Graduate Education
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Graduate Transformative Skills Project Series: Faculty Perspective
In 2019-20, the Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching and Learning (GMCTL) funded a faculty fellow, Dr. Loleen Berdahl, to study the needs for graduate student professional skill development at USask and recommend next steps. This blogpost series examines and translates the data from differing perspectives. We invite you review the data here. This work continues through the Graduate Competencies project, led by Wendy James and Chelsea Smith. Faculty Perspectives Jon Farthing is a Professor in the College of Kinesiology, University of Saskatchewan. His research focuses on Human Performance, Healthy Aging and Management of Chronic Conditions, and Neuromuscular Physiology, with specific interest in adaptations to various types of acute and chronic strength training.…
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Graduate Transformative Skills Project Series: Graduate Student and Postdoc Perspective
In 2019-20, the Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching and Learning (GMCTL) funded a faculty fellow, Dr. Loleen Berdahl, to study the needs for graduate student professional skill development at USask and recommend next steps. This blogpost series examines and translates the data from differing perspectives. We invite you review the data here. This work continues through the Graduate Competencies project, led by Wendy James and Chelsea Smith. Graduate Student and Postdoctoral Researcher Perspectives Holly is a postdoctoral researcher in the College of Medicine, who loves dogs. Edgar is a PhD candidate in Engineering, who also loves dogs What stands out to you about the Transformative Skills Project data? Holly: Focusing…
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Graduate Transformative Skills Project Series: Support Perspective
In 2019-20, the Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching and Learning (GMCTL) funded a faculty fellow, Dr. Loleen Berdahl, to study the needs for graduate student professional skill development at USask and recommend next steps. This blogpost series examines and translates the data from differing perspectives. We invite you review the data here. This work continues through the Graduate Competencies project, led by Wendy James and Chelsea Smith. Support Perspectives Chelsea Smith: I’m the Professional Development and Postdoctoral Studies Coordinator with the College of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies. In my role, I support Postdoctoral Fellows and faculty and staff that work directly with postdocs. Postdocs come to USask to develop the…
- Assessment and Evaluation, Curriculum Development, Educational Technology, General, Graduate Education, Inclusivity, Indigenization, Decolonization, Reconciliation, Instructional / Course Design, Instructional Strategies, Open
Gearing Up With Fall Fortnight 2016
[social_share/] [social-bio] “Happy New Year!!” That is how I think of September and the new school year. This often coincides with a strong pull to stationary stores, tidying my office, organizing my supplies, reading new books, and pulling out sweaters and warm socks. Gearing up for the Fall Term is exciting. There’s often anticipation, hope, renewed energy for trying new things and looking forward to tweaking things I tried last year. I think about taking a class. There are new “school” clothes, crisp mornings, and longer shadows when I head for home. All of that is bundled together as the new term starts. I think about the new faculty, staff,…
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A Short Reflection of a Graduate Student Fellow
[social_share/] [social-bio] By Ayodele Olagunju, Doctoral Candidate, School of Environment and Sustainability My time working on a graduate fellowship at the Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching Effectiveness highlights a most significant period in my graduate program. As a doctoral candidate with a deep longing to be part of a vibrant academic community, I did have a clue of my job description, which was to support some GSR classes, among others, and I was confident it was going to be a two-way opportunity both to equip and to be equipped in the areas of effective teaching. The only fear I had then was that despite a fair amount of exposure to…
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Graduate Student Teacher Journey
[social_share/] [social-bio] By Noura Sheikhalzoor, Graduate Student, College of Pharmacy and Nutrition Teaching has been a rich and rewarding part of my graduate school experience. It added a new flavour to what I have been already doing in my program of courses and research. My teaching experience has taught me a lot on the technical and personal levels. I started my M.Sc. program with teaching responsibilities as part of a scholarship I earned and I was given the opportunity to be a teaching assistant (TA) to be a lab instructor and mark assignments. Through this post, I would like to take you in a journey with me to one of…
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Teaching Goals, the Learning Charter, and the Fall Fortnight
[social_share/] [social-bio] It’s hard to believe, as we sit on a 30+ day, that the fall term is coming up fast! It is even warm in my office today as I write. (And for those of you who have stopped by on other days and needed to put on a jacket, you know how hot it must be out there to warm it up in here!!) At the Centre we have been busy planning for the start of the fall turn and, as always, our guiding star is the University of Saskatchewan’s Learning Charter. It reminds us of our responsibilities and commitments to the university community. There are specific commitments…
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If It’s Too Good to Be True: The publishing edition
[social_share/] [social-bio] At the end of June this year, I did something all graduate students look forward to doing: I uploaded the final, defended and amended version of my MA thesis to the University of Saskatchewan’s Electronic Theses and Dissertations site. Then, only two days later, I received an email from a company offering me the chance to publish my thesis, for free. I suspected that every other grad student who submitted a thesis that month also received such a generous and tempting offer. Grad students often experience pressure to build a publication record, which I assume might be why publishing companies like this spam us. I found an article…
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Twitter As A Catalyst for Science
[social_share/] [social-bio] By Jorden Cummings, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology In May I had the pleasure of participating in a symposium at the annual Association for Psychological Science (APS) conference entitled Social Media as a Catalyst for Psychological Science. (The organizer of that symposium, Cedar Riener, wrote a great summary of our symposium – including the slides from our talks). My own contribution was specifically about using Twitter as a psychological scientist. In fact, the very reason I was invited to participate in the symposium is because I follow Cedar Riener on Twitter, and responded to his tweet looking for someone to fill in for a symposium speaker who could…
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PhD Reform: A Speedier and Dissertation-Free Degree?
[social_share/] [social-bio] Not long ago, I began the arduous process of applying to PhD programs. I didn’t make it far. What stopped me was not a lack of desire to push learning further, to what most graduate students see as the logical end of journey that began with their first university class. I was stopped by the nagging sense a PhD would simply take more time and resource than I had available. Because I disliked falling prey to so utilitarian an impulse, I began looking into the PhD itself, to better understand why such a worthy intellectual endeavor appeared unsustainable and to find out if other students felt the same…