Author: ctecoop1

While sitting in an 8:30 morning class of over 100 students with caffeine as the sole driving force for consciousness it is easy to overlook the dynamics at play. It is easy to miss the carefully structured slides made with purpose to be as accessible as possible. As you pull your iClicker out it is easy to miss how each question was designed according to Bloom’s Taxonomy so that concepts are tested at different levels of comprehension. Designing a lecture that keeps everyone’s abilities in mind is not a simple task.

Upon starting to work at Centre for Teaching Excellence (CTE) I had no idea how many resources and mechanisms are in place to allow the teaching community at the University of Waterloo to continually improve. There is undoubtedly a necessary push to keep up with the ever-changing technology in the classroom but the aspect of being inclusive is not always as clear cut. It amazed me to see how many faculty and staff members at the university took time out of their day to participate in workshops at the CTE such as “CTE779: Accessibility in Teaching”. Teaching staff do not just settle and do their required job but rather look for ways to learn and improve their teaching methods so that their students get the most out of each lecture.

From an undergraduate student perspective it is comforting to know that there is genuinely a concern for creating the best learning environment where lessons learned will be fundamental in any future academic endeavors. It is through constant self-assessment and passion for teaching others that our community excels as a world-leading university.

Photo taken at the 2016 Teaching and Learning Conference by CTE Staff

In early June, I had the pleasure of going to the Waterloo Aboriginal Education Centre (WAEC) at St. Paul’s University College with my colleagues from the Centre for Teaching Excellence (CTE). Our Centre went to WAEC for our annual Professional Development Day where we learned more about each other through various activities. One of the activities that stood out for me was indicating on a map where we live, where we are from, and where our roots originate. This activity allowed us to see that we all come from different places around the world, but we come together to make the CTE team. This activity also showed that we all have unique experiences, and we should use those experiences to help the Centre, and each other grow.

We also learned more about Truth and Reconciliation while at the WAEC. We were taken through a blanket activity (an example of a blanket activity can be seen on the left) that acted as a simulation of the history of what aboriginal people had experienced. Our staff started out standing on some blankets that were spread across the floor (to form one large blanket representing Turtle Island), but as the activity went on, the blankets kept getting folded in and shrinking the space we had to stand on (representing the lands that were taken from the aboriginals). In addition, some people were taken from the main group and told to stand on a separate blanket (representing a residential school). Other members of our group were told that they had to leave the blanket because they had become a lawyer or doctor (aboriginals lost their status if they became certain professions), or because they had gotten a deadly disease that was brought by the settlers. By the end of the activity, there were only 3 out of about 26 people still standing on the blankets that had been significantly reduced in size. The activity opened my eyes to some of the hardships that the aboriginal people have been through.

Overall, I thought the day was a success. I was able to learn more about myself and my colleagues, while also learning a bit more about the history and hardships of aboriginal people.

Photo taken by Bernard Clark at Queen’s University, Creative Commons (found on Flickr)