Featured Instructors
The CTL's annual Festival of Teaching and Learning features five recent U of A Teaching Award Winners as they share their creative and innovative teaching strategies in online teaching and learning.
Houssem Ben Lazreg
Flipgrid and Padlet: The perks of remote teaching
In this presentation, I will explain how I used flipgrid and Padlet to facilitate discussion and collaboration between students. These tools empower teachers and learners to continue their learning, supplement existing teaching methods, and enable new ways of doing meaningful tasks using the target language. They include both synchronous and asynchronous opportunities online. By the end of this presentation, participants will learn how to motivate the learners and stimulate their active engagement with digestible and interesting content.
Houssem Ben Lazreg is an award-winning teaching assistant of French/Arabic at the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta. He has taught Arabic, French, and English with various institutions in Tunisia, the USA, and Canada. He is also a blogger, a freelance translator/interpreter, and a Ph.D. candidate in Translation Studies. His research interests include politics, translation and journalism.
Janet Wesselius
Fishbowls: Promoting Student Engagement & a Safe Atmosphere for Remote Teaching
In this presentation, I will describe and explain how I adapted a fishbowl conversation strategy for remote teaching this past year. I will discuss the outcomes of this strategy for my students and what I learned and will be taking back to my in-person classes, followed by a conversation about what strategies worked for us as teachers and what did not.
Janet Wesselius teaches philosophy at the Augustana Campus, where she was Associate Dean Teaching 2013-2019. She is a recipient of the Rutherford Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. In addition to this past year of remote teaching, Janet participated in two projects of the Council of Public Liberal Arts Colleges: the online Hybrid Course Sharing and the Digital Liberal Arts at a Distance.
Shereen M. Hamza
Meaningful Professional Transformation in the Midst of a Pandemic: Teaching with compassion, embracing essential foundations in education and why there is no going back
My vision for the video presentation is to describe my own professional transformation as an instructor, with particular emphasis on my complete change in philosophy regarding assessment (which was the most difficult decision for me, but has turned out to be one of the best and most effective). I shifted from high-stakes mid-term and final exams to creative and practical assignments and open-book assessments based on integrated knowledge from various course topics and lectures. I am also re-introducing compassion in the classroom and share how I intend to carry these new traditions forward in my work.
Dr. Shereen Hamza, a 2021 Remote Teaching Award Recipient, teaches in the Department of Physiology in the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry. Her passion and energy for teaching is contagious!
Hayley Morrison
Embodied, Engaged, and Experiential Learning in Online Physical Education
Teaching movement-based, curriculum and pedagogy courses is no easy task in an online format. To ensure that embodied and experiential learning were still a key focus in my courses, I developed a teaching strategy and assignment that centered on experiential learning and professional engagement. These experiential learning tasks encouraged students to learn course material while experiencing a variety of outcomes such as developing their own practical pedagogy skills, collaborating with classmates, reflecting in- and on-action, and learning critical thinking and problem-solving skills.
Dr. Hayley Morrison, a 2020 Teaching Unit Award winner is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Alberta. Hayley teaches undergraduate courses in curriculum and pedagogy for elementary school health and physical education as well as graduate courses on inclusive health and physical education and introduction to educational research. Hayley’s teaching is centered on creating inclusive environments, experiential learning opportunities, and using diverse pedagogies for a student-centered approach to learning.
Tanya Ball
Relationality in the Classroom
Special welcome from Florence Glanfield, Vice-Provost (Indigenous Programming & Research).
This presentation discusses Indigenous Ways of Being and Knowing. Specifically, it hones in on the concept of relationality and how it can be incorporated into the classroom.
Tanya Ball, Graduate Student Association (GSA) Graduate Student Principal instructor Teaching Award Winner in 2021, has been recognized for her work in the course Indigenous Contexts for Library and Information Studies in Canada. Tanya Ball (she/her) is a Michif woman currently living in amiskwacîwâskahikan (Edmonton) in Treaty 6 Territory and Métis Region 4. She is a PhD Student at the Faculty of Native Studies where she researches Michif experiences of death and dying and a co-host for masinahikan iskwêwak: the Book Women Podcast, which is a podcast about Indigenous Storytelling.