SEATTLE —
About 4,500 scholars are convening in Seattle this week for the 135th annual Modern Language Association (MLA) Convention.
The first day of sessions was a smorgasbord of hands-on professional development workshops, deep-dive literary lectures, small group discussions and panels on the academy. But it also showed the association dipping its toe into relatively new waters, with an emerging emphasis on pedagogy and the humanities at community colleges.
“In recent years, teaching and pedagogy has become a little bit more prominent. The two-year college [focus] I think is pretty recent,” said Dr. Sean Gerrity, an assistant professor of English at Hostos Community College. Still, “it’s kind of a relegated side thing.”
He noted that more Ph.D. recipients with a literature focus are getting jobs at community college, where they mostly teach writing.
“They weren’t trained in writing pedagogy,” he said. “For us, there’s a kind of void there. We’re being trained to do one thing and hired to do another thing that’s sort of different. We all know how to write but we haven’t been trained extensively on how to teach how to write.”
He co-organized a session with Hostos Community College Assistant Professor of English Dr. Alexandra Milsom called “Antiracist Pedagogy and Assessment at the Community College,” a wide-ranging panel discussion on techniques for more equitable teaching.
