Spring Perspectives on Teaching Conference

In 2021-22, the Maatoogiying gaa-miinigoowiziying (Sharing our Gifts): Indigenous Learning Bundles project was launched at Western with the goal is to collaboratively create a digital repository of Indigenous-led teaching resources that privilege Indigenous knowledges (IK) and support Western instructors in delivering Indigenous content in ethical ways. Recognizing that lack of instructor preparedness to understand and teach Indigenous perspectives, this project adopted a Community of Practice (CoP) model in its second year to support instructors in bundle implementation. Community of Practice (CoP) is a social learning theory used in education for professional development purposes (Wenger, 1998) which recognizes that deeper “learning occurs when people who share a concern or passion for something, do and learn how to do it better and interact regularly” (Wenger, 2011, p.1). CoP approaches have also been used in advancing Indigenization of academic curriculum (Yeo et al, 2018). This panel presentation will start by offering some background on the bundles project with a focus on instructors’ experiences participating in the CoP and learning with bundles.

How can we prepare our students to address the complex real-world problems that we are facing? Our students will need to bring expertise from multiple disciplinary and experiential perspectives to address these complicated issues, but our programs and courses generally exist in disciplinary silos. Interdisciplinary collaborative teaching, bringing together educators from across disciplinary and experiential boundaries to co-teach, enables our students to learn and integrate different approaches and perspectives to help develop creative solutions to these complex problems.

Please join us for this interactive session to learn about how we have integrated interdisciplinary collaborative teaching into our courses, the benefits we have seen, and the challenges we faced. You will also have an opportunity to reflect on and discuss why this approach to teaching could be beneficial for your students, what it might look like within your context, and the practical steps you can take to implement an interdisciplinary collaborative teaching component in your courses.

It’s hard to know where to start when looking to update your syllabus. Should you start with assignments? Attendance policy? The reading list? The truth is there are many entry-points into making your syllabus, and by extension your course, more learner-centered. In this hands-on clinic, we will explore a few different elements of learner-centered syllabi so that you can identify the entry-point that makes the most sense for you, find colleagues with similar goals and – supported by resources – get to work revising your syllabus. Significant time in this clinic will be devoted to writing (and re-writing) and discussion, so come prepared with a syllabus you wish to work on.