Taking Teaching to the Edges and Beyond
Date: August 11, 2010 - 11:00am to 3:00pm
Location: TELUS 150 Auditorium
Presented by Community Service-Learning & CTL
An afternoon of showcasing excellence and innovation in teaching that goes beyond the university classroom and into communities. Members of the University community shared examples of how they have moved beyond the classroom to enhance and enliven the teaching/learning experience.
The event began with a keynote presentation titled: Balancing the Edge: The Politics of Engaged Teaching & Learning by Dr. Joel Westheimer, University Research Chair in the Sociology of Education and Professor of Education at the University of Ottawa. Following the keynote, guests visited the displays and watched the presentations set up around the TELUS Centre.
Schedule of Events
11:00 - 12:15
KEYNOTE: Dr. Joel Westheimer
TELUS CENTRE Auditorium, Room 150
12:15
REFRESHMENTS
TELUS CENTRE Foyer
12:30 - 1:15
PRESENTATIONS
TELUS CENTRE, Second Floor
1:15 - 2:15
DISPLAYS
TELUS CENTRE, Foyer
2:15 - 3:00
PRESENTATIONS
TELUS CENTRE, Second Floor
Keynote
Balancing the Edge: The Politics of Engaged Teaching & Learning
Teaching is always perched somewhere on a razor's edge between creative madness and logic. There is a plan, of course: as a social scientist as well as a teacher, I always feel compelled to have a plan. But half of social science is social, and that's where the madness is. You can't predict who's in the room, what experiences they bring to the table, how a classroom conversation or a community activity will be filtered through the life experiences, assumptions, personal theories and individual quirks of everyone who enrolls in a course. Most professors like to believe that it is the logic of their plan -- the curriculum or the syllabus -- that determines the experiences students have in their course. But really the opposite must be true. Our collective experiences must always be the central driving force of teaching. That's what makes community service learning potentially powerful. The creative madness of community experience lives in uneasy dialogue with the professor's plan.
About Dr. Joel Westheimer
Dr. Joel Westheimer is University Research Chair in the Sociology of Education and Professor of Education at the University of Ottawa, Canada. He is co-founder and executive director of Democratic Dialogue, (www.DemocraticDialogue.com). Westheimer teaches, researches, and writes on democratic engagement, social justice, service learning, and community in education. Prior to moving to Canada, he taught at New York University and Stanford University. He has published books such as Pledging Allegiance: The Politics of Patriotism in America's Schools (2007), which Teacher Magazine called "this year's most important education book," What Kind of Citizen? Schools, Civic Education, and the Promise of Democracy (forthcoming, 2010), and Among Schoolteachers (1998). He also publishes widely in newspapers, magazines and scholarly journals and addresses radio and television audiences on shows such as Good Morning America, More to Life, The Agenda, NBC TV News, C-Span, NPR, and CBC radio. Westheimer has received numerous awards including the Daniel E. Griffiths Award for Excellence in Education Research, the Jason Millman Award, and Outstanding Research of the Year Award from the American Political Science Association's Division on Teaching and Learning. In 2005, he was named John Glenn Service Learning Scholar for Social Justice by the John Glenn Institute for Public Service and Public Policy, and in 2009 the Canadian Education Association gave Westheimer the prestigious Whitworth Award for education research that makes a difference.
Westheimer grew up in Manhattan, New York City and attributes much of his formative ideas about education, democracy, and civic engagement to his early involvement in a democratic youth organization. A former musician, he also taught in the New York City Public Schools before pursuing graduate work in education at Stanford University. Westheimer has been politically engaged in campaigns concerning racial equality in South Africa, low-income housing and green spaces in urban centres, and unionization rights of students and faculty at North American schools and universities. Westheimer now lives with his wife and two children in Ottawa, Ontario, where, in Winter, he ice-skates to and from work. He can be reached by email at: joelw@uOttawa.ca.
resentations
- Reading the World: Humanities 101 at the Learning Centre
Donna Chovanec, Trudy Cardinal, Nicole Smith Acuña & Colin Piquette
This interactive session is based on a graduate course that required a CSL placement in pre-‐selected activist organizations. We will explore the students' response to the lack of choice and the pedagogical value of disrupting the hegemony of choice through the lens of critical pedagogy.
- High Risk Youth Uncensored: An educational exchange
Diane Conrad
The performative presentation will share artworks created for a participatory project with iHuman Youth Society, including youth as research collaborators, to develop a series of arts-‐based workshops to educate service providers about working with high-‐ risk youth. REACH Edmonton Council for Safe Communities funds this project.
- Visualizing Community: Visual pedagogies and Community Service-Learning
Joanne Muzak
This presentation will discuss several visual pedagogical strategies and assignments, including photography, ethnographic sketches, and collective mapping, that I have begun to experiment with in Community Service-‐Learning classes, particularly "Introduction to Community Engagement" and "Oil & Community." Examined are how visual pedagogies are especially useful for students participating in service-‐learning, as they integrate conventional classroom learning with community service.
