About the Pedagogy Lab
The BBQ+ Pedagogy Lab is a speculative space where educators of all kinds collaboratively envision and create new futures for their teaching, their students, and education as a whole. We believe that education at all levels should be accessible, life-affirming, exploratory, and empowering. We nurture and promote the undervalued craft of teaching.
Our major initiatives include our open educational resources, annual Pedagogy Conference, and summer fellowship.
Summer fellowship
Our annual summer Pedagogy Fellowship brings scholars and educators together for a two-month immersive, collaborative, and interdisciplinary experience. Participants receive mentorship and support as they develop equity-driven open educational resource (OER) audio shorts around a particular theme.
Our 2023-24 Pedagogy Lab theme is Horror, Haunting, and History.
OER Library
We host a growing library of open educational resources (OERs) that explore the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, socioeconomic status, and colonialism. These include BBQ+’s podcasts, as well as our summer Pedagogy Fellows’ OER audio shorts, which blend guided meditation, storytelling, oral history, and podcast.
Whether you’re in K-12, higher education, or beyond, we welcome you to integrate our OER resources into your own teaching!
Pedagogy Conference
Unruly Bodies, our second annual Pedagogy Conference, took place March 2-4, 2023 — as always, free, fully virtual, and open to all. Thank you to everyone who made this event possible. We can’t wait to be with you again next year for Horror, Haunting, and History!
Explore the Unruly Bodies Playkit, curated from the resources that presenters shared at the conference.
News & events
Our history and vision
The BBQ+ Pedagogy Lab launched in 2020 under the leadership of Dr. Caitlin Gunn.
The Lab is a speculative space where educators of all kinds collaboratively envision and create new futures for their teaching, their students, and education as a whole. We believe that education at all levels should be accessible, life-affirming, exploratory, and empowering. It should cultivate individual liberation, empathy for others, and a stronger sense of connection and shared responsibility among people.
We nurture and promote the undervalued craft of teaching, and we challenge the idea that learning outside of academia is inherently less rigorous and valuable. Within the Lab, educators from different backgrounds and settings receive support, ask questions in community, and connect to teachers, activists, and leaders with similar investments in liberatory education.
Educational environments are often the site of mismanaged power and punitive authority figures. We strive to create new realities by grounding ourselves in the critical pedagogy traditions of bell hooks and Paulo Freire, and in Black futurist speculative visions of what the future could be. We see liberatory education as a beautiful inevitability that we must continually struggle to achieve across generations. We take on projects and ideas that support that future.
Our goal is to position ourselves at the forefront of a changing pedagogical landscape—one which offers more time, money, and research to spend on advancing radical pedagogical approaches in K-12 settings, higher education, and community learning.
Collaborations
We are eager to exchange ideas and resources, plan events together, and explore synergies with like-minded people, organizations, and institutions. If you would like to partner with the lab, email caitlin_gunn@bbqplus.org.
The Lab is sponsored by a generous grant from the Hewlett Foundation as part of its support for innovations in open education.
Please visit our support page to learn how you can contribute to the continuation of our work.