Connecting you to influential authors – one webinar at a time.

Join SAGE's new and best-selling authors for SAGE talks webinars!

Designed for various levels of faculty and students, these engaging webinars will help you learn more about our authors, textbooks, and initiatives. SAGE talks webinars offer you the opportunity to closely interact with authors as they explore some of today's top trends and discussions within the worlds of Social, Behavioral, and Health Sciences.

Coming soon!

Accessibility for Every Brain: Tips for Facilitating a Neurodiverse Classroom

This webinar, led by Krisstal D. Clayton, will provide an introduction to neurodiversity in the classroom and how restructuring your syllabus, assignments, and course materials can enhance everyone's learning. Tips will focus on providing all students with a more accessible learning environment that includes ADA compliance, flexibility, clear instructions, and team-building. 

Inclusive pedagogy for neurodivergent students has been, and remains, a focus for Dr. Clayton. Her course materials demonstrate that persons who identify as neurodivergent are an asset in the workforce and also enhance team performance. To facilitate an inclusive classroom, Dr. Clayton consistently implements teaching strategies that she learned in collaboration with experts in neurodiversity such as Hiren Shulka of the EY Neurodiverse Center for Excellence, and specialized training which includes her completion of the Understanding and Supporting Diverse Learning course with Landmark College, and several workshops on diversity and inclusive learning at the University of North Texas, the National Institute for the Teaching of Psychology (NITOP), and the Worcester Polytechnic Institute Center for Project-Based Learning.

Krisstal D. Clayton is also co-author of Essentials of Psychology. 
 

Check out our other webinars:

Classroom Conversations on DEI in a Global Context: 5 Common Questions Students Ask about DEI and How to Engage Them in Productive Conversations

Led by Professor and SAGE author Michàlle Mor Barak, this webinar focuses on the advantages of applying a global lens to teaching diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).

You will examine 5 common questions students ask about DEI and explore research that supports the benefits of DEI in organizations. The author will provide this information and will present her original model, pointing to additional advantages to society as a whole. You will also hear about common challenges, difficulties and obstacles encountered when building inclusive programs. Finally, you will learn about classroom activities and assignments that promote the understanding of DEI in organizations. 

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Strategies for Engaging Criminal Justice Students in Critical Thinking

This webinar, led by Professor Aaron Fichtelberg, focuses on developing a classroom where students are open to critical approaches to criminal justice.  
 
Many students begin their studies of criminal justice with commonly held “good guy/bad guy” narratives regarding the criminal justice system and are often resistant to a critical perspective on the issue.  A lecturer who is too strident in how they approach the material can easily lead students to resist critical insights or simply to refuse to engage with the material.

In recent years, however, many young people, particularly those from marginalized groups, have begun to become far more skeptical about the benevolence of the criminal justice system as groups like the Black Lives Matter movement have begun to force discussions of systemic inequalities into the public sphere.  Therefore, it has only become more important the professors of criminal justice help students understand the validity of these critical views regardless of whether their students agree with them.
This webinar will focus on how professors can maintain a classroom that helps otherwise skeptical students to open to a critical perspective on the criminal justice system.  It will emphasize classroom strategies and teaching tips that will help students see criminal justice in a critical light without alienating or offending students who may disagree with such an approach. 

Finally, the webinar will discuss bigger questions about what it means to be critical in the classroom.

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Changing the Conversation: 5 tips for re-energizing your Interpersonal Communication course

This webinar, led by Professors Laura Guerrero and Bree McEwan, focuses on reimagining the structure of the introductory-level course, to focus on what IPC does, rather than what IPC is.

Research in the area of interpersonal communication is interdisciplinary and has expanded over the past few decades into a body of knowledge that helps people understand how interpersonal communication functions in our everyday lives.

A course that focuses on key functions of interpersonal communication, such as forming and managing impressions, communicating across cultures, and developing, maintaining, and ending relationships speaks to students’ lived experiences.

