Category: About the Centre

Maryellen Weimer at 2011 Presidents’ Colloquium – Trevor Holmes

Annually, Waterloo’s two presidents (the President, and the Faculty Association President) host a special guest on campus to talk about teaching and learning. These guests are recognized specialists in some branch or another of higher education. This year we are honoured to hear from Maryellen Weimer, whom I’ve hosted in other settings and with whom I’ve been lucky enough to spend time at teaching conferences. Dr. Weimer is the long-time editor of the Teaching Professor Newsletter, and has also published books about pedagogical scholarship, learner-centered teaching, and techniques for instructional improvement. She manages both to be generously humane and caustically funny (sometimes in the same breath). Last time we spoke, I recall a debate erupting about why she rejected the “Scholarship of Teaching and Learning” (SoTL) label in favour of “pedagogical scholarship”; and yet she has been invited to speak at a SoTL conference about SoTL work. I’ll be very curious to hear how she frames this more defined field of study now that its name and practices have become somewhat more solidified by way of journals, professional organisations, and books.

Can Scholarly Work on Teaching and Learning Actually Improve my Teaching?
Presidents’ Colloquium: Opening Keynote: Dr. Maryellen Weimer

“Books, journals, and articles on teaching and learning date back to the early 1900s – some even before that. All these materials have one thing in common: few educators read them. What can be learned from this literature? Is research a useful resource faculty need for self-improvement as teachers? Are fellow teachers the ones best suited to research and write about teaching and learning? How is this pedagogical scholarship alike and different from discipline-based research? In this keynote, Maryellen Weimer explores answers to these questions. Whether engaging in a thoughtful reflection of classroom experience or an empirical endeavour that answers a pragmatic question, post-secondary teachers can use the scholarship of colleagues not only to enlarge their understanding of teaching and learning, but also to increase their effectiveness in the classroom. Illustrative examples will offer a range of new ideas, interesting findings, and provocative points to consider.”

Please join us for the Presidents’ Colloquium April 27 2011 in Hagey Hall 1101 (the new wing of Hagey). No registration required for this special keynote event (a free and open part of the longer Opportunities and New Directions Conference, for which registration is required — we can still take a few more people for OND if you are interested!).

The Power of Community — Donna Ellis

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what we’re trying to accomplish in CTE (one of those off-shoots of having to prepare for a job interview!) and I keep coming back to building community and building capacity.  While it’s important to build capacity Continue reading The Power of Community — Donna Ellis

Eric Mazur to visit Waterloo campus – Trevor Holmes

Renowned physics education pioneer Eric Mazur will be at Waterloo Dec 1 2010. Before there were clickers, before there was a “Force Concept Inventory,” Mazur was developing “interactive engagement” or peer instruction (see a two-minute video here).

The talk is co-sponsored by Physics and Astronomy and the Centre for Teaching Excellence. Here’s the ad: Continue reading Eric Mazur to visit Waterloo campus – Trevor Holmes

Teaching Certificate Programs are becoming more popular world-wide! –Arash Shahi

In my days as an undergraduate engineering student, I was rather disappointed with the teaching quality in a number of my classes. To me, it seemed as some of my high school teachers could do a much better teaching job than some of our first year instructors. Throughout my undergraduate and graduate degrees, I started to pick on the trends of good professors and I couldn’t help but notice that most of our younger professors were much more interested in teaching than the older ones. Continue reading Teaching Certificate Programs are becoming more popular world-wide! –Arash Shahi

Collaborative presentation challenges through metaphor – Trevor Holmes

worldmap

Recently I attended the biennial conference of the International Consortium of Educational Development (ICED), an organisation that brings together national Societies for higher education development, research, and practice. The conference crosses borders quite literally (it rotates around different continents), and the opportunities for intercultural learning are rich. My fourth ICED helped me to recharge my intellectual and practical batteries, and so I thought I would share some experiences on our CTE blog over the next weeks, beginning with a presentation in which I was involved (because I can remember it quickly and Mark is after me to get a blog entry done!).

A bunch of folks from the Challenging Academic Development collective (formed some years ago after a creative session at ICED 2004) proposed a Symposium, in which we would present three thematically-linked presentations. The overall title was “Political Geographies of Academic Development: Neutral, Non-Neutral, or Marginal” and each section had multiple collaborators. My section was inspired by the question that also inspired a somewhat different presentation at Educational Developers Caucus this past February, that question being simply “If your university were the world, what country would your teaching centre be?”

This question arose as a response to an idea that a couple of us in the field had heard before, namely that our teaching centres must be “Switzerland.” Essentially, I wanted to question first the idea that we had to be neutral in our work, and second that Switzerland itself may not be a great metaphor for neutrality.

Hence this abstract and workshop for the section of the Symposium co-authored by myself, Beverley Hamilton (Windsor), Catherine Manathunga (Queensland), and Brad Wuetherick (Saskatchewan)…

*****************

The [im]possibilities of neutrality: metaphors of nation for academic developer identities
Universities are geopolitical spaces. Within the territorial spaces of post-secondary institutions, it is often said that academic development should be ‘like Switzerland’, meaning ‘neutral’ in contrast to other university zones. We argue that, the neutral zone in which academic developers work is a kind of fictional truth which allows us to operate without owning our actions in real terms. This session will explore the tropes of neutrality and engagement, also exploring other less dominant forms of neutrality (e.g. Ireland or Iceland) and other metaphors of national identity that can be applied to academic development in order to question what possibilities these tropes open up and close down.

*************

We found, just as a somewhat different group of us found at EDC, that this idea (University as nation, departments as countries) became a really good way in for people to think about their identities as scholars and developers, or as members of a support unit. What do you think? If your institution were the world, which country would YOUR department be? What do you think about the neutrality of the work we do as teaching centre employees? For me, it’s one thing to be confidential, respectful, ethical, responsible to those we support, and quite another to claim “neutrality” — which I think is really impossible in the end. There’s no positionless position, I think, from which to proceed in our work, even when we claim to be “only” facilitators rather than experts. That itself takes a position vis-a-vis the work.

______________________________________

The Centre for Teaching Excellence welcomes contributions to its blog. If you are a faculty member, staff member, or student at the University of Waterloo (or beyond!) and would like contribute a posting about some aspect of teaching or learning, please contact Mark Morton or Trevor Holmes.

CTE Welcomes Visiting Faculty Members from KSU – Donna Ellis

The next two weeks will be very different ones for the staff at CTE.  We are delighted to be welcoming twenty-five faculty members from King Saud University (KSU) in Saudi Arabia.  They are joining us as of July 12 for an instructional development program developed by our staff members. The first week of the program, entitled “Integrating Technologies into Your Teaching,” comprises a dozen workshops, including “A Survey of Learning Technologies,” “Blended Learning,” “Assessing Student Learning with Eportfolios,” “Facilitating Online Discussions,” and “Creating a Fully Online Course” (the latter workshop is being offered in conjunction with the Centre for Extended Learning). Continue reading CTE Welcomes Visiting Faculty Members from KSU – Donna Ellis

CTE’s Eventful April – Shelley Bacik

The Centre for Teaching Excellence organized three large events in April, 2010.  The Presidents’ Colloquium on Teaching and Learning (PCTL), the Learning and Teaching Workshops (LaT), and the Opportunities and New Directions (OND) conference were held April 26, 27 and 28, 2010, respectively. Continue reading CTE’s Eventful April – Shelley Bacik