teaching and learning – Page 3 – Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning

Camosun Story #77: Stephanie

Stephanie is a term instructor in the Social Sciences department where she teaches geography courses. She has not been at the college long (since fall, 2023) and as a term instructor, does not always know if or when she will be teaching again. But she had an amazing story to tell and some great insights on teaching and learning to share.

Stephanie grew up in Arkansas where she completed a bachelor’s with a double major in geography and Arab studies. After completing a master’s in geography, Stephanie studied tourism in Tunisia before beginning her doctoral studies in environmental studies at York University (moving to Canada for the first time). During all of this, and in between studies, she traveled, attended the American University in Morocco and the Borgiba Institute for Languages in Tunis, worked with World Heritage Sites, specifically in Carthage, then returned to the United States to study American nationalism and identity on landscapes of national parks. Finally, she moved to Qatar with her husband who works in medical imaging IT, where they spent six years before returning to Canada in 2022. “I worked at the US army base with Afghan refugees. We built a school and brought kids together. We would go out into the community and distribute donations. And I ended up teaching English – I never thought of being an English teacher, but it was what was needed.”

After renewing her permanent residency in Canada, Stephanie applied to be a substitute geography instructor at Camosun, a job she did during the winter term of 2023. Then, in the fall of 2023, she came on board as a term instructor teaching two sections of Geography 100, one blended and one in-person. And this past winter term, Stephanie was teaching a full course load, including courses on resource and environmental management, environmental sustainability, and the geography of Canada. As overwhelming as starting to teach at a new institution then taking on a full load of teaching has been for her, Stephanie tells me she has had a lot of help. Her chair at the time was with her every step of the way, and she also had help from some of my colleagues in CETL, as well as her subject liaison librarian, telling me that “every person has been amazing!”

When I asked Stephanie what drew her to teaching and what she enjoys most about it, she immediately answered, the students. “My weekends are busy with course work and sometimes I get bogged down. But when I get back with the students, it’s very energizing and I remember why I’m doing this. In spite of the ups and downs that come with teaching, I just want to engage and empower the students; I want to show them the world.”

I also wondered about her experience teaching a blended course. “Even though I did teach and take classes online during COVID, the blended concept was completely new to me. I taught two blended sections in the winter 2024 term – one ran during the day and the other in the evening and the students in each section had very different needs. I found it challenging but Derek in CETL helped me pick out some books about online learning, and I talked to Susan Chen and Katie Waterhouse [both instructors who teach blended courses.] I would redesign the courses if given the opportunity, but you don’t always know what needs to be changed until you’re in the middle of teaching.” Right now, as a term faculty member, Stephanie unfortunately does not have the Scheduled Development time she would need to redesign the courses. But she didn’t start with nothing. “My chair was very generous in sharing her content, and I inherited some content from another faculty member, so all I had to do was fill some gaps, integrate current topics, and add a bit of myself. The blend itself was one class a week in person with the rest asynchronous in D2L, so I also had to figure out what belonged online and what needed to be in-person. Sometimes I recorded lectures, sometimes the lecture was in person and the lab activity was online – it depended on the class. I worked hard to make the courses successful, but I could only do so much with the time I had.”

I asked Stephanie if any memories of the past year of teaching had stuck with her. “I think just making connections with students and those moments when you say something that opens their eyes to something new. For example, in the resource and environmental management course I asked students if they had heard about the ring of fire. And everyone said yes, until they realized I was talking about the ring of fire in Northern Ontario which none of them knew about, even the Canadians from Ontario. When you hook them, they get excited. For me, that’s the best part.”

Stephanie has had many international students in her courses. “It’s amazing to have students from all over the world because they bring different perspectives.” Stephanie worked with Cristina Petersen (one of our Multilingual Support Specialists) to support her international students on how to take notes, and to provide definitions for terms they find challenging. “When I get frustrated because students aren’t coming to class or taking notes, I remind myself that every student, international or not, has their own struggles, preferences for how to learn, and reasons for being here.” Stephanie can also relate to international students because she is international herself. “In one class, we were talking about forestry in British Columbia and I asked ‘who here can vote in Canada?’ Well, of course, I can’t and that I think that helped some of the international students, knowing that I’m not from here either.”

As we came to the end of our conversation, I asked Stephanie, as a fairly new faculty member, what she would like to have had or known when she started teaching at Camosun, and what advice she would have for other new faculty. Her answer echoed what I have heard from many other term instructors: “I would have liked to have had more time before the start of the term to figure out what I was doing, because that first term was tough. Getting a C-number, getting access to D2L and learning how to use it, etc.” In addition, Stephanie spoke to the uncertainty of not knowing if she would be teaching again in the future until the last minute, and imagining what she could do with her courses if she had more time to prepare. “As far as what would I tell new faculty: Be annoying. Ask questions. If you’re wondering about the writing center go over and knock on the door and introduce yourself. Just be annoying – it’s okay. People will be kind to you. But you’re not going to find out unless you keep asking questions.”

Camosun Story #76 Thuy

Thuy has been a faculty member in the Biology Department at Camosun College since 1999. Thuy was finishing her master’s in molecular and developmental genetics, and had transferred into the PhD program, but after passing the PhD qualifying exam left her wandering the streets of Montreal feeling empty instead of elated, she decided teaching was really what she wanted to do. She was accepted into the education program at McGill where she completed a two-year degree. And the rest is history. I have spoken to Thuy a few times in the past about her teaching (sometimes on nice walks around the campus), and was really looking forward to sharing some of her insights with others.

Thuy started out teaching introductory biology courses, then began teaching anatomy and physiology (A&P) to first-year nursing students. After 15 years of teaching A&P, an opportunity came up for her to teach the infectious disease course. At first, Thuy was not interested, but as she thought about it (and became fascinated with sourdough cultures) she decided to give it a try, and in Fall of 2019 found herself teaching three new courses, one being the infectious disease course. “I remember teaching my infectious disease students that first fall, talking about Ebola and other diseases where the World Health Organization will come in to mitigate spread of the disease during an outbreak. To help students understand the challenges of public health and relate to the people living through the Ebola outbreak, I said ‘can you imagine if you got sick, and people in blue vests came and said, you can’t get together with your family this Christmas because you have a respiratory illness?’ And then, COVID happened. Teaching this course turned out to be a good thing for me, because despite the horror of switching to online teaching, because I was still new to infectious disease, I found myself very curious about COVID rather than worn down by it.”

