Originally founded in the summer of 2020, the Columbia English Department’s Pedagogy Colloquium was first created in response to the exigency generated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the consequent shift to emergency remote instruction. Over that summer, a series of teaching initiatives organized in the form of workshops led by English faculty members highlighted the need for resources and support for online teaching, as well as a lively interest in dialogue about pedagogical content. The colloquium also grew out of prior conversations among faculty and graduate students about the importance of having a formalized space for discussing teaching principles, strategies, and needs that are specific to both literary studies and our institutional context at Columbia’s English and Comparative Literature department. At its inception, ours was the only graduate student colloquium dedicated uniquely to pedagogy active in an Ivy League English department.
For the 2026-27 academic year, the Pedagogy Colloquium’s website and blog are being revived, partly in response to ongoing changes to graduate teaching opportunities that necessitate reevaluating the spaces and resources needed for graduate teaching development. Our hope is that, moving forward, the colloquium blog can archive pedagogy-related events and conversations in collaboration with the department’s Lead Teaching Fellows and serve as the home of a larger English and Comparative Literature teaching resources database collating teaching materials from faculty, graduate students, and alumni of the department.
More broadly, the Pedagogy Colloquium continues to be invested in the following:
- Assisting in graduate students’ general pedagogical development
- Enabling dialogue specifically among graduate students about pedagogy, by providing opportunities for safe and private discussions on a range of topics related to teaching in the department
- Enabling dialogue about pedagogy among graduate students and faculty alike, through events that are open to both graduate students and faculty, including those from other departments
- Creating space for discipline-specific pedagogical strategies and topics
- Responding to community needs and interests regarding pedagogical content
- Preserving institutional memory on teaching practices, opportunities, and resources for Columbia’s English, Comparative Literature, and Theater graduate students
- Fostering community among departmental Lead Teaching Fellows and facilitating liaising work between the department and the Center for Teaching and Learning