Dianne is a faculty member in the Healthcare Assistant (HCA) program, and she was a recipient of a Camosun College Teacher Recognition Award this past spring.
Dianne has been at Camosun since 2003; in fact, she retired for a spell (and was retired during the COVID pivot) and came back because she loves teaching. “My teaching actually goes back to a one-room public school in rural Manitoba where I invigilated exams and helped teach the little ones. My mom and grandmother were both teachers, as is my daughter.” While Dianne doesn’t have formal teacher training (she has a Bachelor of Nursing and a Bachelor of Management in Human Resources) as she told me, “a nurse is always a teacher because you have to teach patients, students, residents, and other health care staff.” Dianne has been a registered nurse in Australia, Manitoba, Alberta, and in British Columbia since 1989 where she was employed initially in occupational health and safety with Juan de Fuca hospitals and BC Ferries.  “I’ve had a varied career for sure, working particularly with seniors and persons with dementia since 2000.” Since 2003, when she came to Camosun, Dianne has been teaching in the Healthcare Assistant program, which has grown from two intakes a year to many more when the Health Care Access Program (HCAP) began.
Dianne reflected on the changes in the student demographics over the years. “Today we have many more international and ESL students who come in with a lot of knowledge and varied backgrounds. I have a student right now who has a Master’s in Social Work from South Asia and I have three RN students from other countries. The diversity is phenomenal.” Dianne also notes that many of today’s students struggle with mental health issues and learning challenges. “More of our students are being supported by the Centre for Accessible Learning (CAL) than in previous years, but the HCA program is a great place to start, as it really is the basic beginning in healthcare education.”
I asked Dianne what keeps her coming back to teaching. “What I like most is helping students learn how to learn and gain confidence in themselves. Those students who already know how to learn don’t really need me, but so many students have been beaten down by the system, so, to me it’s about building their self-esteem. I am inspired when students who have struggled with education in the past get an A and take a picture to send to their mom, even though they are 45 years old!” Some students have not been in school for 20 to 30 years and these are the students Dianne especially enjoys mentoring. It seems to take longer to get some students to focus in class and I watch for students having difficulty with attendance.”
But what Dianne emphasized to me was her thinking around assignments and exams. “My personal philosophy is that an assignment is a measure of how effective your teaching was as you go through the material, in other words, assignments are tools for teaching not tools of evaluation, whereas exams are evaluative. Students hear only about 20%of the content presented by the instructor in class. I am not surprised that many students are unsure of what the assignment is asking when they first start the program. We fail as teachers if students don’t learn how to learn, so I spend a lot of time going over what’s expected of an assignment, making sure students understand what’s needed, referring them to the writing center, even looking at drafts before they submit them especially for students who have been away from studies as long time or for ESL students who want clarification on English wording. I don’t punish students for late assignments but try to get to know my students as well as I can so I can address their specific learning needs. The curriculum can be very difficult for some students.”
Dianne also finds that her own experiences coming back to teach post-COVID have been challenging, due to the increased use of technology to support teaching and learning. “It’s been very difficult, and it used to bother me terribly because I felt incompetent, but I’ve tried to put that away because I’m a nurse, not a computer technician.” But when the technology challenges affect the students, Dianne becomes very frustrated. “Students find writing exams stressful at the best of times and we shouldn’t be adding to this stress because our technology is not working.”
One of the Dianne’s thoughts resonated with me because other faculty member have mentioned it as well: that students should have a course built into all curriculum to help them learn the technologies and other skills they need to succeed at the college. “I think we need to step back from the academics during a student’s first week because they’re too anxious and overwhelmed to really learn much of the content. We need to give them practical hands-on skills. We need to build in more resources to help students be successful. Teaching is not just about covering content. It’s helping students learn how to learn, learn how to find things, and learn who’s there to help them. I would like to see a more supportive approach at Camosun with more integration of support services throughout the term and the program, not just on the first day. In the first three weeks of my classes, I build in how to study, how to read a textbook, how to highlight, how to make notes. And then I offer extra after-class time with students who need it.”
I asked Dianne about some of the memories that stood out for her over her many years of teaching, and one story she had for me was amazing. “I had a young woman who had to travel a long distance to get to her clinical sessions. Clinical started at seven and one day she got there right at seven with her coat on and was having trouble concentrating that morning. I went to talk to her later about being almost late and she said that on her way to clinical, she had come across an accident, so she stopped and found the driver was not breathing. She was by herself, so did CPR, and when somebody else came along he called 911 (she didn’t have a cellphone). She saved the driver’s life.” A good reminder to remember to have empathy for our students before jumping to conclusions about their behaviour.
My final question for Dianne was around what advice she would give new faculty coming in to teach in her program. And not surprisingly, she recommends new faculty get more help with technology, but also to “use the resources other people have already built for their courses and customize them, because this can be a good way to learn the material yourself.” Dianne also thinks new faculty should critically review the way existing assignments and exams are worded and “have the confidence to point out when they don’t make sense to them. Because of time constraints, we often repeat and reuse our content and assessments without fine-tuning, but new faculty see them with fresh eyes.”
In addition, Dianne wants new faculty to be better supported. “New faculty often come on term contracts. They get lost in the system and try to cope without a lot of support. I think sometimes we as an organization are so busy with bureaucracy and budgets, we lose sight of the people who are supporting our students, the people who are in the front of the classroom keeping the students in our programs.” Without faculty and students (and people to support them), our institution is just a building – it’s time for us to refocus on what really matters.