I asked Thuy what she likes best about her life as an instructor. “I really like the creative aspect of it and the problem solving and I like learning and trying new things, whether it’s new material or new students with new problems. I find the challenges of, for example, making a particular piece of content more accessible or easier to understand, fun. And the best challenges are when students come for help, you work with them, and then see them achieve what they want – that’s really exciting. But I do find it hard when students are struggling but you have no idea if it’s a personal struggle, a content-related struggle, or a learning skills struggle – sometimes it can be difficult to support in those circumstances.”

Going back to her online teaching experience (which she found especially challenging) during COVID, I asked Thuy if there were things she continued to integrate into her teaching since coming back to in-person teaching. “I have continued to record my lectures and make them available to students, and I provide notes for them in D2L, first, to reduce stress for people who can’t make it because of illness and also to support international students, or for any student really. For example, while my dental hygiene students come to every class, most of them watch the recordings in case they missed something. Some students don’t take notes in class anymore because they find it more effective to focus and listen and not have to worry about taking notes too.”

I wondered if Thuy had any memories of past 25 years of teaching that stuck out for her. “There were two students – I don’t remember their names, but I still think about them sometimes. Both of them came to me for help and I spent a lot of time with them. When they came to my office, I would ask them about various topics, and they could talk to me about those topics with no problem. However, when it came to writing the exams, they would falter. I began to feel that oral exams would have worked better for them., but at that time I didn’t know how to go about offering oral exams as an option in a way that would have seemed fair and not additionally stressful for them. Maybe if I had tried it, or if I had been able to talk to somebody who had already tried it I could have helped these students more.”

I asked Thuy what advice she might have for new instructors at Camosun. “It doesn’t matter if you’re new or if you’ve been teaching for a while, sometimes things don’t go well, and you can lose confidence. One image which helps me when I feel really, really low, is that what I am doing is scrunching down low so that I can suddenly leap up – that periods of downs are actually periods of powering up. Thinking about them that way can really help. In addition, so often when we as teachers get evaluations, 95% of them will be great, but those other one or two comments are the ones that hurt you, that stick with you. But don’t hold those negative comments to your heart.” Thuy said she thought this same idea would be helpful for students as well. “One bad exam can be demotivating enough to make students give up. Instead, we need to all remember to use those failures as feedback. Everyone fails at one time or another and it’s not the failing that’s important, it’s what you do afterwards that matters.”

As we wrapped up our conversation, Thuy wanted to share one more story with me. “To support students to develop their voice, I ask them to do presentations, but not in front of the entire class. Instead, they present to small groups of people at stations in the classroom. As students in the audience move from station to station, the presenting students repeat the same ten-minute presentation many times, so they become more comfortable with presenting. My dental hygiene students do this twice in one semester and once in the following semester, and by the end they have learned how to narrow down what is important, how to create visuals for the presentation, how to engage their audience and are better prepared for their capstone project, a presentation in front of 30 dentists and dental health professionals!” What a wonderful model for building an essential, transferable skill in a supportive environment. I am looking forward to our next walk to find out what she is exploring next.

Camosun Story #75: Kristin

Kristin is an instructor in the School of Health and Human Services. She has a background in mental health and curriculum and instruction and was hired by Camosun over 20 years ago on a contract to start a community mental health credential. She has since worked not only to grow that program, but to develop other credentials. Today, Kristin teaches courses in the Mental Health and Addition program, as well as in the Interprofessional Mental Health and Addiction post-graduate diploma, and the Community Family and Child Studies program.

Kristin says “I came to Camosun with a non-traditional perspective of teaching. I was working with groups in psychiatry and mental health and was drawn to building relationships with students. Our programs attract many students with their own mental health and substance use challenges, so it’s important to meet students where they’re at to recognize their strengths and support their motivation. Nothing warms my heart more than hearing grads tell us how much they changed through the program, or even partway through.”

I wondered where the students in Kristin’s program come from. “Many times, they’re coming from support or work positions in residential settings, street programs, outreach, etc. In the classroom, students engage in reflection and self-awareness so they can become more grounded in their own values and beliefs; if you’re going to develop relationships with the people you’re supporting, you need to understand your own perspectives to be accepting of others’ values, beliefs, and perspectives.”

I asked Kristin what impact the past three years have had on her teaching. “Being online during COVID highlighted engagement, because if we can’t engage students in any context, online or face-to-face, then they’re not to grow and become who they need to be in order to support others. That experience pushed us as faculty to be responsive and figure out how we were going to keep students engaged and motivated when we didn’t have the containment of the classroom.” But luckily, the programs were approved to have some in-person sessions during the height of the pandemic. “It was worth the work to get classroom time on campus, and students appreciated the opportunity to work on their skill development with others.” Kristin herself is skeptical of how relationships can be built online but appreciates that many of their grads will need to engage with clients through online platforms, making online learning relevant for them. “Some of our graduates will need to use technology to connect with and assess clients and right now we’re revamping our professional communication courses to include content on digital literacy to help students think more about the benefits of technology, and ultimately help their clients navigate the Internet to find relevant information and reliable resources.”

One activity in one course in the program Kristin has kept from the online teaching days was one where students work in small groups and record video of themselves leading group sessions. The video allows students to not only observe the activity and evaluate things like facial expressions, but also allows them to watch the video again and conduct a self-evaluation of the session. In addition, an assignment that required students conduct interviews at an organization on-site, but had to move online during the pandemic, has been revised to include online interviews as an option. “This helps because professionals out in the field are very busy and the online interview option means students have more opportunities to connect with them while being more respectful of the professional’s time because they can choose what works best for them.”

Since Kristin has been teaching at Camosun for so long, I knew she must have some memories that stick in her mind. “I recall the first graduation ceremony I went to and seeing the excitement in the grads waiting to get their parchment. I was ready to shake their hands as they crossed the stage but instead, I got hugs! It was amazing to see that I meant more to them than I thought, and I felt very blessed to be a part of their learning journey.” Another thing Kristin appreciates is the diversity of students in her classes and the relationships they build together. “We get such an eclectic group of students in our program, of all ages and with all kinds of experience and education. I still have grads from years ago contact me to let me know what they are doing now – it’s those relationships I always think about, as well as the collective wisdom that the variety of students brings to the program.” But what Kristin really wanted me to know about her students was how much they want to be here. “We get a lot of people that need to make career changes and have put a lot of thought into what’s going to bring them purpose in their lives. Some have retired and decided retirement is not for them, some have been in recovery and want to learn how to help others in recovery. There are so many different reasons people come to the program, but everyone’s passionate and thirsty for knowledge, and that’s what’s so exciting.”

