[csaa-forum] Disciplining Innovation: new learning and teaching in media and cultural studies, Nov.21

[Nicole Matthews]

Disciplining Innovation: new learning and teaching in 
Nov.21st, Macquarie University, C5C 498

Keynote speaker: Prof. Meaghan Morris, Lingnan University

All are welcome to attend this free colloquium

As disciplines heavily invested in making sense of the contemporary
world, media and cultural studies are constantly engaging with new
examples, new technologies, new political contexts and even new
theoretical paradigms. The progressive political ethos of many working
in this field makes many of us sympathetic to pedagogical innovations
that promise to shake up existing practices, hierarchies and
conventions.  

However, the new offers threats as well as opportunities to our
disciplines.  This colloquium will consider how we should teach media &
cultural studies in a changing world of environmental crisis,
globalization, continuing demands for social justice and rapidly
shifting communications technologies and practices.  At the same time it
will address the politics of “new pedagogies” in institutions
preoccupied by audit cultures and "instrumental progressivism".  

Some questions we will be discussion:

* How do we avoid being drawn into the hyperbolic claims of newness we
use in our own learning grant applications – and continue to
acknowledge the role of collaboration in developing innovative
curricula?  

* How can we use educational technologies without falling prey to
utopianism or technological determinism? 

* Can the “soft” money of learning and teaching initiatives and
pilots be used to compensate for the long-term under-funding of
Australian higher education?  

* How do we recognise and reward excellence in teaching practices that
are not new?

* How do we connect our educational innovations to our interest in
social justice?


If you would like to come, please register your interest with Nicole
Matthews (Nicole.matthews at scmp.mq.edu.au) by Tuesday, November 18.

For more information, see
http://www.ccs.mq.edu.au/current_events.php?news=58#58