Teaching Fellows

Ashley's project titled, Transformative Pedagogies: Nurturing Cultural Humility through Epistemic Justice Education for Culturally Safe Healthcare Practice, seeks to foster 'epistemological diversity' and address biases in nursing curricula and allied health curricula, to support health professional student competency development in practicing cultural humility. This teaching innovation project aims to equip health professional students with tools for practicing cultural humility through an epistemic justice learning module. The overarching goal is to evaluate how teaching students to use an epistemic justice lens to guide their professional practice influences students' perceptions of cultural humility in their workplaces, fostering the establishment of culturally safe healthcare spaces. This project aims to advance major decolonial reforms in healthcare education by incorporating epistemic justice principles, fostering cultural humility, and disseminating findings to contribute to the broader discourse on equitable healthcare practices.

Lauren’s project, Impact of Active Learning on Student Enrolment, Engagement and Career Pathways in Chemical Engineering, involves a complete redesign of a core course in Chemical Engineering to:

1. reflect current, varied career applications of the discipline, and
2. integrate active pedagogies to support student engagement, learning, and career preparation.

Specifically, the course focus will shift from the traditional application of course principles to the oil and gas industry and modernize it to the varied career applications more accurately reflected in the current industry landscape (e.g., health care, the food industry). The course also will move from the traditional lecture format to a case-based pedagogy, with a focus on the application of core concepts to varied industries and the development of teamwork skills fundamental to those industries.

To achieve these outcomes, Lauren will work with alumni and industry partners to design realistic cases and demonstrations reflecting the varied industries in which program graduates eventually find employment. Lauren will also establish a research program to assess the impact of the course redesign on student engagement, skill development, knowledge acquisition and application, and career pathways. Finally, Lauren will build capacity for employing case studies, teamwork, and other active learning strategies within Engineering through professional development opportunities for faculty colleagues such as consultations, workshops, and training resources.

Aaron’s project, Rethinking Applied Music Instruction, will create novel, discipline-specific opportunities for collaboration, knowledge exchange, investigation of teaching practices, and professional development for colleagues teaching the course Applied Music Instruction. This course focuses on the study of solo performance on a musical instrument and, primarily, is taught one-on-one, with over 50 instructors teaching hundreds of students. To build community around, and capacity in, teaching and learning, Aaron will investigate the innovative teaching practices already being employed within the department and broader field, as well as the relevant research literature, and share those practices back with instructors through retreats, workshops, the Music Pedagogy Speaker Series, classroom observations, and consultations. Aaron will also develop a new, graduate-level experiential learning course, Pedagogy Internship, where students will teach applied music on an ongoing basis, reflect on their teaching and, within small groups, offer one another feedback and study relevant research. Students in this course will also develop a portfolio of professional materials.

Charys’ project, Open Access Library of Inclusive Anatomical Science Learning Resources, will incorporate equity, diversity, inclusivity, and decolonization (EDI-D) principles in developing inclusive medical terminology and anatomical resources. The resources will support educators and students in learning about inclusive terminology and why the existing terminology, which is gender-binary and consists of numerous eponyms (anatomical structures named after European men who claimed to discover these structures first), is outdated and inappropriate. The focus will be to develop resources that (1) ensures the language used is gender-inclusive by focusing on anatomy-based language, which emphasizes structures independent from a person’s sex or gender, and (2) eliminates eponym use and refocuses on the Latin descriptive anatomical terms, decolonizing the terminology. The resources, including an open access library of training modules and exemplar anatomy learning materials, also will be designed with accessibility and racial diversity in mind. To ensure voices of underrepresented groups and individuals with lived experiences are heard, the project will be developed in collaboration with student consultants. Ultimately, learners, educators, and community members locally, nationally, and internationally will all benefit from these modern teaching and learning resources. Charys will also establish a research program to examine the impact of the innovation over time on clinical faculty’s eponym usage and students’ perception of their confidence in using gender-inclusive terminology during patient interactions.