I asked Kristin what advice she might have for new instructors in her program or at Camosun in general. “Connect with other faculty to ask about strategies and talk about challenges. Don’t take things that happen in the classroom personally because you never know why someone might be reacting the way they are. Instead, engage with that student and figure out what’s going on rather than make assumptions because that personal engagement goes a long way to help that student sort out what’s getting in the way. New instructors might not feel confident in responding to something unexpected happening in the classroom that might have them questioning their ability as an instructor. It’s ok to say, ‘let me think about that and get back to you’ and not feel compelled to say something right then and there.”

As we wrapped up our discussion, Kristin said, “I’ve been really fortunate to be in a program with students who are passionate about learning, and I also learn from my students – I’m always changing the way I do things and am grateful that we have that freedom as instructors and as a program to be responsive to what’s going on in the community. That ability to adjust and respond to the needs of students and the people they will ultimately be serving, as well as the students themselves, makes it all worthwhile”.

Camosun Story #74: Nancy

Nancy became an instructor in the Visual Arts Department at Camosun in 1997 when she began teaching photography while completing her Master’s in art history. Currently, Nancy teaches several courses, including Modern Art History, Visual Culture, Digital Photography and Filmmaking, and Film Photography. Nancy told me that her current art practice revolves around creative writing, either on its own or in conjunction with photographs.

I sat down with Nancy to find out more about how Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) has affected her teaching and her students, and she began by talking the impact GenAI has had on how she approaches her lecture-based courses. “I knew I had to start by looking at my exams. I typically provide an exam overview so that students can focus their studying and spend more time with course material. They could bring in these notes on paper or access the information from the desktop. I had open-book exams because my philosophy is that exams are opportunities for students to show off their knowledge. I use the D2L Quiz tool and allowed students to cut and paste in their answers which supports students who don’t have strong keyboarding skills and those who may struggle with English. But last summer when I was teach Modern art history, I noticed that about a third of the exam answers did not sound like students wrote them, so I felt I had to make a change. But rather than moving to pen and paper exams like some faculty have, I decided that students could bring in as much printed information as they wanted into the exam but would have to type their answers into D2L rather than copy and paste. In addition, I changed the kinds of questions I asked on the exam.”

In addition to changing her exams, GenAI also made Nancy rethink the research papers in her art history courses. Moving from her model students creating an essay proposal early in the term and handing in a final paper at the end of term, Nancy now starts with “a series of small, kickstart assignments working up to the essay proposal: a thesis statement, an outline, a bibliography of ten sources – all providing proof that students did their own work. I tell them that if I don’t think they’re doing their own work, we’re going to have a conversation.” In addition, Nancy provides a statement in her syllabi around GenAI and how it should and should not be used, not endorsing its use, but acknowledging its existence and potential as a tool.

In preparation for these changes to her assessments, Nancy decided it was important to learn how to use ChatGPT – to find out more about what it can and can’t do. One of the first things she did was ask ChatGPT to help her revise a lecture on Russian Constructivism. “Normally writing a lecture takes 10 hours to research it, 10 hours to find the visuals and create the PowerPoint presentation, check everything for copyright, etc. So, I put everything into ChatGPT and in 10 seconds I had an outline for a lecture. I went through it, and it was pretty good – ChatGPT even included ideas I had not considered.” Nancy was elevated, but wondered, “if I’m using ChatGPT to generate lectures outlines, but telling students they can’t use it to generate ideas, am I a hypocrite? But I brought myself back to how I talk about GenAI with students, asking are you using it as a tool or a crutch?” Because in the end, as much as ChatGPT helped Nancy create her lecture outline, she still had to spend time reviewing the results before finishing it. For example, “I asked ChatGPT if other painters were painting the Death of Sardanapalus in the 1800s. It generated a list of well-known artists, the titles of the paintings, and even dates. But when I started to research these leads, all the information was fabricated.” It was an important lesson in the importance of checking ChatGPT’s work and letting students know to do the same. “I tell students if you’re going to use it, then you need to follow-up, which can be more work than just sitting in the library and typing in your keywords. And as instructors we need to understand how GenAI tools work so we can find a middle ground between ignoring it and letting its use go unchecked. Maybe someday we will see a shift in education where there is less emphasis placed on generating information and more on research and editing, where GenAI finds information and students are responsible for checking for its accuracy and then finessing the writing.”

I asked Nancy how her colleagues around the college are handling GenAI tool use in the classroom. “A tool like ChatGPT represents a big adjustment and people will embrace it slowly as they start to see what other people are doing with it. While some instructors are reverting to pen and paper assessment, a lot of people I talk to about ChatGPT are excited when I tell them how I created a rubric in 10 seconds and then spent 30 minutes to finalize it.” What Nancy finds is that it’s in those hallway conversations where we share what we’ve tried, how we’ve failed, what we are doing to do differently, etc. that gives us courage to try something new or think about our teaching practice in a different way.

I was curious if Nancy had noticed any questions around AI in her photography classes. “I had a student last year who wondered why were not working with AI in our classes, which is a good question, but I still have to think about how it could be used creatively. If students are gathering information to create something, then AI is just another tool to support that. But using AI to create art is another thing. When I teach Photoshop [a tool which integrates AI] for example, I want students to think about why they choose AI generated effects, and not just say, ‘because it looks cool.’ Maybe another one of our roles as educators is to help students gain the language around the why.”

I’ve known Nancy for a few years now, and she is always ready to try new things to enhance her teaching, so I was happy to hear how she is embracing GenAI in these small ways. “New tools push me as an instructor, push me as an artist, push me as a human, and help me reevaluate and let go of my preconceptions. So often new things that are out of our control, like GenAI, cause people to shut down. But for me, when I start to panic, I think, okay, it’s just a tool. Let’s see what we can do with it.”

Leaving Wishful Thinking Behind: A Bookclub Reflection by Robin Fast

If on one side we have pessimism and anger, and on the other we have oblivious and blissful optimism, I tend to nestle comfortably and happily in the latter. I have been told, bizarrely, that this quality is a bit annoying. On closer examination, I must admit this quality may be the result of a luck-filled life – a life that, while touched, at times, by hardship, is insulated by a long list of privileges. It may be easier to be hopeful when surrounded by good things.