- Experiential Learning and the Mobile Phone: Introducing the MARS Lab
Gordon Gow
This presentation will describe how the Masters of Arts in Communications and Technology (MACT) program at the University of Alberta is incorporating the mobile phone and low cost text-‐messaging to support experiential learning through action research projects involving graduate students. Central to this strategy is the recently established Mobile Application for Research Support (MARS) Lab, which provides students and community partners with tools and support to design, manage, and evaluate small-‐scale, low cost text-‐messaging campaigns.
- Grassroots in Action
Martha Urquhart
Pushing past the boundaries of traditional professional development, 13 communities participated in a tutor training videoconferencing pilot project. This presentation will cover some of the results from these experimental sessions.
- Experiencing Places: Local and international learning opportunities
Karsten Mündel, Ryan Mason & Candice Tremblay
Over the past three year, Augustana, the Liberal Arts campus of the University of Alberta, has been implementing and researching a series of curricular and co-‐curricular educational experiences designed to enhance students' engagement with place. Through a study of these experiences, we have found that by engaging with real people in real places, even in a modest way, students are given tools to lead more ecologically and socially sustainable lives-to be active, critical and engaged citizens in their communities.
- From the Excitement of Discovery to Engagement in the Research Process in Field Studies Courses
Doris Audet, David G. Larson & Candice Tremblay
Every two years we offer a project-‐based field studies course in tropical ecology and conservation, which emphasizes peer-‐based and collaborative learning and promotes student ownership of the course. In this session, we will describe our pedagogical approach, which is applicable to a wide range of 'out of the classroom' experiences across academic disciplines and discuss specific strategies that enrich student learning experiences and improve the quality of research reports they produce.
- Learning Philosophy from the Original Philosopher's Children
John Simpson
Philosophy, especially introductory philosophy, is often seen to be too simultaneously abstract and impractical to be either taught to children or taken outside the classroom. This hands-on workshop will expose you to how myths like these are being dispelled through combining philosophy, community service learning, and Philosophy for Children.
- Disrupting Hegemony of Choice: Community Service-‐Learning in activist placements
Donna Chovanec, Trudy Cardinal, Nicole Smith Acuña & Colin Piquette
In this interactive session, we will enact (with audience participation) a montage of our mutual learning in Humanities 101 - What I didn't learn at school: Education and society - at the Learning Centre Literacy Association at Boyle Street Community Services Centre. In the final 15 minutes, co-learners and co‐teachers of Humanities 101 will share our experiences of the session held in Winter 2010 and elicit ideas for future sessions.
- Moving Inter‐Professional (IP) Learning Beyond the Classroom: Lessons learned from four student placement models
Tara Hatch, Lisa Guirguis, Mark Hall, Renate Kahlke, Sharla King, LuAnne McFarlane, Susan Mulholland, Steve Paterson, Jam Pimlott, & Susan Sommerfeldt
Eight Health Science faculties collaborated to develop and deliver inter-‐professional education, including an elective course that provides students with practical and immersive inter-professional experience in a clinical setting. This presentation compares four delivery models employed since 1998, focusing on how the benefits (student engagement, knowledge transfer to workforce) and challenges (ethical, logistical) of each impact student learning.
- Citing People as Information: The Augustana Human Library as Undergraduate Research Resource
Nancy Goebel
The Augustana human library gathers together individuals who have experienced prejudice or stereotyping (called "Human Books") with students. The students "read" the Human Book in an hour of conversation related to the prejudice or stereotype.
- A Material World: Changing perception through reflective thought
John Nychka
We are surrounded by objects, people, plants, and animals, however when a materials engineer gazes at the world they can switch modes and see only the materials (their atomic structure, the way in which they were processed, their properties). Such a perception shift is a necessity in the engineering profession and is achieved through careful teaching and learning exercises designed to demand exploration of the world outside of the classroom yet, the techniques to be showcased in this presentation are not specific to engineering and have wide applicability.
- Linking Coursework to Community Work: Video gaming in education
Patricia Boechler & Eric deJong
In 2009, researchers in the Departments of Computing Science and Educational Psychology recognized the need for the summer Computing Science camp instructors to have knowledge of teaching practices with children as well as knowledge of video gaming; a collaboration was created in which students enrolled in an education course (EDIT 486: Interactive Multimedia: Video Gaming for Teaching and Learning) were given instruction on how to use and teach with the gaming software used in the camps (Scratch and Opensim). This presentation describes the experiences of the students within the course and their subsequent experiences as instructors within the summer camps.
- Fostering Social Justice work at the "Glocal" Level: Student/NGO engagement and Community Service-Learning approach
N. Ernest Khalema
This poster focuses on strategies used to explore the pedagogy of service-‐learning with social work students; specifically, the process of developing and facilitating a CSL course entitled: Social Work 399 (Practice with Organizations).
