Power, Voice and Positionality

A faculty-student partnership records a podcast to share their experience of a students-as-partners framework. The commentary invites the listener to explore some of the inherent tensions associated with power, voice, and positionality. Listeners are gifted with the story of the Ani to Pisi (Spiderweb), which informs this work.

As Student Response Systems Expand Features and Question Types, Multiple Choice Continues to be the Gold Standard for Calculations from both Student and Instructor Perspectives

Student response systems (SRS) continue to evolve as bring-your-own-device (BYOD) systems allow more question and answer types to be utilized. While users were once limited to a button press on a clicker selecting from a list of predetermined responses, students can now generate text and numerical responses on their personal devices. Question and response types are now limited only by software, and new features can be added without requiring an overhaul of the existing system. Using two successive course offerings of a biomedical lab techniques class, the effect of question type was evaluated, using a crossover experimental design, and applied to novel discipline-specific calculations. Students used the Top Hat student response system (tophat.com) to answer either multiple choice questions (MCQ) or numerical response questions (NRQ) in class. Student responses were tracked for elapsed time to completion, performance, and subsequent test performance. Additionally, students were surveyed about their question-type preference. Analysis shows that on formative assessments, students take less time on multiple choice questions, are successful more often, and show a clear preference for this type. When students used those calculations on summative exams, they performed similarly regardless of whether they initially used MCQ or NRQ. Students also expressed clear preference for MCQ. The use of NRQ is still recommended to be used strategically as it increases question difficulty and diversity. The findings from this study may assist STEM instructors looking to formulate their own evidence-based best practices when incorporating SRSs intotheir pedagogy.

Negotiating the Nation Through Superheroes

This case study focuses on Canadian students’ responses to our invitation to imagine their own nationalist superheroes whose costumes and powers represent a nation. We provide a close reading of 34 student artifacts to show how they draw on discourses that position Canada as a benevolent, multicultural country—a rhetorical formation we call the Canadian Shield. We also reveal how some artifacts negotiate tropes of the Shield, adapting or revising them in distinctive ways. We conclude, however, that when invited to create Canadian superheroes, many of the student creations reaffirm dominant visions of the country, and such habits of thought, we venture, are best considered as ideological bottlenecks.

How Educational Developers can Re-engage Mid-Career Faculty Using SoTL

Mid-career faculty (MCF) currently make up a significant number of faculty at higher educational institutions. This group comprises key stakeholders with institutional history, diverse teaching and learning experiences, and strong relationships with colleagues. While faculty need different kinds of support and opportunities at different career stages, it has been reported that mid-career professional development is under-researched and overlooked. We contend that professional development for MCF is essential if these faculty are going to continue to grow as educators, leaders, and scholars. With the support of Educational Developers (EDs), the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) is one way for faculty to focus their professional development in the middle years of their career. Drawing on the literature about challenges for MCF and using the micro-meso-macro-mega framework, we explore ways in which EDs can use SoTL to re-engage MCF on a revitalized path. Our synthesis offers reflections on our career experiences as EDs and boundary-spanning points to ponder for both EDs and MCF as they enter into SoTL engagement.

Conversations and Reflections on Authentic Assessment

In this paper, we describe how academic colleagues from different fields used a theoretical framework for authentic assessment as the starting point for meaningful conversations about our teaching practices. We re-envision Hutchings’ (2000) taxonomy of SoTL questions as a fluid conversational cycle rather than a system of classification. Using the eight elements of authentic assessment as outlined by Ashford-Rowe et al. (2014) as a theoretical framework, we engage with the research literature, reflect on what is and what works from our previous teaching and learning experiences, and propose ideas and questions for what is possible moving forward.

Academic Writing in the Health Professions

Academic writing in higher education has been a long-standing priority, with a greater need for writing supports noted in the past decades (Wingate & Tribble, 2012) and an increasing focus on discipline-specific language in order for students to learn to write and communicate effectively as professionals in their chosen fields (Grzyb et al., 2018). This study examined student learning outcomesin two writingintensive designated health professions courses (Nursing and Public Health). Students completed assignments throughout the semester. One course section required students to turn in a final paper without receiving feedback during the writing process while, in the other course, students received feedback on sections of the final paper throughout the semester. At the final exam stage, students were asked to reflect on their learning experience in the course. At the end of the semester, students submitted their final paper and completed a learning reflection to meet the course requirements. To inform a course revision, student paper and learning reflection narratives were analyzed. Narratives were de-identified and inductively coded by a single coder. First-round coding employed descriptive and in vivo coding to explore the data. The codebook for second-round coding was refined and codes were classified within the headings descriptive, emotion, and value. Findings indicate that students felt they had increased capacity for reflection when feedback was provided throughout the semester. They also felt they benefited from integrating feedback on the credibility of sources, organization, and citations. Integrating feedback and reflection opportunities contributed to greater student learning.

Turning the Tables: Involving Undergrads as Researchers in SoTL

We report on the experience of working on a research project where students and faculty worked together as peers. The project investigated the challenges and enablers that helped or hindered faculty engage in SoTL work, and what might help encourage their colleagues to engage. The findings were instrumental in identifying components for a guide for SoTL. The findings from the study have been published elsewhere. In this paper we report on the experience of two undergraduate students who took a central role guided by experienced researchers, in collating, coding and analyzing the results, and of two experienced researchers. We share a brief overview of the project and its outcomes, provide detail of the involvement of the students and hear from them and the researchers about the experience of taking part in the project. The findings from both the original study and the student experiences will be of interest to others interested in work in this field.

Applying Theatre Principles to SoTL Research

The same principles of engagement that actors use to engage deeply with the script and their roles can also be used to more engage deeply SoTL scholars in their lines of inquiry. In this paper, we draw parallels between actors’ approaches to theatre performance and deep engagement with SoTL inquiry. We build on a relational perspective to help others generate SoTL questions about interactions between instructor and students. We describe activities that draw on dramatic arts theory and through a process of “defining the issue, agitating the inquiry, and discerning the questions” (Simmons & Simmons, in press), we outline sample activities to help support others in honing SoTL questions and transforming the questions into successful SoTL project implementation.

Teaching as Authentic Practice in the Graduate Student Supervisory Relationship

This article is the outcome of a co-inquiry with students where shared interests about student learning, students as partners, and a hermeneutic lens shaped the main research questions: What are graduate students’ experiences of the supervisory relationship and what happens inside the relationship in terms of learning and student success? We conducted 16 in-depth interviews with graduate students across various departments and programs. From these interviews we theorized that it may be more appropriate to speak of graduate supervision as a practice which produces internal and external goods. We found that it may be more appropriate to speak of the pedagogy as mentoring. We believe our research findings extend understanding of the supervisory relationship, contribute to the concept of teaching, and expand the idea of partnership with students in higher education wherever faculty and students find themselves in supervisory relationships. This is relevant to SoTL because it allowed us to think of the nuances in the word teaching and how supervisory relationships in higher education may need to expand the way we talk about teaching and learning in higher education.

Good Beginnings: Launching Imagining SoTL

Writing this introduction is an exciting moment as we prepare to launch this new SoTL journal, which provides a forum to highlight the work shared at the annual Banff Symposium for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. We called it Imagining because of the inspirational Blackfoot translation of Mount Royal University’s (MRU’s) Institute for Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Leo Fox, of the Kainai Nation, offered the translation, ksimstaani, which can also be translated into English as “imagining.” Thus, the journal is called Imagining SoTL: Selections from the Banff Symposium. We intend to speak to the aspirational nature of SoTL, its inherent hopefulness.