TYCA-SW 2024: Possibilities and Potentials

Graduate school never offered a class about teaching through a pandemic. Or teaching through a massive shift to online learning. Or teaching through politically motivated censorship and content bans that make “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion” into negative things. Or teaching through increased awareness of A.I. generated writing. We’ve had so many tensions, traumas, and trials in the last three years—and if we’re still in the classroom, what has kept us there?

In a 1990 interview, Paulo Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed [1968], Pedagogy of Hope [1992]) spoke about how important conflicts and breaks in tradition are for knowledge making and creativity, calling these moments ruptura—and declaring “there is no human existence without ruptura” (We Make the Road by Walking, p. 38). While he was talking about students and their learning, we might think about how we have used ruptura—we’ve had no shortage of them—to explore, to innovate, and to try something new in our teaching. Freire told us more than 30 years ago that tensions (the “ruptures” in our normal) could be good, so this conference asks members to consider his decades’ old assertion that we need these moments to make things better.

The 2024 TYCA-SW Annual Conference invites members to explore how we’ve used our ruptura moments to find the possibilities in our classrooms, to rethink approaches to teaching and learning, and to change what we do, even in the smallest of ways. What important conversations have we had spurred forward by three years of constant change? What changes have we made in the classroom that we’re happy to have made, even if it came from a site of stress? What questions do we want to explore as we continue forward?

Host or Publisher TYCA-SW 2018