2018 Spring Institute

“What Happened Here?” Surfacing Career Learning in Coursework

Wednesday, May 23 | 9 – 10:30 a.m. | IKBLC, Chilcotin Room (Room 256)

Pillar: Transformative Learning

The pursuit of a degree is a meaningful experience for students, ripe with moments to learn about who they are, what matters to them, and how they want to contribute to the world. The Centre for Student Involvement and Careers has been collaborating with faculty members who are interested in drawing connections between teaching topics and student learning in order to make explicit some of the personal and professional learning that is taking place in the classroom. Holistic career development often extends beyond role or job preparation and pays careful attention to the identity, experiences, networks and skills that students gain through their discipline and university experience.
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Using Student Peer Assessment to Reinforce Community and the Role of Audience

Wednesday, May 23 | 9 – 11 a.m. | IKBLC, Seminar Room (Room 2.22)

Pillar: Transformative Learning

In this session on student peer assessment (SPA), we’ll look at the first iteration of a course that included a series of group assignments incorporating SPA, including instructional support, assignment specifications and rubrics shared with students. Stepping back from this specific example, I’ll share not only my rationale for including SPA in a multidisciplinary academic language class, but discuss larger pragmatic and ideological issues of implementing SPA raised in the literature (Ashenafi, 2017; Grajczonek, 2009; Thondhlana & Belluigi, 2017; van Gennip et al, 2009).
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Activating Supported Educational Leadership, Research and Collaboration; or, what are these things, how does UBC do them, and where are the experts I need?

Wednesday, May 23 | 11:30 a.m. – 1 p.m. | IKBLC, Seminar Room (Room 2.22)

Pillar: Transformative Learning

In the CTLT Faculty Associates program, each of us works on pedagogy or curriculum project of high interest to our home department; we meet regularly to share successes, problems, strategies and outcomes and to create webs of connection among diverse UBC communities to strengthen student experience and faculty expertise. The Faculty Associates program funds and provides staff support in educational research methods; interviews, surveys, and data gathering; data analysis; and outcomes assessment.
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Exploring the “Power of a Name”: An Interactive Workshop

Wednesday, May 23 | 11:30 a.m. – 1 p.m. | IKBLC, Chilcotin Room (Room 256)

Pillar: People & Places

During this workshop, participants will have the opportunity to explore a new learning resource developed through Indigenous Initiatives, The Power of a Name. This learning resource includes a film series and website that examine the complex history of building names at UBC’s Totem Park Residence, and features stories of relationships between UBC and Indigenous communities.
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Creating Transformative Learning Experiences Through Community Engaged Learning

Wednesday, May 23 | 1:30 – 3:00 p.m. | IKBLC, Chilcotin Room (Room 256)

Pillar: People and Places, Transformative Learning, Community and Global Engagement

UBC’s reading week suite of programs is a unique opportunity for staff and students to collaborate with and to run projects that benefit community partners – and to experience the benefits of community-based experiential learning. Through these programs, staff and graduate students (through participation in the Community Leadership Program) and undergraduate students (through participation in the Reading Week Student Leader and Reading Week programs) collaborate with community partners and apply their knowledge to lead activities such as running events, creating resources, and conducting research for the community partner. With underpinnings from fields of transformative learning, asset-based approaches to leadership and community development, experiential learning, and self-directed learning, care is taken to provide opportunities for staff, students, and community partners to reflect on their experiences and utilize their strengths.
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Why I Avoid My Student Evaluations of Teaching

Thursday, May 24 | 9 – 10:30 a.m. | IKBLC, Chilcotin Room (Room 256)

Pillar: Transformative Learning

As faculty members, we are told we need to read and respond to our student evaluations of teaching (SEoT). We work hard to provide good learning experiences for our students but the comments can be harsh and confusing and send us into a spiral of negativity and self-doubt. So, how should we respond? Should we/Do we: Avoid them? Read but ignore them? Read and obsess? Read and respond?
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How to Teach with Case Studies?

Thursday, May 24 | 9 – 11 a.m. | IKBLC, Seminar Room (Room 2.22)

Pillar: Transformative Learning

Well-designed case studies usually generate animated class discussions; not to mention that they hold great potential in supporting student learning, from enhancing basic knowledge comprehension to developing higher-level problem-solving, decision making, and/or evaluative skills. However, teaching with case studies isn’t a simple feat — we need to know all the issues involved in the case, prepare scaffolding prompts in alignment with the learning outcome, anticipate challenges that students might face, and consider how to productively draw on our students’ diverse background and experiences to enhance the discussion.
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Provide Immediate Feedback on a Summative Exam by Adding a Group Phase

Thursday, May 24 | 11:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. | IKBLC, Seminar Room (Room 2.22)

