Teaching and Learning Symposium: Mini-Series
While we were unable to host Day 2 of the 2024 Teaching & Learning Symposium (TLS) due to a power outage, we are committed to showcasing the innovative ideas and topics that were previously scheduled as concurrent sessions.
This TLS: Mini-Series offers our community an opportunity to reconnect and re-engage throughout the Fall 2024 and Winter 2025 terms. Join us for conversation, community and collaboration as we work towards an understanding of What is a Classroom? today, tomorrow and for the future.
Teaching Dialogue Roundtable: Exploring Critical AI Literacy as a Learning Community
October 7, 11am-12pm (in-person)
Elaine Khoo, Associate Professor, Teaching Stream, Centre for Teaching and Learning, UTSC
Dina Soliman, Faculty Liaison, Educational Technology, Centre for Teaching and Learning, UTSC
Armando Rojas, UTSC Student
Jasmine Willy Saphira, UTSC Student
Yuseon Jeong, UTSC Student
In the fast-changing Generative AI (GenAI) landscape, re-examining roles of instructors and students allows higher education to capitalize on unique learning opportunities arising from the current climate of uncertainty. While universities are determining ways to deal with academic integrity in the age of AI, students need to learn the nature of AI – the good, the bad and the ugly – so that they are critical and ethical users. This session draws on a three-pronged approach of active learning about GenAI developed through a LEAF+ grant to explore creative and ethical uses of GenAI for equity-deserving students.
Community Engaged Learning Faculty Roundtable – Community Places as Classroom Spaces: Reflecting, Disrupting, Re-Imagining
October 18, 2:30pm-4pm (online)
Facilitator: Jennifer Esmail, Director, Centre for Community Partnerships
Panelists:
Aditi Mehta, Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, Urban Studies Program
Maggie Hutcheson, Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream,Faculty of Information
Maria Assif, Professor, Teaching Stream, English, UTSC
Reid Locklin, Associate Professor, Department for the Study of Religion, St. Michael’s College
Suzanne Sicchia, Associate Professor, Teaching Stream, Health and Society, UTSC
What are the implications of envisioning community places as spaces of student learning? As experiential learning, and more specifically, community-engaged learning expands across the University, partnerships with First Nations, community groups, nonprofit organizations, grassroots initiatives and the public sector are increasingly pursued as strategies for teaching our students across all disciplines. These teaching strategies seek out “community” as an innovative site and partner in teaching and learning. What does imagining community as classroom enable, and what tensions emerge? How might community-based approaches to teaching and learning disrupt–or reify–inequities? If best practice dictates that widely varying models of community-engaged learning (CEL) aspire to “reciprocity” with community-based co-educators and co-learners, how might we move the dial from transactional to transformational engagement, at individual, collective and systemic levels? Seasoned community-engaged professors address these questions through their varied teaching practices, followed by an interactive discussion with panelists and audience.
Presented with the Centre for Community Partnerships
Interactive Workshop: Family Friendly Classrooms
October 31, 10am-11:30am (online)
Facilitators:
Joanne Lieu, Graduate Professional Development Coordinator, FASE
J. Sparks, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Sociology & Anthropology, University of Guelph
Student caregivers navigate different challenges in postsecondary spaces than their non-caregiver peers (Bleakney, 2014; Sinha, 2013). With the additional role of being responsible for the well-being and health of a loved one, and at times more than one person, students often find themselves experiencing role tension and strain. While family roles can motivate students and life experiences may support their maturity, research has also suggested that students with caregiving roles can disproportionately face economic insecurity, difficulties meeting their basic needs, and additional time demands (van Rhijn, Lero, & Burke, 2016; Cruse, Mendez, & Holtzman, 2020). However, being a caregiver is an invisible identity, especially as many students do not realize they are one (Beed, 2017; Charles et al., 2012). Since, a limited amount of SoTL research has been published on this often invisible student group within Canadian higher education, our workshop aims to encourage discussion and knowledge sharing in advocacy of student caregivers at U of T.
Interactive Workshop: Teaching Wellbeing and Mental Health Literacy in the University Classroom
November 6, 1pm-2pm (online)
Lauren Brown, Program Coordinator, Mindfulness, Meditation and Yoga, Multi-Faith Centre, Division of Student Life
In this workshop participants will learn what mental health literacy involves, hear how students from my doctoral research improved their wellbeing, and develop ideas on what you can do in your own classrooms. Along the way you’ll have the opportunity to try a variety of contemplative practices including deep listening, bearing witness, beholding, and reflective writing. The aim of this workshop is to help you feel more confident acting in support of your students’ and your own mental health and wellbeing.
Panel Discussion: Civil Discourse in the Classroom: What’s the State, and What’s at Stake?
December 5, 1pm-2pm (in-person)
How important is it for faculty and students to think out loud together in the classroom? In this panel, faculty members, all members of the university’s Working Group on Civil Discourse, will discuss their experiences with teaching and learning when it comes to the state and stakes of civil discourse in the classroom.
Interactive Workshop: All Work and No Play? The Classroom Is/As Play
December 9, 4pm-5pm (in-person)
In reframing the classroom as play, this interactive workshop seeks to empower instructors with methods of addressing the challenges shaping higher education today, including anxiety, depression, structural inequities, classroom absence, and burnout. Emphasizing learning through play is particularly important as both learners and educators struggle to rekindle curiosity and joy after a grueling pandemic. This workshop invites participants to connect with both research and each other as we engage recent scholarship on play and learning in higher education. Shifting between play, reading, and discussion we facilitate a puckish and critically engaged learning period centering on the pedagogical value of curiosity. Attendees will participate in analog and digital techniques for grounding learning through play, including movement, art, collaboration, and gamification. By imagining the classroom as play, participants will leave curious about their own instructional processes and eager to experiment with play across our diverse teaching contexts.
Upcoming Sessions
Dates to be announced
Teaching Dialogue Roundtable: Discussing Tough Topics: Strategies for Building and Maintaining Equitable Learning Environments
Said Sidani, Sessional Lecturer, Education Studies, Language Studies, UTM