This winter, the Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) Book Club participants read Critical Hope: How to Grapple with Complexity, Lead with Purpose, and Cultivate Transformative Social Change by Kari Grain.

In the book, Grain, a teacher in the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia, suggests that “positivity can be toxic.” I don’t appreciate this conclusion, but, sadly, I’ve come to agree with her. How helpful can positivity be – how helpful can hope be – without a plan, without action based on a critical understanding of what’s going on? And if there isn’t space for anger and frustration, an important source of motivation for change is eliminated.

Drawing on educational thinkers like Paulo Freire, Grain describes critical hope as “a dance, a negotiation, a heated entanglement between a critical awareness of the problem (or many problems) at hand and the spark of spirit that – sometimes in contradiction to our own experiences and sensibilities – insists on hope.”

Many of us see students struggling to live in an increasingly complex world that, while some might argue is not necessarily any more dangerous than the world experienced by previous generations, bombards us with a hopeless, overwhelming sea of bad news – all of it easily accessible 24/7, from that shiny rectangle in our pockets. Through Critical Hope, Grain offers solutions to the overwhelm and despair some of us may be experiencing by sharing principles, strategies, classroom activities, and local and global stories of critical hope in action.

This blogpost will offer a small taste of a few of these ideas, and, hopefully, entice you to grab the library’s copy and take a larger bite.

The Seven Principles of Critical Hope

In Critical Hope, Grain describes what she calls a “non-exhaustive” list of principles “meant to get at the core ideas underlying critical hope” based on what she has learnt from other thinkers, leaders, and teachers. So, here we go…

Hope is necessary, but hope alone is not enough.

Hope alone is naive. Knowledge isn’t action. The commitment, discipline, self reflection, and intentional action of praxis combined with hope is critical hope.

Critical hope is not something you have. It is something you practice.

Grain offers a slightly horrifying image of a surgeon that hasn’t planned or prepared. As I read I imagine hearing, as I lie on a table and drift off, “Let’s just see how it goes, shall we?” Planning and practice is critical to critical hope. Drawing on her experience learning to play music, she describes three components of practice:

Practicing your part – What is your responsibility within the broader effort in which you are engaged?
Practicing your art – What is the gift you bring and how can you use it to create change?
Practicing asking questions – What’s going on in the larger system? What is beyond what you can see?

Critical hope is messy, uncomfortable, and full of contradictions.

Here, Grain asks “Why do you have no mud beneath your fingernails if your goal requires you to move earth?” Some of that dirt comes through the discomfort of challenging our comfort zones: cultural values, habits, common-sense conclusions,etc.. Without this examination, she suggests, we risk perpetuating oppression in our attempts to create positive change.

Critical hope is intimately entangled with the body and the land.

Grain describes the “politics of the body,” and the contradictions in societal expectations, for example, women being policed for modesty while also being sexualized. She also describes the importance of decolonizing practices, rather than decolonization, focusing on the action as well as hope and challenging the reader to ask: How does the land affect my identity? What are the histories on this land? How can my current action impact the injustices of the past?

Critical hope requires bearing witness to social and historical trauma.

Acquiring “difficult knowledge” can make action “imperative.” It becomes an irritant like “a grain of sand in the oyster of imagination,” pushing us to ask, “Who am I now that I know this?” Grain describes this time, between acquiring knowledge and action, as a valuable liminal space, and an opportunity to reconceptualize ourselves and the world, to grapple with this new understanding and to prepare to act.

Critical hope requires interruptions and invitations.

Connecting critical hope to the role of educator and the classroom experience, Grain describes “Spider-Man moments,” those times when an opportunity exists for a big shift in perception. Perhaps a student has asked a challenging question, or perhaps they are struggling with new information and it is poking at their sense of self, their sense of self in relation to disparity or trauma. With all eyes on you, for a teacher, these moments can be “terrifying” and “whatever you do will be action.” Grain emphasizes the importance of leadership here, describing ways to prepare for and capitalize on these moments. She also suggests a context of radical hospitality — a “hospitality that welcomes all and also expects guests to respect the place and the people with whom they coexist.”

Anger and grief have a seat at the table.

“Welcome each emotion as a treasured guest,” Grain advises. “Each has wisdom to offer.” The final principle focuses on the importance of accepting rage, anger, and grief, in ourselves and in others, as important components of critical hope. Rage and anger are indications of injustice. Grief is an indication of healing and can motivate us to ask questions like, what historical traumas do you need to heal from and what action do you need to take? Ignoring or discounting these emotions, Grain suggests, is an act of privilege not afforded to those most impacted by things such as systemic discrimination or global conflict.

Bringing Critical Hope into the Classroom

Throughout the book are several helpful tools that can bring a pedagogy of critical hope into the classroom. Here are a couple of examples that I found particularly helpful.

Grain writes that she regularly asks “students to begin the semester by writing a ‘positionality statement.’” This is a statement that describes “the position from which you view the world.” It is “an explicit recognition of your own identity and the ways your identity might affect how you listen, how you are perceived, how you move through the world, and what barriers you face or privileges you have.” This self-reflection activity, touching on categorizations like “nationality, race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, educational level, familial roles, occupation, physical ability, mental health, and age,” can be difficult as it turns “the lens of learning inward” while requiring students, and teachers, to explicitly acknowledge things about themselves. I’ve left links at the end of this blog to a couple examples of how to carry out this activity with students.

A second strategy, described by Grain in support of student learning, is a framework to cultivate psychological safety in the learning environment. She offers the SAFE framework as a way “for leaders and educators to help others access neural resources related to hope.”

The ‘S’ in SAFE stands for social engagement system: using calm and engaged responses – a voice that conveys emotion and intention, listening, smiling, and engaging eyes-to communicate safety and care.

‘A’ for attentiveness: We are “mirrors for each other” and it is important to ensure our social signaling aligns with our intent. The “most important things a leader and educator can do are to be very present in their body and to have their attention focused on the social engagement signals of the people they are interacting with.”

‘F’ for fun and playfulness: By “introducing playfulness and fun, a leader triggers a social cue that says there are no threats in this moment, there are no goals to achieve, and we are here to create an emotional experience of happiness and connection,” creating an “environment that is conducive to helping others access the higher-order features of learning, flexible problem solving, creativity, and seeing multiple possibilities.”