This webinar focuses on how you can:

• reorganize your course to reflect the current research;
• incorporate active learning into the course, through the use of discussion boards and a flipped classroom design;
• use examples and facilitate class discussion with a focus on how today’s students use technology to communicate;
• approach teaching the course online.

Finally, Professors Guerrero and McEwan will share ideas for assignments that help students better understand and critically think about how interpersonal communication works.

Laura Guerrero and Bree McEwan are authors of Interpersonal Encounters: Connecting Through Communication.

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Teaching Policing During a Time of Change: Classroom Discussions on Race, Gender, and Reform

This webinar includes a discussion on teaching policing courses during a time when societal expectations and perceptions of policing are changing in the United States. The authors talk about their experiences in the classroom where they have effectively engaged students in conversations regarding race, gender, and police reform. They provide tips on how to create a classroom environment that encourages students to use critical thinking skills and to apply concepts and ideas from class to real world situations.  

Carol Archbold identifies ways to incorporate race and gender into the history of American policing so that students can make connections between historical and contemporary issues.  She also provides suggestions to engage students in discussions on police accountability, and how to manage conversations in class between students who criticize the police and students who dislike criticism of the police.     

Carol Huynh talks about being mindful of your audience when discussing issues of race, perceptions of the police, and police-citizen interactions.  She also highlights the importance of talking about gender and racial diversity within police agencies, and the ways that inclusion could influence police culture within police organizations.    

Tom Mrozla explains how he incorporates research into conversations about police effectiveness in his classroom, and why it is important to discuss how some police operations can disproportionately impact communities of color.  He also identifies ways to include current events (such as defunding the police and eliminating low level traffic stops) into discussions and classroom activities associated with police effectiveness.        

Carol Archbold, Carol Huynh, and Tom Mrozla are authors of Policing: The Essentials.

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Myths and Realities of U.S. Inequalities

SAGE authors Mark Robert Rank (Washington University-St. Louis) and Dawne M. Mouzon (Rutgers University) lead a presentation and discussion on some “Myths and Realities of U.S. Inequalities.”

Mark Rank addresses Five Myths About Poverty: 

• Poverty happens to other people
• Most of the poor live in inner cities
• America’ poor can rise from rags to riches with hard work
• Poverty is the result of individual failure
• America’s poor are comparatively well off

Prof. Rank is the author of Confronting Poverty: Economic Hardship in the United States (January, 2021) and other scholarly works on U.S. poverty.

Dawne Mouzon addresses Five Myths About Black Americans’ Health:

• Poor health outcomes for Black Americans are due to poor health choices
• Black American are less healthy than White Americans because of their lower socioeconomic status
• Racism primarily affects mental health, not physical health
• Black Americans have more mental health problems than White Americans
• Distrust of medicine is primarily about historical events like the Tuskegee Syphilis experiment

Prof. Mouzon is the author of Health and Inequality: The Social Origins of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities (forthcoming) Her work on this topic also appears in Getting Real About Race, edited by Stephanie McClure and Cherise Harris (Third Edition, forthcoming fall 2021).

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White supremacy, “post-truth,” and the failure of imagination: An intercultural praxis approach

Kathryn Sorrells - California State University, Northridge

The first weeks of January 2021 brought several of our nation’s deep, enduring, painful and unaddressed failures into stark relief. Millions watched the violent storming of the Capitol by self-identified white nationalists and Trump supporters, ending with five people dead. What just happened? How could it have happened? Is this the beginning or end? In our so-called post-truth era, more information emerges, interpretations abound, and spin turns to dismissal and denial of facts. Yet, much has been revealed as the insurrection and the treatment of white nationalist insurrectionists is juxtaposed with the atrocities of racial injustice and the Black Lives Matter movement for intersectional justice.

