Getting Started
Welcome to Teaching Citational Practice! The following pages will serve as your entrypoint into the TCP curriculum. In this “Getting Started” section, you’ll learn more about:
- The origins of the TCP curriculum
- Definitions and stakes of citational practice
- Definitions of critical feminist pedagogy
- How we’re applying critical feminism
- Some of our sources of inspiration
TCP started in the spring of 2021 with a two-part workshop designed and facilitated by TCP co-founders Cat Lambert and Diana Newby. The workshop, “Citational Practice as Critical Feminist Pedagogy,” took place at Columbia University's Center for Teaching & Learning as part of the Center's "Learning Community" series. Our workshop was attended by around 30 graduate students hailing from a range of disciplines. Over the course of two meetings, participants engaged in readings, discussions, and reflections about the implications of traditional approaches to practicing and teaching citation in academic contexts.
Our conversations in the workshop series focused on a number of specific “problems areas” in traditional citational practices: areas, in short, where citational practices tend to reproduce exclusionary epistemological and political hierarchies. To address those problem areas, participants designed and workshopped original instructional resources that could be used for teaching citational practice in ways that dismantle those hierarchies instead of reproducing them. Our goal was for each participant to leave the workshop series with a tangible, practical artifact that could be immediately applied in their own classroom, as a tool for enacting more equitable and empowering approaches to teaching citation and research.
When our workshop series concluded, we invited interested participants to revise their original instructional resources for submission to an open-access pedagogy publication. While our volunteers worked on revising their resources, Cat and Diana collaborated with Columbia University Libraries to develop a digital platform for hosting the resource collection. The result was TCP, and our first published collection features the work of six contributors who also participated in our Spring 2021 workshop series: Sandra Chiritescu, Emily FitzGerald, Emma Ianni, Shanelle Kim, Cosima Mattner, and Lilith Todd. We are deeply grateful for their individual and collective commitment to this project, which would not have been possible without the support of their time, energy, and vision.
From the beginning, TCP has centered and depended on the labor and ideas of graduate students. Although we hope and anticipate that the resources collated here will be of use to instructors at all levels, we want to emphasize that the majority of the work that TCP represents is graduate student-authored. Through this emphasis, we call attention to a body of work and a group of workers that are among those regularly marginalized or overlooked in traditional citational practices. It has been our shared experience, across the various pedagogical circles which Cat and Diana inhabit, that graduate students are frequently at the forefront of the most pressing conversations about teaching, as well as behind the most crucial interventions into curricular structures and classroom practices. We see TCP as a celebration of graduate student contributions to pedagogies for a more just and equitable future of academia.
Image Source: Alfons Morales on Unsplash