And finally, ‘E’ for Expressiveness: Using “facial gestures and voice in expressive ways” so that students don’t need to make guesses about and can accurately interpret our intentions. 🙂

Fostering Critical Hope

In addition to guiding principles and specific classroom strategies, the book includes several stories about people engaged, both at the micro and macro level, in education or social-justice work that exemplify a practice of critical hope. Each story includes bits of wisdom as well as key considerations for fostering critical hope from the person sharing their experience. I’ll share one piece, from a man named Am Johal, an activist working in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, that stood out to me as relevant to anyone working, as we are, in a large, sometimes less-than-responsive organization.

“Institutions are clumsy, slow, and problematic. But they are also sites of possibility. And if we lose sight of that, then we lose the capacity to think about making changes at a scale that can be important.”

Instead of pessimism or optimism, perhaps I need to engage with what is, as well as with the steps for what’s next.

If you are considering joining the next faculty book club, please see CETL’s Calendar of Upcoming Events.

Additional resources can be found with any of us at CETL and:

Camosun Story #73: Helen

Helen is a Co-op and Internship Coordinator (CIC) with the Technology programs at Camosun, as well as Chair for Cooperative Education. Helen has been working in post secondary education for most of her career and explained, “I have always been interested in the teaching and learning process, even when I was in administrative or coordination roles. And I am particularly interested in experiential education and reflective learning, or work-integrated learning which is how co-op fits in.”

Part of Helen’s work as a CIC is to teach a Career Development Workplace Preparation Skills course, known as CDEV. “CDEV is a competency-based course teaching students about career development that includes assessing one’s own interests, skills and abilities; understanding the world of work; and connecting with professionals, and opportunities, in industry.” Helen also noted that for her program area, CDEV is a requirement for graduation, meaning that not all students are keen to take it.

Because CDEV is required, Helen sometimes finds teaching it challenging. “Ideologically, I want people to learn, not just finish with a grade. But it’s challenging to engage students meaningfully when they are motivated by the technology aspects of their program and are very busy in their courses.

Most of the assignments in CDEV are not graded – with the exception of the cover letter and resumé, with a requirement of achieving 70% or higher to complete the course. A strong cover letter and resume is the biggest artifact coming out of CDEV for students. After Helen heard about ungrading, she had a conversation with Robin Fast and thought it “might be a solution to some of the tensions I was experiencing” around student engagement and grading that assignment within a pass/fail course. “I love to try out new things, so last fall I decided to scrap the itemized rubric for the cover letter and resumé and made it more qualitative. I still had grades, but used a binary method where One was ‘you’ve met the requirements’ and Zero was ‘you need to keep working on it.’”

Helen anticipated my next question; how did it go? “It’s a work in progress and I need to refine things for next time. What I found is that ungrading didn’t seem to give students enough direction. Part of me thinks I may have removed some incentives by removing the quantitative rubric. When it was clear that the requirement to pass was 70 out of 100, they had incentive to work harder, even though I would tell them not to do it for the grade.”

A piece of ungrading that supported the workplace preparation and student engagement aspects of CDEV was the feedback component, which in ungrading is typically formative and collaborative. “Students need to learn how receive feedback and to be able to adapt based on feedback. While I had always incorporated peer feedback into class activities, I required students to submit their feedback along with their application documents so I could help them be accountable to the feedback they received. And thanks to Robin, I implemented audio feedback for students, which was a way for me to provide personal commentary about their submissions.” One problem she encountered was that while “students were allowed to resubmit their documents as many times as they needed to, many of them seemed to disregard the feedback that was given. It almost seemed that without a grade, feedback did not matter.”

One aspect of ungrading Helen particularly appreciates is the focus it brings to building relationships in the classroom. “I feel that this experience with ungrading enhanced my relationships with students and contributed to a wonderful communal learning experience. In fact, I heard more than once that the peer reviews and the discussions in class and enabled students to better connect with each other if I can get them to talk to the student next to them, that’s a win!”

Helen reminded me that “these students are in a grueling and competitive program, and I like to think that CDEV supports them to excel at a personal level, because CDEV is all about them. I believe if I can boost their confidence through CDEV, that will also be good for their career. And because their success is based on the choices they make, I’d like them to choose to be successful, not be reliant on a grade as a measure of success. That’s why ungrading appeals to me as a principle.”

What is the future of ungrading for Helen? “I’m going to keep it with some refinements. I think when you do something new you should give it more than just one try. Not everyone is comfortable with trying new things and possibly failing, but if something you try works out, then others may be willing to try it out too. In the end, our goals are to help our students succeed in their careers and prepare them for the real world.” And Helen believes many of ungrading aspects, like reflection and collaborative feedback, can support those goals.

Camosun Story #72: Robin and Ungrading

You may remember Robin from such stories as Camosun Story #7 (SO long ago) and Becoming Unravelled: a reflection. Robin is both a faculty member in the Community, Family & Child Studies (CFCS) program as well as an Educational Developer in the Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning. A few weeks ago, I sat down with Robin to talk about his journey into ungrading, foreshadowed by his Unravelled post.

“This journey for me began when I started with CETL last year. I facilitated the book club with a book about ungrading already assigned, and then wrote my reflection blog post. But for awhile now I’ve been grappling with how to make sure everything I do aligns with my principles of teaching and learning, and wondering how we can grade students for their efforts when grading is not at all an objective measurement of their learning.”

Robin’s work with the book club clarified that he was not alone in struggling with having to assign grades. “Students are supposed to make mistakes, try things out, and practice” and grading them at every step along the way may not encourage them to continue in that ongoing learning whether that grade is “good” or not. And when Robin read the ungrading book he realized that he had already been doing quite a bit of ungrading. “For example, in the CFCS diploma, we have practicum courses that aren’t graded – those courses are assessed as complete or not complete and the assignments all align with that. Students are expected to meet learning outcomes to a level where they’re ready to practice independently in the community. So, if an assignment doesn’t reflect that ability, we ask them to redo it and explain how they can improve.” But what Robin realized was that the other courses students take were not preparing them for that practicum learning experience, although within those graded courses, Robin was providing assignments that were NOT graded. “For example, if students are doing presentations, they will for the most part receive an A because they are taking a risk by standing up and speaking and you don’t want to discourage them.” But the conversations Robin had in book club helped him realize that ungrading was important for every assignment. As a result, Robin decided to move a class he had taught many times completely into the world of ungrading for the following Fall term.

