General
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Looking Back, Moving Forward
[social-bio] As the academic term draws to a close and after my marking is complete, I find myself looking back over the semester, determining which learning activities went well and why, the teaching goals I set forth for myself, where I succeeded and fell short, and what I should do differently the next time I teach. For me, the process of reflecting on my teaching practice, or “recapturing my experience, thinking about it, mulling it over, and evaluating it” (Boud, Keogh, & Walker 1985) begins on the last day of class when I ask my students to come prepared to tell me one significant thing they’ve learned or taken away…
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We Are All Treaty People
By Tereigh Ewert In the fall, the office of the VP Teaching and Learning began offering treaty education to faculty and staff at the University of Saskatchewan. Each month, a cohort of people engaged in an online module, and then their learning culminated in a three-hour face-to-face session with a Traditional Knowledge Keeper who further illuminated treaty history and issues, and who also provided some critical cultural context. Gordon Barnhart, in his 2007 speech to the throne, made treaty education mandatory in the K-12 school system, so our upcoming generation has some knowledge of treaty history and issues. But for most of the rest of us, we have had little…
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Syllabus Template Developed For Use at U of S
[social-bio] The syllabus is probably the most important document that you will provide your students during a class. It ideally conveys the learning outcomes, information on the methods of assessment, contact information for the instructor, time and locations for labs, required and supplemental readings, exam information, and other important details about the class. The University of Saskatchewan has a number of required items that must be included in the syllabus for any course (Academic Course Policy, 2011). They include: The type and schedule of term assignments with approximate due dates, as well as the type and schedule of term examinations Learning outcomes of the course and of the assignments and…
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With Great Power …
[social-bio] I am a regular reader of University Affairs. I always find it an interesting place to hear about what is making news in Canadian higher education. In particular, I like looking at the ‘most popular articles’ section just in case there are articles that I should pay attention to that I have somehow missed. That is how I stumbled across an article by Shirley Katz from 2000, titled “Sexual relations between students and faculty”. Most of the article was what I expected (ie. don’t do it! – there are too many possible conflicts of interest and risks associated with such relationships). While I have a number of questions about…
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Academic Integrity and the Roles Students Play: The Student as Moral Agent
[social-bio] This is the final post in a series of four about metaphors revealed in students’ discussions of academic honesty and dishonesty. The four metaphors presented in this series do not represent mutually exclusive understandings and can overlap in their meanings. Not all students in my study expressed the same meanings or, if they did, did not express them in the same way. As McMillan and Cheney (1996) acknowledged, it can seem drastic to ascribe such power to metaphors but we rely so heavily on them that we often overlook their “powerful and practical role in our discourse” and that there is a “tendency to become what we say we…
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Registration Open For TLt 2013
[social-bio] The 2013 Teaching and Learning with the power of Technology (TLt) Conference will be held this coming May 1 and 2 at the University of Saskatchewan. This year’s theme is “Making IT Mainstream: Everybody’s doing IT”. With ubiquitous use of smart-phones, tablets and laptops by students and faculty the days of speaking of educational technology in future or fringe terms are long past. It is now mainstream so conversations at this year’s TLt will focus on the mainstream integration of learning technologies at both the level of the institution and individual instructor, what is what working and what is not, and how all of this is and will continue to…
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Academic Integrity and the Roles Students Play: The Student as Trainee
[social-bio] This is the third in a series of four posts about the ways students positioned themselves when discussing matters of academic honesty and dishonesty in my doctoral study. The metaphor of trainee described below, could also be conceived as the student as investor in or consumer of higher education. The overarching idea I gleaned is the student viewpoint that the desired outcome of a university education is gainful employment, where coursework is merely a means to that end, education an investment in the future, and enrolment in university a contractual relationship with an educational service provider. The Student as Trainee “This class that I’m taking is not relevant to…
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Academic Integrity and the Roles Students Play: The Student as Competitor
[social-bio] This is the second in a series of four posts where I present the metaphors I recognized as being in use in students’ discussions in my doctoral study of students’ understandings of academic honesty and dishonesty. These metaphors can be treated as lenses students appeared to use to see themselves in the university, to navigate their relation to others, and to interpret events. The Student as Competitor “It’s [good grades] like a carrot dangling in front of you. And everybody’s at a race and whether or not your carrot is big enough will tell you how far you’ll go.” “But you try to find every possible way,…
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PLN (Personal Learning Network): What, Why, and How?
[social-bio] Do you work in a specialized field? Do you work in a small department? Do you ever wish you had colleagues that you could share ideas with or someone to bounce teaching ideas off of? The answers to these questions are expectedly “yes” for most faculty members. One way to address these questions is by creating a Personal Learning Network (PLN). A PLN is an informal group of people that you can learn from and along with. The difficulty with creating a PLN is the fact that you may not be able to find people with common interests, skills and subject-matter knowledge. This is where the Internet comes in.…
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Academic Integrity and the Roles Students Play: The Student as Subject
[social-bio] This post is the first in a series of four. My posts largely draw from the insights I gained by conducting a doctoral study of students’ understandings of academic honesty and dishonesty. In my analysis, I noted that students used, indirectly and directly, four metaphors to describe their sense of their role, place or position in the university. This is the first of four posts presenting these four metaphors and their potential explanatory power related to students’ understandings of academic integrity. I begin each with two student quotes that reflect the metaphor used by several students, a short explanation, and ideas about what the metaphor might suggest for teaching…