How Do We Teach and Learn in a Crisis?
3QTL: Three Questions about Teaching and Learning
Release Date: 02/21/2024
What is Queer Pedagogy?
3QTL: Three Questions about Teaching and Learning
We might not instinctively associate drag queens with teacher education, but for Dr. Harper Keenan, the queer imagination has tremendous potential to help us “unscript curriculum” and think about our classrooms in radically different ways. The Robert Quartermain Professor of Gender and Sexuality Research in Education at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Dr. Keenan has initiated an impressive array of community collaborations, including Drag Story Hour and the Trans Freedom School. Join us as Dr. Keenan describes the challenges (and unexpected rewards) of teaching pre-service...
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What Motivates Students to be Their Best Selves?
3QTL: Three Questions about Teaching and Learning
For Dr. Bryan Dewsbury, equity-minded, inclusive, or humanist teaching means distinguishing teaching students from teaching subject matter. The humanity of students, in other words, is prioritized over course content, and their lived experiences become vital to how the classroom operates. In our conversation, Dr. Dewsbury describes how he confronted the challenges of teaching online during COVID lockdowns, while also highlighting the many dimensions of his approach to humanist teaching. He explains, for example, how restructuring “office hours” as “student hours” can deepen student...
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How Might We Collaborate to Advance Racial Justice?
3QTL: Three Questions about Teaching and Learning
In a 3QTL first, we are delighted to feature two guests on today’s episode: Dr. Patrina Duhaney and Dr. Regine King, the award-winning co-developers and instructors of a University of Calgary course entitled “Afrocentric Perspectives in Social Work.” As members of their Faculty’s Anti-Black Racism Task Force, which was established in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd, Dr. King and Dr. Duhaney were motivated to create a course that would familiarize students with the challenges and barriers experienced by Black people in a Canadian context. Our guests also found themselves in...
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How Do We Teach and Learn in a Crisis?
3QTL: Three Questions about Teaching and Learning
The most challenging years of COVID lockdowns found Dr. Morgan Vanek inhabiting the role of student more often than she might have expected. As she learned to parent, drive, and cook—all during a pandemic—Dr. Vanek found herself reflecting deeply on those core values that were guiding her teaching and learning practice, while simultaneously rediscovering the value of the Humanities for helping us survive and make sense of global crises. Join us as Dr. Vanek outlines the many ways she transformed her classrooms in light of these experiences: from the implementation of “ungrading”...
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How Can We Practice Reciprocity?
3QTL: Three Questions about Teaching and Learning
We rarely imagine the library to be a “rowdy” space, but for Jessie Loyer, unruliness and quiet contemplation can (and should!) coexist in our libraries. Drawing from her research on Indigenous information literacy and the Cree legal concept of “wâhkôhtowin”—the imperative to know your relatives—Jessie invites us to rethink what it means to “visit” a library, both ethically and relationally. How, as instructors, are we in a reciprocal relationship with not only our students, but also with the knowledge we acquire through research and those spaces in which we conduct it? How...
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What is a Pedagogy of Kindness?
3QTL: Three Questions about Teaching and Learning
Justice, believing students, and believing in students: according to Dr. Cate Denial, these are the three pillars of “a pedagogy of kindness,” an approach to teaching and learning that centers care for ourselves, as instructors, and care for our students. Dr. Denial, the Bright Distinguished Professor of American History and Director of the Bright Institute at Knox College, Illinois, is also the Primary Investigator of “Care in the Academy,” a Mellon Foundation-funded project examining pedagogies, communities, and practices of care in the academy after COVID-19. Kindness, Dr. Denial...
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What is Student-Centered Teaching and Learning?
3QTL: Three Questions about Teaching and Learning
Our social lives and community-driven projects were significantly affected during the pandemic, and it became especially difficult to organize innovative teaching and learning experiences within such a context. Our guest this episode, Dr. Adela Kincaid, has much to say about some of these challenges. An assistant professor in the University of Calgary's International Indigenous Studies Program, Dr. Kincaid has collaborated with students and community partners—including Indigenous Elders and knowledge-keepers—on some inspiring, student-centered teaching and learning initiatives. Join us...
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Can We Think Differently About Time?
3QTL: Three Questions about Teaching and Learning
What do Mariah Carey, arts-based student feedback, and the Disability Studies concept of “crip time” have in common? They all played integral roles in Dr. Alan Santinele Martino’s approach to teaching and learning during the most challenging moments of the COVID-19 pandemic. An assistant professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences at the University of Calgary, Dr. Martino is currently researching the intimate lives of LGBTQ2S+ disabled people in Alberta, and he brings this Disability Studies lens to our conversation. While we aimed to survive the pandemic, Dr. Martino points...
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How Do We Become Creative?
3QTL: Three Questions about Teaching and Learning
How do we become creative people in the world, as both instructors and learners? For Dr. Laleh Behjat, professor of Electrical and Software Engineering at the University of Calgary’s Schulich School, creativity both necessitates and fosters courageous, caring, and collaborative approaches to teaching and learning. In our conversation, Dr. Behjat shares how she and her colleagues renewed the engineering curricula during COVID-19, and offers examples of how she cultivates community in her classrooms. Join us as Dr. Behjat describes how we might eliminate exams and draw inspiration from karate...
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How Might We Reimagine Assessment?
3QTL: Three Questions about Teaching and Learning
Over the course of a twenty-five-year teaching career, Dr. Jesse Stommel has been interrogating the power dynamics that structure our grading and assessment practices. Every conversation about grades is also a conversation about power, he maintains, and “ungrading” might offer some possibilities for making our classrooms more inclusive, caring, and collaborative spaces. The rapid switch to online teaching during COVID-19 raised some new questions for Dr. Stommel about the state of post-secondary education, and he found himself reconsidering the very foundations of his teaching and...
info_outlineThe most challenging years of COVID lockdowns found Dr. Morgan Vanek inhabiting the role of student more often than she might have expected. As she learned to parent, drive, and cook—all during a pandemic—Dr. Vanek found herself reflecting deeply on those core values that were guiding her teaching and learning practice, while simultaneously rediscovering the value of the Humanities for helping us survive and make sense of global crises. Join us as Dr. Vanek outlines the many ways she transformed her classrooms in light of these experiences: from the implementation of “ungrading” techniques like contract and labour-based grading, to strategies for demystifying the “hidden architecture” of university courses, to centering social justice in a course focused on the traditional canon of English literature. Full episode transcript and references are available on our website.