Displays
- Experiential Learning: Complementary and alternative medicine fair
Soleil Surette & Sunita Vohra
The goal of this activity was to offer medical students an opportunity to experience complementary and alternative medicine. Providers of acupuncture, Reiki, music therapy, mind-‐body stress reduction (MBSR), massage, and naturopathy offered their services over a lunch hour in order to engage with students.
- The Ins and Outs of Creating Communities for Learning in Visual Communication Design
Bonnie Sadler Takach & Aidan Rowe
How far do we need to go in pushing the boundaries to develop relevant and effective curriculum and learning experiences needed to educate designers who will serve as contributing citizens in our community? In this presentation, we show projects from across and outside the curriculum, demonstrating how we bring the community into the classroom and take our students out into the community; and how these complementary approaches have derived from our exploration of course delivery and assessment practices.
- Dental Hygiene Service Learning Experiences in the Inner City
Alexandra Sheppard
Dental hygiene students at the University of Alberta attend clinical rotations at the Boyle McCauley Dental Clinic, a component of the Boyle McCauley Health Centre, which provides services for people who are culturally diverse. This is a true service learning experience in which the community benefits from the care provided by the students and in which the students have an opportunity to provide supervised dental hygiene treatment to an underserved population of the community.
- Engaging with the Community: Creating opportunities for undergraduate students and persons with disabilities to learn from each other in a physical activity setting
Brenda Rossow-Kimball & Bonnie Cummings Vickaryous
This audio-visual display reveals the experiences of, and relationships between, undergraduate students and persons with disabilities as they negotiate the parameters for a shared, optimal, physical activity experience. The presenters can provide an overview of the development and maintenance of the partnerships that have been established between community agencies and the university, as well as the successes and challenges encountered as experiential learning opportunities within an undergraduate course are created.
- Global Project-‐based Service Learning for Engineers
Vinay Prasad, Arno de Klerk & Sushanta Mitra
This presentation summarizes our approach to and experiences in providing a project based learning experience for engineering students, incorporating cross-‐cultural and global aspects by working in teams with students from other universities, and having a service learning component by working on technological solutions to socially relevant problems. The students are working in teams with students from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay on methods of converting biomass to fuels, chemicals and power.
- Health Professions Initiative for Nutrition, Physical Activity & Wellness (INPAW): From learning to practice
Kathy Kovacs Burns, Leah Gramlich & Michelle MacKenzie
Gaps have been identified in the primary knowledge and skills of health professionals to counsel patients/clients concerning wellness, nutrition or physical activity. Results of a mixed methods study indicated that integration of common and/or discipline-specific nutrition, physical activity and wellness content in existing health sciences education curricula was the preferred approach to address the gaps, including more knowledge and skills regarding counseling and behavioral/lifestyle modification.
- Building Clinical Education Capacity with Inter-professional Clinical Learning Units (IPCLUs) across the Continuum of Care
Mark Hall
This presentation explores the creation of inter-‐professional clinical learning units at three Edmonton healthcare facilities to formalize inter-‐professional collaboration and enhance the clinical education experience for health science students and healthcare practitioners.
- Undergraduate Health Professional Education in Nutrition, Physical Activity and Wellness
Leah Gramlich, Michelle MacKenzie & Katharina Kovacs Burns
This presentation reviews the findings of a qualitative evaluation of nutrition, physical activity, and wellness education in undergraduate health programs at the University of Alberta. Gaps and opportunities will be discussed relative to the findings.
- Theory to Practice in Mechanical Engineering Design
David deJong, Curt Stout, Randy Duke & Bernie Fuchs
This presentation illustrates a new collaboration between the U of A Department of Mechanical Engineering and the NAIT Machinist Program that closes the loop on design education by allowing students to manufacture and test their own designs.
- Community as Partner: Pharmacy students engaging in community health
Cheryl Cox, Sasha Wiens, Tasneem Karbani & Charlotte Jones
Extending patient care from the individual to the community context during clinical placements is more than a quantifiable change. The project included the incorporation of principles of Community as Partner, evidence based approaches to reducing cardiovascular morbidity and mortality and dialogue to attend to the disruptions in the traditional discourses of pharmacy practice.
- The Great Canadian Developmental Mnemonic Contest: A somewhat unorthodox faculty-student collaboration
Debbi Andrews & Peter MacPherson
How do you develop a teaching tool for complex content for novice medical learners? Start with a framework, hold a contest to develop a mnemonic, and then collaborate with the student winners to develop the tool and put it into use.
- From the Excitement of Discovery to Engagement in the Research Process in Field Studies Courses
Doris Audet, David G. Larson & Candice Tremblay
Every two years, we offer a project-‐based field studies course in tropical ecology and conservation that emphasizes peer-‐based and collaborative learning and promotes student ownership of the course. This display features some of the work accomplished by students following their 'out of the classroom experience'.