David’s project, Co-Teaching in Law Schools, involves developing three distinct approaches to collaborative teaching in law, each prioritizing a key thematic objective of legal education. In the first approach, David will collaborate with practitioners to reinforce the integration of theory and practice in the law classroom. This form of co-teaching will convey how the real-world experience of a practitioner can illustrate and bring to life the abstract principles of the law, and, conversely, how theory and scholarly inquiry can provide explanatory meaning, critical perspective, and recommendations for change to the world of legal practice. With the second approach, David will collaborate with a series of co-instructors to expose students to diverse models of legal professionalism, deploying exercises that encourage students to integrate their professional identity with their backgrounds, lived experiences, values, and goals. The third approach will bring David together with an instructor from a different discipline to collaboratively design and teach all aspects of a course, as an exercise in robust interdisciplinarity within the law curriculum. During his Fellowship, David will also offer a variety of professional development opportunities for colleagues in the Faculty of Law, including a Legal Education Seminar Series that will focus on pressing issues in teaching and learning in law, workshops and resources on collaborative teaching, and pedagogical consultations with faculty colleagues.

Mike is an expert on large class instruction and the use of multimedia in the classroom. He is a recipient of the University Students' Council Teaching Award of Excellence (1996), the 3M National Teaching Fellowship (1998), and a multi-year recipient of the Western Psychology Association Psychology Professor of the Year Award.

As part of her new university-wide teaching fellowship, and building on the curriculum change initiatives she led during earlier work in the Office of Indigenous Initiatives, Candace is now leading two interrelated Indigenous curriculum projects. These projects focus on developing unique online teaching opportunities to assist Western instructors in ethically including Indigenous ways of knowing into their teaching and learning practices.

The primary project—Maatoo-Kiiying Gaa-Miinigoo-Wiziying (Sharing Our Gifts): Indigenous Online Learning Bundles—places Indigenous scholars and Indigenous epistemologies at the forefront in the creation of curriculum Learning Bundles. (A Learning Bundle is a collection of teaching resources focused on a broad theme that has interdisciplinary application.) Over the course of three years, Candace will facilitate collaborative spaces that nurtures the creation of at least 28 Bundles which will form a digital repository of resources to be made available to Western instructors across disciplines. The Learning Bundles initiative is inspired by a similar project conceived by Dr. Kahente Horn-Miller at Carleton University, an award-winning initiative that engages her campus community in learning with and from Indigenous Peoples and ways of knowing.

Beyond the Bundles project, Candace will work closely with Western’s Office of Indigenous Initiatives and Centre for Teaching and Learning to foster professional learning communities to support use of the Bundles. She will also play a key role in collaboratively developing and piloting an Indigenous Teaching and Learning Series (with Sara Mai Chitty, Indigenous Curriculum and Pedagogy Advisor) geared towards Western instructors who are committed to advancing critical, Indigenous, and decolonial approaches to teaching. This series of online modules will guide Western instructors in thinking through and applying critical, decolonizing principles to their classroom pedagogies. This project has been partially funded and supported through a Peace and Reconciliation grant awarded to Candace in March 2021 by the Association of Commonwealth Universities.

• https://www.edu.uwo.ca/news-events/2021/teaching-fellow-indigenous-learning.html
• https://news.westernu.ca/2021/06/moving-toward-decolonizing-the-curriculum/

Dr. Nicole Campbell is an Associate Professor in the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology and the Director of Interdisciplinary Medical Sciences at the Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry at Western University. She teaches undergraduate students and is leading a new course-based MSc in interdisciplinary medical sciences. She has received several awards for teaching and innovation, including the Marilyn Robinson Award for Teaching Excellence in 2019 and the Schulich Excellence in Education Award (2021). She has also been one of Western’s Teaching Fellows and Experiential Learning Scholars. Dr. Campbell’s scholarly interests include supporting student mental health and embedding skill development in the curriculum.