
Convocation
About
Each year, the TLC hosts a convocation to bring together educators across the campus and from the local community to explore significant topics in teaching and learning in higher education. Each year’s keynote address is free and open to the public.
Convocation 2023
Liberation Pedagogy: bell hooks and Teaching/Learning as Emancipatory Practice
Thursday April 27, 2023 | 5:45 – 7:30 pm
Reception at 5:00 & Lecture at 5:45 | University Center

UC Santa Cruz’s Teaching and Learning Center (TLC) held our 2023 Convocation featuring Founding Director Jody Greene. From its foundation, the TLC has drawn inspiration and wisdom from the work of the late bell hooks, educational visionary and early proponent of active and activist learning. According to hooks, our practices of teaching and learning can and should be as transformative and revolutionary as what we teach. More than three decades ago, not long after she finished her graduate work on this campus, hooks offered us a roadmap to transform educational practice to be equitable, student-centered, relationship-rich, and dynamically engaged. In this talk, Jody revisited hooks’ influence on recent efforts to reshape teaching and learning at UC Santa Cruz as it takes up the challenge of being a genuinely minority-serving institution.
In June, Founding Director Jody Greene will be stepping down to make way for new leadership for the Center in the next phase of its evolution.
This program is made possible by generous funding and support from UCSC’s Executive Vice Chancellor/Campus Provost and is co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute.
About the Speaker
Jody Greene came to UC Santa Cruz in 1998 and has served as Professor of Literature, Feminist Studies, and the History of Consciousness. Their research interests include seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British literature; non-dualist Western philosophy, especially the work of Spivak, Derrida, and Nancy; human rights and international law; queer studies; and the history of literary discourse and literary institutions.
Recent publications include a collection, co-edited with Sharif Youssef, The Hostile Takeover: Human Rights after Corporate Personhood (Toronto, 2020), and op-eds in publications such as The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed. They are the recipient of the UCSC Humanities Division John Dizikes Teaching Award (2008), the Disability Resource Center Champion of Change Award (2018), and, twice, of the UCSC Academic Senate Excellence in Teaching Award (2001, 2014). In 2016, they were appointed the founding Director of the Center for Innovations in Teaching and Learning (CITL), and they now serve as UCSC’s first Associate Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning. In 2021, they were appointed Special Advisor to the CP/EVC for Educational Equity and Academic Success.