Wed, Oct 9, 8:30 am – 11:30 am

“But How Do We Do It?” Implementing Student-Faculty Partnerships in SoTL

Facilitated By: Catherine Bovill, Peter Felten, Nattalia Godbold, Ketevan Kupatadze, Michael Paniagua Jr., and Cherie Woolmer

Partnerships between students and faculty/staff in SoTL is potentially transformative, providing shared spaces and processes to enhance teaching and learning. While there is a growing body of evidence that demonstrates the value of this approach to inquiry, it can be challenging to know how to develop and implement partnership in SoTL. How do we actually do it? The aim of this workshop is to equip participants with tools to put SoTL partnerships into action by: i) critically reflecting on the meaning of and values inherent in partnership practices; ii) analyzing illustrative examples of SoTL co-inquiry, and iii) supporting participants to develop/refine a SoTL inquiry project that could be conducted in partnership, including learning techniques for enabling success in this project. Drawing on facilitators’ experiences and frameworks for conceptualizing partnerships in SoTL, we will explore both possibilities and challenges – paying particular attention to being inclusive, managing risks and failures, negotiating power, and ensuring joint ownership of the outcomes. We hope the workshop will spark critical examination of and reflection on what SoTL partnerships might look like in various domains and in diverse contexts. We encourage workshop participants to come with a student or faculty/staff partner.

Smashing Disciplinary Borders with SoTL Methodologies

Facilitated By: Janice Miller-Young and Neil Haave

There are many ways to think about learning, based in part upon disciplinary differences in views about the nature of knowledge and how it is acquired. As we search for ways to study and improve our teaching so that it results in student learning, it is useful to be explicit about what we mean by learning and thus how we will recognize whether it has happened or not. In this interactive workshop, we will discuss broad categories of learning theories, methodologies, and evidence; participants will have a chance to not only see what features seem to fit their own orientation but also to explore others’. We will discuss how a broader knowledge of learning theories can help us expand our own repertoire of teaching strategies, articulate better research questions about teaching and learning, and break down barriers within the multidisciplinary field of SoTL.

Guerilla Leadership Revisited: Troubling Metaphors, Strategic Leadership and Social Change – Cancelled

Facilitated By: Claire Hamshire, Rachel Forsyth, Paul Taylor, Jessica Riddell, Heather Smith

A guerrilla-style approach to leadership informed by Che Guevara’s handbook on guerrilla warfare (1961) is a theoretical model of leadership in higher education that takes as its starting point the need to enact culture change at the grassroots level and design nimble, strategic approaches to dismantling or maneuvering around structural and systemic challenges. The metaphor, we have found, provides insights into power, embedded ideologies, structural and institutional obstacles to social change. However, previous guerilla leadership workshops conducted have led us to revisit the metaphor. For some the metaphor represents a ‘call to arms’. others have expressed deep discomfort with any metaphor that deploys war or conflict, especially in an era of violent backlash to progressive agendas. Our pre-conference session will ‘trouble’ the metaphor of guerilla leadership. We aim to reframe the discussion of strategic action and its underlying trajectory of hope in order to equip participants with critical pedagogical insights, a theoretical lens for culture change embedded in the values of social justice, and a practical tool box for anchoring this model in practice(s). Together we will reflect on why we need change, what we hope for and how, collectively, we can create an action plan for the future.

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Wed, Oct 9, 1:30 pm – 4:30 pm

What Works, Why, Where and How: Global Lessons in Influencing SoTL Culture and Leading Change in Institution

Facilitated By: Chng Huang Hoon, Mills Kelly, Lee Kooi Cheng, and Wu Siew Mei

All of us who manage change at different organizational and regional levels have encountered colleagues who resist change, and institutional leaders whose job is to foster a ‘better’ culture for the future. Whatever our beliefs and assumptions are towards change, and depending on the role(s) we assume, change management requires persistence, and thoughtful, sustained responses. This workshop focuses on the strategies for fostering SoTL in (research-intensive) institutions at curriculum, department, institutional, regional and global levels. In the spirit of promoting “SoTL without borders”, we draw on Roxa, Martensson and Alverteg’s (2010) networked approach to culture change and Martensson and Roxa’s (2016) concept of local level leadership to showcase different change initiatives within and beyond our institutional and geographical domains. We offer all participants an interactive platform to discuss and debate about the strategies that have or have not worked in fostering SoTL in different locations.

Writing for Publication in SoTL without Borders

Facilitated By: Mick Healey and Ruth Healey

In writing about SoTL, is developing your own voice and identity part of, or distinct from, learning to write in multiple genres? Should you write about what you already know, or learn what you want to say through writing? In this highly interactive workshop, we will try to resist such ‘either/or’ formulations or ‘borders’. Drawing on material from a book Mick is co-authoring with Kelly Matthews and Alison Cook-Sather on Writing about learning and teaching in HE, we will unpack some of the mysteries of publishing. We will help colleagues develop their voices through valuing the variety of writing genres (including empirical research articles, conceptual research articles, literature reviews, opinion pieces, case studies, and reflective essays) and publication outlets (including subscription and open access; disciplinary and transdisciplinary; refereed and non-refereed; journals and blogs). In short, we argue that there is no one-way of going about writing for publication in SoTL. The intended audience is primarily faculty/staff and students who have limited experience of publishing about their SoTL work. However, our approach and strategies should also support and guide more experienced colleagues to rethink some of their writing practices. Participants are asked to bring an abstract (150-200 words) and title of a SoTL article that they would like to write for publication in a genre and outlet of their choice

Using SoTL to Improve the Design and implementation of Teaching Examples for Student Learning

Facilitated By: Stephen L. Chew

The use of examples to improve student learning is common to virtually all teaching methods. Research on examples shows, however, that designing good examples and implementing them effectively is far from straightforward, and bad examples can actually undermine learning. Examples that are clear to faculty may not be clear to students. Students may not know how to use examples to improve their understanding. In this workshop, I will introduce a cognitive framework to guide the development and implementation of examples. Participants are encouraged to share their own favorite teaching examples (or ones that have failed) with other participants. The goal of this workshop is help participants learn to design and implement examples based on cognitive and pedagogical research to improve student learning in their particular teaching context.

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