“The course I ungraded is CFCS 110, Foundations for Practice, and is a first semester course in a two-year diploma program. Melissa (another ungrader) shared some examples of wording she used to describe ungrading to students, and I made some modifications to my course using those examples. I got rid of any of the one and done assignments and made sure all assignments were formative.” Robin noted that ungrading research discusses how ungrading is both positive for students and disruptive, because it is a radical change from how they are used to being assessed. Communicating clearly and regularly with students is, therefore, essential to build their comfort with ungrading. “At the very beginning of the course, I described the ungrading process to students and gave them a document describing the reasons for ungrading, what some of the problems are with grading, and why this could be valuable to their learning. I explained that I would give them regular feedback on their assignments, but they wouldn’t receive a letter grade for their assignments. I also clarified how redoing assignments would work to meet the course expectations.”

Robin chose to provide audio feedback to students so that they could hear his voice explaining clearly what he saw that they were doing well in the assignment, and places that they could improve for the next assignment or for a resubmission if that was needed. “Audio feedback is easy to create, can be more detailed, and supports building a relationship with the learner much better than written feedback.”

Robin also met with students individually right before the midpoint of the course, taking class time to do so. “That took a couple weeks to complete. I intended to meet again with each of them towards the end of the semester, but I did not manage that this time around.” While time consuming, Robin feels this piece of the switch to ungrading is critical, to build trust in the feedback process, and making sure he was always following through with his commitments to them.

Because self-reflection is an important component in ungrading, Robin had his students reflect on their progress at both the midpoint and the end of the course. “When you ask students to assign a letter grade for themselves, you reserve the right to adjust it, which opens the door to a conversation if there’s disagreement.” Robin asks things like: How do you see yourself progressing over the semester? Have you responded to feedback from one assignment for the next? “In my past courses students have often been dragged down by a weak assignment at the beginning of the semester meaning their final grade may not reflect where they’ve come to by the end of the semester. None of that is a factor with the ungrading process because their letter grade is based on how they see themselves progressing and what they’ve learned by the end of the course.”

Whether you use ungrading or not, students need to receive a letter grade, and Robin wondered how students would assess themselves – would they all give themselves an A+? “I came to two conclusions. First was that letter grades, no matter how hard we try, are subjective measures of something, and not necessarily learning, so why am I worried about what grade students are assigning? Second was that research says students are typically harder on themselves with their grades that we are, and I found that was true in many cases, where students assigned themselves a letter grade which was lower than I would have.”

Robin also puzzled over the disconnect between ungrading and having to assign a grade. “If I tell students that the letter grade system is subjective for instructors to assign, how can I expect them to assign themselves a grade? So, I discussed that apparent contradiction with students and provided them with a clear rubric. And I know some ungrading instructors will build that rubric with students, so they have even more of an understanding of what it is that they’re working towards.” Another challenge Robin has with letter grades is how they turn education into something that is ranked. “In real life, after they complete college, students will go to work, get feedback on the work they do, and use that feedback to improve – that’s the way our whole world works. So why don’t we make sure that we’re aligning that with how we’re teaching here?”

Robin was happy with how his first foray into ungrading went. “I received positive feedback from students both during the course and at the end. In fact, I had one student tell me that she felt like she had never learned in school before, but now she felt like she was learning. She could focus on the content and not worry about meeting the instructor’s expectations in order to get the right grade.”

Even beyond improving student learning, Robin found that “the process of reviewing student assignments and giving them feedback was so much more enjoyable and productive than it has been for me in the past. Being able to simply focus in on the feedback, and not have to worry about how my feedback connected with a letter grade, wasn’t only freeing, but it was much better aligned with how I see effective education.” And students were excited to receive his feedback. “Students told me that in the past they have been anxious and worried about looking at their feedback, but now they were looking forward to it so that they could improve their next assignment.”

I asked Robin if he had spoken to any of his colleagues about ungrading. “Colleagues agree with me about the incongruity between letter grades and the work we’re trying to do as instructors. But they wonder: Will students be motivated? Will they be confused by the lack of grading? But the nice thing about ungrading is that there are many ways to implement it.” Although Robin cautions, implementing ungrading is more work for the students. “Students may be redoing an assignment instead of just moving on to the next one and reflecting on their experience and learning process. But I’ve never had such consistent attendance as I had this last semester, probably because the assignments were designed such that students needed to be in the classroom, engaging with the material and each other, in order to successfully complete them.”

I wondered what advice Robin might have for faculty wanting to try out some ungrading. “I’m really privileged because in my program, there are no multiple sections of classes and faculty are all working with the same cohort of students, so we don’t have the pressure for every course section to be similar. But I think there are some guiding principles that are helpful. First, be transparent. Talk with your students about what you’re doing and why, laying it out clearly for them and following through with your commitments to them.” Second, start small. “Try revising one or two assignments to be ungraded rather than your entire course.” And third, consider the time commitment. Set expectations on how often you meet with students and discuss feedback with them, as well as due dates for resubmitted assignment to help you manage your time.

What is the future of ungrading for Robin? “I have a hard time imagining myself not using it in the future. Next time I teach a letter grade course my plan is to ungrade it. If I can do it in a first semester course, I can do it anywhere else in the program. And I will continue to talk with my colleagues about if and where they might want to try ungrading out.” But will he change anything? “Yes. There were quite a few students at the end of the semester who still had to resubmit assignments, so I need to be clearer about the resubmission process to help students stay on track a bit better. And I want to find space for more individual meetings with students.”

In the end, Robin says he was surprised, but gratified, to see the shift in how students responded to assignment feedback. “I didn’t change the way I was giving feedback – audio feedback, focusing on positives – I just removed the grade and thus the pressure on students. The only difference was removing that letter grade.”

Camosun Story #71: Sonja

Sonja is a faculty member in the School of Business where she teaches Introduction to Human Resources (HR), Employment Law, Labour Relations, and HR Trends. Like many Camosun faculty, Sonja came to teaching after first working in her field. She began studying HR at the British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT) in her twenties when she finally felt ready to begin post-secondary studies, saying “BCIT was very different from a traditional university and opened my mind to higher education.” Sonja worked in HR departments in both the private and public sectors and eventually began to focus on labour relations. “My main focus was on building relationships between people and through my work began to realize that the how was what mattered: how we handle people and issues within organizations is more important than the what we have to do, and how we do it brings the focus back on the people in our organizations.”

