

November 10, 5-6:30 PM (The Cooper Union Library)

How can we make sure that everyone feels welcome in our classrooms? This workshop will lead faculty through an exploration of different institutions’ online resources for centering diversity, equity, and inclusion in teaching. Join us to learn concrete, evidence-based strategies and to offer your ideas for how Cooper can build virtual resources to support our best teaching.

Facilitator:

Asilia Franklin-Phipps, Asst. Professor in Teaching & Learning, SUNY New Paltz


 

Social Media: Profession and Recreation (for Students)

April 4th at 12pm (online)

How can we navigate the competing roles of social media as spaces where we both see friends and also build a professional identity? As you move through college toward a career, it can be difficult to understand how best to use the many different platforms to communicate with others. Join this zoom presentation and discussion with social media expert David Flores from Albert Einstein College of Medicine to gain skills and develop an approach to social media that will work for you.


 

Social Media: Profession and Collaboration (for Faculty and Staff)

April 4th at 5 pm (online)

The social media landscape has become increasingly complex, with many academics defecting from Twitter following Elon Musk’s acquisition and with anxieties around the role of these massive, corporate-owned platforms in our intellectual discourse. Yet as engineers, artists, architects, and scholars of the humanities and social sciences, social media allows us to engage with peers at other universities and to build our careers by sharing our own work. This zoom presentation and discussion—with social media expert David Flores from Albert Einstein College of Medicine—will help foster our thinking about the changing nature of how we communicate online and develop our professional identities.

 


 

Universal Design for Learning and Other Paradigms for Inclusive Classrooms

(TBD)

One of the key insights of Disability Studies scholarship over the past several decades has been a transformation in how we understand the location of disability: It’s not a quality inherent in individuals. Rather, it’s actually a result of the relationships among individuals and environments. In other words, if we design spaces and experiences so that everyone can share equally in them, difficulties that individuals face become less significant. We’ll consider Universal Design for Learning (UDL) as well as other approaches to course design that work against ableism in the classroom.

 


 

Cooper Teaching Exchange Roundtable

(TBD)

Select faculty who have participated in cross-visits over the course of the ‘22-‘23 academic year will share what they learned from colleagues, from lesson-planning strategies to new understandings they’ve formed of the practices in other parts of the college. This event will conclude with a reception so that informal conversations can continue from the roundtable discussion.

 

  • Founded by inventor, industrialist and philanthropist Peter Cooper in 1859, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art offers education in art, architecture and engineering, as well as courses in the humanities and social sciences.

  • “My feelings, my desires, my hopes, embrace humanity throughout the world,” Peter Cooper proclaimed in a speech in 1853. He looked forward to a time when, “knowledge shall cover the earth as waters cover the great deep.”

  • From its beginnings, Cooper Union was a unique institution, dedicated to founder Peter Cooper's proposition that education is the key not only to personal prosperity but to civic virtue and harmony.

  • Peter Cooper wanted his graduates to acquire the technical mastery and entrepreneurial skills, enrich their intellects and spark their creativity, and develop a sense of social justice that would translate into action.