How can we, as educators, engage our students in making sense of these critical issues? How can we use the classroom to harness our current moment and augment the shift in individual and collective awareness? How can we support students’ in translating increased awareness into responsible action for social justice? Using an intercultural praxis approach, Kathryn Sorrells addresses the pitfalls and possibilities of dismantling white supremacy, grappling with “post-truth” realities, and re-imagining our roles in creating a just, multicultural nation and world.

Kathryn Sorrells is a professor of Communication Studies and author of Intercultural Communication: Globalization and Social Justice.

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Teaching Evaluation That Supports Social Justice and Social Change

This webinar highlights strategies for teaching and implementing evaluation approaches that are guided by values of social justice, cultural competence, contextual sensitivity, and community/stakeholder engagement. The presenters are Veronica Thomas from Howard University and Ryan Kilmer from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Dr. Thomas discusses how instructors can include pedagogical content and strategies to help students identify and work through bias and unchallenged assumptions and to acquire the skillset and sensibilities to plan quality evaluations tied to social justice aims. She provides illustrative examples of how issues of social justice, diversity, and inclusion can be at the center, rather than the margins, of the teaching of evaluation. Dr. Kilmer describes a partnership-based approach to evaluation and strategies for students to learn by doing. He discusses recommendations for how to build partnerships characterized by shared knowledge and collaborative processes; evaluations that yield actionable guidance for programs, organizations, and systems; and real-world opportunities for students to learn to develop pragmatic and usable evaluations that facilitate social and community change. Collectively, these presentations provide instructors with insights for helping students build evaluation skills and knowledge that are applicable across various settings and contexts and that address some of the challenges of conducting evaluations with diverse populations and partners.

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Preparing Today's PR Students to Lead in Times of Change and Challenge 

In this webinar, authors Janis Teruggi Page and Lawrence Parnell cover diversity in PR history and highlight PR’s role in social responsibility engagement. They discuss how various companies are implementing crisis management during a pandemic. And they highlight the digital skills essential to prepare PR students for their careers. The presentation gives you tips and resources to help prepare current PR students to be leaders in times of change and challenge.

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Top tips for switching to teaching remotely with Tom Chatfield and Elspeth Timmans

In response to the COVID-19 outbreak, many universities around the world are having to switch to online teaching and remote learning at scale and at speed. To support faculty in the challenges switching to teaching remotely brings, we hosted a webinar on how online teaching can be done right. Watch our webinar recording where online learning expert, Dr Tom Chatfield, and instructional designer extraordinaire, Elspeth Timmans, discuss top tips for switching to teaching remotely.

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Having Conversations About Race in the Classroom

Please join us for a webinar with SAGE author and activist Stephanie Jirard for a discussion about “Having Conversations About Race in the Classroom.” The powerful protests of the past few weeks sparked by the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, and other injustices are giving voice to the profound changes needed in our country, in our communities, in our families, and in our individual lives to bring attention to and end systemic racism and inequality, but also in the classroom. The just, equitable, and thriving future we all hope for will depend in large part on how courageous each of us is willing to be to have difficult conversations with each other and those around us on and off campus. In this webinar, Stephanie Jirard will offer suggestions on how to approach this topic in the classroom to help prepare students to have these conversation and to facilitate critical thinking, social justice, and change.

Stephanie Jirard is the Title IX Coordinator and a professor of Criminal Justice at Shippensburg University and has received training on how to lead Courageous Conversations on race. Prior to teaching at Shippensburg, she was a Lieutenant in the U.S. Navy's Judge Advocate General's Corps and served as a trial attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Division; a federal prosecutor at the U.S. Attorney's Office; an assistant Public defender at the Federal Public Defender’s Office; and a death-penalty defense lawyer with the Missouri Public Defender’s Capital Litigation Unit. As a professional coach, she also provides training on diversity and inclusion to organizations and agencies surrounding race, gender, LGBTQ, mental health, and the differently-abled.

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Using Courseware in Criminal Justice Courses

In this webinar, Mary Dodge shares about how she has been successful using courseware in her criminal justice classroom, how this has had a positive impact on her teaching, and what her students' responses have been.

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