Pillar: Transformative Learning

Two-phase collaborative exams or group exams, in which students first complete the exam individually and then form groups to complete the same or similar questions are a flexible and effective method for adding immediate formative feedback to what is traditionally a summative experience. This workshop will support participants to engage with the evidence for including a group phase and to develop their own two-phase exam implementation plan.
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Transforming Teaching in Innovative Learning Spaces

Thursday, May 24 | 1:30 – 3:30 p.m. | IKBLC, Chilcotin Room (Room 256)

Pillar: Transformative Learning

The origins of using auditorium spaces for education date back to 1079 when Pope Gregory VII decided that the clergy needed to be uniformly educated in Christian dogma to spread a consistent message around his expanding kingdom. Gutenberg’s printing press would not be invented for another 400 years but the clergy lived in monasteries that had auditoria for religious services. Lecturers (from Latin for ‘reader’) would visit monasteries, read a manuscript and monks would copy down what they heard with perfect accuracy. When finished, each monk had their own personal manuscript and could hire themselves out as lecturers around the kingdom. This was excellent technology for the time, but almost 1000 years later we’re doing the same thing, even though our students not only have access to books, but entire libraries of information from the convenience of their smartphones.
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Spaces and Places in Education: Enhancing Engagement by Creating Connected Content

Thursday, May 24 | 1:30 – 3:30 p.m. | IKBLC, Seminar Room (Room 2.22)

Pillar: People and Places

Place-based education enhances students’ learning by recognizing the significance of cultural, historical, ecological and spiritual ties to landscape. Incorporating the local environment offers unique, rich opportunities to strengthen engagement for students from all backgrounds. For example, geography students learning about land use mapping could be introduced to maps and planning relating to the traditional lands of the Musqueam people. Or, ecology students working in the Fraser River could learn about the importance of the waterway to many groups of people over time.
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Best Practices in Teaching Communication – Developing a Well-Rounded Professional Skill Set

Friday, May 25 | 9 – 11 a.m. | IKBLC, Seminar Room (Room 2.22)

Pillar: Transformative Learning

Attend this workshop to explore teaching and learning practices that support the development of personal and professional communication skills for degree success and success outside of the university. Participants will cycle between tables to engage with short presentations about teaching methods being used at UBC, such as listening, nonverbal communication, clarity & concision, confidence, respect, teamwork, feedback, and picking the right medium. Take away new ideas to implement in your own teaching context, expand your UBC network in teaching and learning, and gain new perspectives from your colleagues.

This workshop is presented by the Writing Across the Curriculum+ (WAC+) Program, a TLEF-funded collaboration between the Science Centre for Learning and Teaching (Skylight), the Centre for Writing and Scholarly Communication, and the Department of Chemistry. The program supports the teaching and learning of written, oral, and other non-traditional forms of communication in the sciences.

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Framing Conversations with Students in Distress

Friday, May 25 | 9 – 11 a.m. | IKBLC, Chilcotin Room (Room 256)

Pillar: Transformative Learning

As Faculty, you play an important role in supporting students through the opportunities and challenges of their UBC experience. This session introduces a developmental advising framework that can be applied when having supportive conversations with students who are struggling or in distress. The training includes helpful approaches to making effective referrals, up-to-date information about campus resources and considerations for self-care and setting boundaries so you can best support students in a range of advising situations.
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Partnership Development and Sustainability in Community Engaged Learning Courses

Friday, May 25 | 11:30 a.m. – 1 p.m. | IKBLC, Seminar Room (Room 2.22)

Pillar: Community and Global Engagement

This 90-minute session will begin with a short presentation by Madeleine Zammar, a staff member from UBC’s Centre for Community Engaged Learning (CCEL), on partnership development and sustainability in community engaged learning courses, followed by a case study from Leeann Donnelly, Assistant Professor in Dentistry, and Shawn Bayes, Executive Director of the Elizabeth Fry Society, who have been working together for more than five years through CEL courses and research. There will be time for Q&A, and we will end with a group exercise generating challenges and best practices in building and sustaining partnerships for CEL courses.
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Integrating Data Science Across Undergraduate STEM Curriculum

Friday, May 25 | 11:30 a.m. – 1:30 p.m. | IKBLC, Chilcotin Room (Room 256)

Pillar: Transformative Learning

Our world is increasingly inundated with data; it amasses in spaces from social media to advertising to personal medicine. This is especially true in the life sciences where next-generation sequencing has revolutionized the way we study living organisms and results in more than 24 TB of new data each day. Thus, it is paramount that today’s undergraduate students engage in data science (often also called bioinformatics) in order to learn the computational and statistical skills necessary to tackle and leverage big data in current and future careers.
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