Associate Professor of Philosophy Russell Marcus recently organized AAPT 2020: Anti-Racist and Pandemic Pedagogies Workshop that took place via Hamilton’s Zoom account. He was also one of the main conference organizers and is on the board of directors.
The AAPT (American Association of Philosophy Teachers) is an international organization dedicated to the advancement of the art of teaching philosophy.
Russell said AAPT ordinarily runs a biennial workshop-conference, and would have met at Otterbein University in Ohio but for the pandemic. Instead, AAPT ran a three-day workshop with a keynote panel on anti-racist pedagogy, a keynote panel on pandemic pedagogy, two three-day workshop series on the same topics, and a closing event full of presentations.
The workshops were modeled after design sprints, developing tools, in teams of people from all over, to be used in classes in the fall. The workshop had well over 100 attendees from all over the country and Canada, including Sara Purinton '17, now a philosophy grad student at Penn. Among the 22 other college and universities represented were Bowling Green, University of British Columbia, Texas A&M, Stanford, Auburn, and Beloit.
Marcus said Abbi Tushingham in LITS was extraordinary in helping set up and run the workshop-conference.