In 2013 Sonja came to Camosun College into the sole labour relations position at the college. “My focus remained the same – on building relationships so the unions and management could effectively discuss and resolve issues long-term,” something she feels she succeeded at. Sonja has always enjoyed training people not familiar with human resources or labour relations and “became more interested in teaching others the how: how to approach people; how to deal with difficult issues; how to find creative solutions without getting personal. And over the years I realized, hey, I like this education thing.”

AS Sonja worked to complete the Provincial Instructor Diploma Program (PIDP) and the then Dean of the School of Business asked her to teach a class. She said yes and was terrified, but said “after teaching my first class, I knew I was where I was supposed to be and that I would be saying goodbye to the full-time HR side of my life and starting on a new career path. And I haven’t regretted that decision for a single day.”

I asked Sonja to tell me more about why she loves teaching. “I was always exhausted after training, but teaching does the opposite – it fills my bucket instead of emptying it.” She even loves some of the aspects of marking “because you get to see where students are at. I’m both terrified and excited when I’m marking, and always wonder if I am getting the message across.” But most of all Sonja enjoys how every semester is different. “Every semester is a project, because there are different students, meaning you’re building new relationships and connections, and the constant change in diversity within the classroom is a bonus for me. I like having to adjust how I’m explaining something and trying to make my courses more accessible.”

Sonja’s is passionate about making things more accessible for students. “My joy lies in making materials that are more easily accessed and used by multiple learners. Making sure we’re presenting materials in multiple ways, takes a lot of planning, but students really appreciate it.” But, as Sonja notes, it takes a village to provide those options for students. “In one semester I might have ten registered Centre for Accessible Learning (CAL) students in a class, but I might also have an additional five who have not registered with CAL but might need those supports – and every semester is different. So, building those relationships with the fabulous people in the Centre for Accessible Learning, the Office of Student Support, Counselling, and CETL is key. If I didn’t have all those pieces working all together, I wouldn’t be successful.”

As we talked, Sonja mentioned the pivot to online in 2020, and I asked her what impact the past few years have had on her teaching. “Having to fly by the seat of your pants made me more willing to try things and make mistakes and forced me to learn how to break the system and then repair it! We also were reminded that instructors are content experts in just one area that students are not, and students can help with technological issues because they’re so tech savvy! But it’s important to remember that we are all learning together.”

Sonja also carried forward many of the lessons she learned during that time, for example all the planning that needs to go into online teaching. “I just developed an asynchronous employment law class, which is going well because of the amount of work that went into the planning. I met with an instructional designer in CETL, and we walked through the process of organizing the course and decided on templates and videos. Every week is chunked with video playlists that are transcribed so all learners can access them, and there are case studies so students can focus on real life situations where they have to apply the theory that they’ve learned in previous courses. I incorporated everything that I learned during COVID. But it takes time, and I never feel I have enough.” She recommends that faculty use their Scheduled Development for planning and building online and blended courses, so you aren’t working on a course build off the side of your desk at the same time you are teaching.

Now that Sonja has been teaching for a few years, I wondered if she had any memories that stood out for her. “I love the student engagement around real-life problems, for example running our collective bargaining simulation in class or running a panel interview. Students get into their roles and ask great questions. It’s the practice before they go out into the world, which is what educational experiences should be. For the panel interview, they develop behavioral-based interview questions and perform that interview on video. For the bargaining simulation, they write their bargaining proposals (usually 3-4), which are graded, then exchange proposals and try to form a collective agreement. This process helps them understand how complicated it must be to bargain 100 proposals in several months.” Sonja also appreciates the diversity of students she has in the classroom. “Students learn from International students where perhaps unions are illegal in their country – hearing perspectives like those mean our domestic learners are getting a much richer experience.”

One course Sonja is teaching is HR Trends. “There’s no textbook for that class and we build the content together as a class. Students work towards presenting a symposium at the very end of the class and each student group presents for 45 minutes on an HR trend that they’ve been researching for the entire semester. The students are very creative with the assignments, which I love to see, but the course also piques their interest in different areas of HR meaning they get exposure to more than I might cover on my own.”

As always, my final question to Sonja was about what kind of advice she has for faculty just starting out at Camosun. “Use the supports that are out there! Ask your Chair right away who to contact in CETL, and who the contacts are for student support, counseling, etc. Remember you really can’t do your best work in a vacuum – build those relationships. And most of all, be kind to the people who support you, and be kind to yourself.”

Camosun Story #69: Tim

Over the past few months, CETL educational developers have been working with faculty across the college exploring the advantages and disadvantages of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in teaching and learning. As we talked to more and more faculty, we discovered several who were already working GenAI into their assessments and talking about its implications with their students and I wanted to share some of their stories with you. So here is the first of these interviews focused on using GenAI in the classroom with Tim, a full-time Instructor in the School of Business at Camosun who teaches everything from International Management to Marketing Research to Workplace Professionalism.

When I asked Tim how he is integrating GenAI into his teaching, he told me “I’d been teaching about AI for the last ten years or so when it became apparent that something like GenAI was imminent. Up until recently, I’ve taught it in a very general way and stayed abreast of its development. But with the rise of ChatGPT over the past year, I was asked, along with three other Instructors in the School of Business, if I would be willing to put some Professional Development time into figuring out what a good response to AI might be. We were starting to see people misusing it from an academic honesty perspective.”

Tim spent quite a bit of time over summer 2023 keeping an eye on the various AIs releases (at one point there were about a dozen new English language AIs released every day of the week) and by the end of August, he had built a list categorizing about 80 in an Excel sheet that anyone can access.

As Tim explored, he concluded that “It’s a mistake to be afraid of AI. What I tell students, is: You’ve been told that AI is coming for your job. It’s not. Somebody who knows how to use AI is coming for your job. That means you had better get out ahead of the curve and learn how to use it effectively.”

Tim explained that his approach is to turn artificial intelligence into a Research Assistant. “When I went to college and grad school, the Internet as we know it didn’t exist. Instead, we spent time going to the library, digging through card catalogs, and writing notes on cue cards. Took forever. The Internet changed all that. But while it’s become easy to find information, it’s hard to sift through because there’s so much out there. I think AI is most useful in an academic world as a Research Assistant because it can find information and put ideas together for you in minutes rather than in hours or more. That said, we still have to teach students how to determine what information is valid.”

