In this campfire session, Eliza Gregory and Emily Merrifield will present their work with a photography history course and solicit feedback and dialogue from participants around alternative pedagogical structures for teaching visual literacy, research, and the value of original scholarship. The Sacramento State context comes with specific challenges—students are often food and housing insecure, provide caregiving for family members, work full time while attending school, and many are first generation to college. Figuring out how to push students intellectually while they are dealing with profound logistical challenges on a daily basis is difficult. We will also be eager to connect with colleagues around how to meet students where they are, and evaluate what skills are most crucial to their success going forward, while operating within a vast bureaucracy with little formal support for pedagogical innovation.
