Teaching Fellows

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.

Paul’s project, Engagement through Immersion: Immersive Education in Science, will focus on the impact of immersive technologies (e.g., virtual reality, augmented reality, immersive video) on student motivation, engagement, and scientific literacy in undergraduate and graduate courses at Western. Paul’s work will have a particular focus on interdisciplinary environmental courses and engaging students with STEM subject matter related to sustainability and climate change education. Students will examine real-size 3D models of biological species, virtually explore sites of ecological significance, and role-play as scientists in realistic simulations. Paul will establish a research program dedicated to identifying the key benefits of immersive education by testing the efficacy of immersive technologies in properly controlled studies. Finally, he will build capacity for employing immersive technologies at Western by overseeing the development of a virtual library of digital learning objects and creating evidence-based training resources such as online video tutorials and guides.

Katrina’s project, Integrating Ways of Knowing to Enrich Climate Change Education, will integrate western science and Indigenous ways of knowing to effectively teach, and empower students to take action on, climate change through the development of an innovative blended module-based experiential learning course, Connecting for Climate Change Action. In partnership with Sara Mai Chitty (Curriculum & Pedagogy Advisor, Office of Indigenous Initiatives) and Dr. Beth Hundey (eLearning & Curriculum Specialist, Centre for Teaching and Learning), the course will be developed as a series of online learning modules that will require a shift in the traditional teaching approach, from understanding with our minds to a deeper awareness that comes from Indigenous ways of knowing that engage the mind, body, emotion, and spirit. The course will be the cornerstone for the new Climate Change and Society Major, the first of such programs offered in Canada. However, the impact of the modules is intended to reach far beyond the one course as they will be made available to other courses at Western and at other post-secondary institutions, as well as to interested community groups, governmental agencies, and businesses, with the goal of transforming climate change education! Katrina will investigate the course’s impact on students’ understanding of, and values concerning, climate change, as well as their skills to address the urgent challenges climate change poses through a mixed-method research program.

Kim’s project, Innovations in Interdisciplinary Pedagogy, Within and Beyond Arts and Humanities, involves developing and evaluating two different models of collaborative interdisciplinary pedagogy. The first involves a collaboration between Theatre Studies and Psychology, refining an existing community engaged learning partnership across two courses and including City Studio London. The students in Psychology will perform qualitative research into the lived experiences of newcomers to London and develop recommendations for City staff, while their counterparts in Theatre Studies will explore different models of performance for social change and community-engaged theatre, creating performance actions to animate the data and help raise awareness about newcomer experience among London’s residents. The second model involves a partnership between colleagues in Theatre Studies and Philosophy who will create a course on the work of 17th Century philosopher and playwright Margaret Cavendish. The course will use a mix of performance- and philosophy-based pedagogies to help students explore Cavendish’s non-dramatic writing in embodied ways and examine her playtexts as embodied philosophy. Kim will also engage in a mixed research program with her partners on the course projects, exploring instructor experiences of designing and implementing the two models of collaborative interdisciplinary pedagogy through an auto-ethnographical methodology, as well as determining the impact of those courses on students using survey and interviews. Meanwhile, Kim plans to engage her colleagues across Arts and Humanities in discussions about interdisciplinary teaching and learning by creating a community of practice within the faculty, and developing a workshop series with 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/