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Mission
What We Do
The Centre for Teaching and Learning (CTL) is the teaching hub of the university. We advance the university’s teaching and learning mission by providing orientation, support, mentorship, scholarship, and opportunities for educational leadership and innovation, so our Western community can create meaningful learning experiences for students. We foster critical connections between disciplines and create communities in which educators share approaches to teaching that enhance student learning, belonging, and thriving. At Western and throughout Canada, we advocate for an institutional culture that recognizes teaching and celebrates excellence in teaching.
Our goal is to mentor educators at each stage of their careers, from emerging scholars and teaching assistants, to award-winning faculty who engage in educational leadership. We engage with full- and part-time faculty members, librarians and archivists, graduate students, and postdoctoral scholars. Our work at the CTL prioritizes three areas: teaching excellence, mentorship, and program renewal through IQAP To achieve these goals, we offer certificate programs, workshops, conferences, communities of practice, courses, consultations, facilitation, and online resources at the course, program, Faculty, and institutional levels.
We support teaching excellence by empowering educators to:
- Reflect on their positionalities, values, and goals
- Design inclusive and accessible learning experiences
- Decolonize their curricula
- Partner with students in co-creating the learning experience
- Develop effective and evidence-based teaching practice;
- Create deep and transformative learning experiences for students;
- Collect and interpret feedback on their teaching;
- incorporate digital technologies in courses and across programs to enhance student learning
- Offer accessible in-person, online, and hybrid learning opportunities
- Design alternative and authentic assessments
- Develop and refine course outlines
- Foster communities of practice on teaching and learning
We mentor colleagues at each stage of their academic careers by:
- Providing information and support throughout the hiring, promotion, and tenure process through the development of teaching dossiers
- Fostering a culture of effective graduate supervision and mentorship;
- Offering continuous skill development on existing and emerging priorities of relevance to higher education (e.g., generative AI)
- Providing grants and awards to advance teaching innovations;
- Creating opportunities for educational leadership
- Consulting on scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) projects
- SoTL research and teaching innovations of faculty members
We support the Institutional Quality Assurance Process by:
- Guiding programs through the curricular components of the IQAP process, including the development of program learning outcomes and curriculum mapping
- Supporting the development of new programs through program visioning
- Facilitating conversations towards continuous curricular improvement through customized retreats on topics such as generative AI and decolonization
To achieve these goals, we work closely with collaborators across campus
- Office of Indigenous Initiatives
- Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion
- Western Technology Services
- School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies
- Student Experience
- Western Libraries
- Faculties and Programs across campus
Values
CTL Philosophy of Practice
Our educational development practice at the CTL is guided by an ethic of care that embeds the following key values and approaches:
- Committed to decolonization and Indigenization. Our work is guided by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action, Western’s prioritization of Indigenization and EDIDA, and our own personal commitments to unlearning and relearning in settler colonial educational systems. We recognize that this work requires moving teaching and learning practices beyond superficial gestures and instead advocating for systemic changes through Indigenous governance and data sovereignty.
- Flexible. We respond to the current and emerging needs of educators at Western, to Western’s strategic priorities, and to the rapidly shifting landscape of higher education.
- Access-Forward. We are committed to collective access and proactively designing robust accessibility environments and experiences.
- Relational and Reciprocal. We partner with faculty, staff, librarians and archivists, and students to ensure our programming reflects and respects a diversity of perspectives, disciplines, contexts, and lived experiences. Through these partnerships, we emphasize relationships of mutual care, accountability, and shared agency.
- Evidence-based. Our work is grounded in both scholarly literature as well as the lived, embodied experiences of educators.