In other words, Tim encourages students to use GenAI tools to find ideas but to personally review the sources and websites where the ideas come from. “You have to be careful because AIs sometimes make things up. For example, I asked an AI tool to create a timeline of Camosun College history, and it did in two minutes. Beautifully presented. All the key events were there, but they were placed in the wrong years, and some were out by ten or more years. The AI had done the research, found the events, but when it couldn’t figure out when these events happened relevant to each other, it made things up and presented them as fact. If I didn’t know Camosun’s history, I’d have believed it.” Lesson learned: “Use AI to do the initial research and collect basic information, but then go dig and make sure that the information was used correctly.”

I wondered how Tim supports with students as they work with AI tools in class and for assessments, and aside from warning them about plagiarism and checking original sources, he works with them to ensure they understand what they are presenting (in Tim’s classes, students present their papers live). “I come from government where if the Minister of Advanced Education has a question in the middle of your presentation, she doesn’t wait until the end to ask. So, to replicate real-world experiences, I interrupt students in the middle of their presentations and pepper them with questions to make sure they understand what they are presenting. Demonstrating comprehension is critically important. It’s also important they understand that while AI will do the writing for them, if fail to develop their ability to write, they will harm their professional and personal development.” “In a very real sense, learning to write is learning to think.”

Tim also teaches his students how to use various AI tools in his 400-level class. “I teach them how to use ChatGPT and the one built into Bing which is the easiest to use, as well as how to get the tool to show you the original sources and provide APA citations.” “In my 400-level course, student teams do an hour-long group-presentation on a particular topic each week. I give them a Backgrounder on their topic, and their job is to boil it down to something that can be explained in an hour to people who know nothing about it. For example, for a recent presentation on Fake News, I had the student team use the Gamma AI tool to build a PowerPoint-like website. It does the research, but also allows you to edit the results.” Tim sees Gamma AI and other GenAI tools as the next step up from the Internet and says, “If we don’t get on board and learn how to use them, we will be left behind by those who do.”

In his lower-level classes, Tim’s approach to students using AI is a bit different. “In the Market Research class students take after completing Intro level Statistics, AI can’t really help. Student teams conduct Primary Research, interviewing real clients from the community, design a survey, obtain ethics approval, collect data, and analyze it using Excel. Then we do Boardroom Simulations in the last two weeks of class where they present their Findings, Conclusions, the Options, and Recommendations to the Board, of which I am the Chair. It’s great fun!”

In Tim’s Workplace Professionalism course, “students complete a series of short presentations on various topics, and AI can be very helpful in conducting secondary research. I check their comprehension in real-time by asking questions during their presentations. I think in the future academic research skills are likely to change much as they did when we learned to use the Internet. This means we have to focus on comprehension and application.”

When I asked how students are reacting to AI, Tim said “They’re not afraid of it at all. They live on their screens, and this is just another way of getting something done. The industrious ones will use AI to build a framework and then they will do the deep dive themselves because they’re curious. The ones who are looking for shortcuts will not do the deep dive and just pretend they understand. That’s why it’s on us to check for comprehension.”

I wondered how Tim’s colleagues have been reacting to all of this. “It depends on what you’re teaching. If I was still teaching Statistics, AI wouldn’t bother me at all because there are already thousands of videos online students can watch until they understand the concepts. It’s when students must engage in research that it becomes dangerous. In fact, some of my colleagues are playing with the idea of accepting only peer-reviewed sources because it is more challenging for AI to work behind paywalls (although there are ways around this).”

As we reached the end of our conversation, I asked Tim what is in the future for GenAI and his classes, and he indicated he would still be teaching GenAI tools to his 400-level courses but said “we’ll see when I review their final papers this term whether I will have to begin checking for comprehension even more now.”

As for GenAI itself, Tim says “It’s not clear to me where AI is going to end up. On November 1, 50 countries (including Canada) – countries who recognize that AI has unintended consequences for economies – met at Bletchley Park and signed a declaration about how to regulate AI going forward. But regulations or not, we’re rapidly reaching the stage where you either use GenAI or get replaced by someone who knows how to use it. That’s why I’m teaching it.”

Camosun Story #68: Arloene

Arloene has been a faculty member in the Psychology department at Camosun College for 10 years, and this last spring was a recipient of a Camosun College Teacher Recognition Award.

Arloene reflected that if someone had told her 20 years ago that she would be here today, an instructor in the classroom, she would not have believed it. In fact, she twice turned down requests to teach, but when she received a third request, she figured something must be going on. “I had worked as a TA when I was in university, but at that time, teaching was just a means to an end.” This time, once Arloene got into the classroom, she was hooked.

A few years later, a friend of Arloene’s mentioned that there was an opportunity to teach for Camosun through the South Island Partnership (SIP), and she decided to give it a try. “I felt so out of my element because I had never been trained to teach, but here I was delivering curriculum. It was terrifying but gratifying at the same time.” When she finished her term, she thought that would be the end. “It was too much work, but at the same time, it was fun. I was still working professionally as a therapist, but once I started teaching one course, then another, I ended up shifting to teaching full time.” Now Arloene is excited for the beginning of every new term. “I see teaching as not that different from when I worked as a therapist, because it’s about growth and helping students to feel inspired.”

Today Arloene no longer teaches in the SIP program, but has continued at Camosun in the Psychology Department, teaching Counseling, Interpersonal Skills, and Developmental Psychology courses, among others.

I asked Arloene what she likes most about being in the classroom, and she said for her, it isn’t the teaching, but “the connections, the relationships, and getting to know people. And it’s the little hallway chats, running into students in the cafeteria, and just checking in hearing their excitement and their questions and their stories – I love the stories.”

But knowing that for a period of time we lost access to those hallway connection, I asked Arloene about the impact of the past three years on her teaching. “It’s so funny because that first semester back in the classroom, I had students saying, oh, that’s what you looked like! While we were online, we lost those conversations and connections and the support that as humans we all need. I know some students enjoyed the online experience because of how it might have fit into their lives, but for me, the enriching parts of teaching are those connections.” But Arloene has brought some of what she learned and used while she taught online into her teaching today. “I’ve always done writing exercises and reflection journals, and those became especially useful online because those were their stories. They were personal, and an essential piece to getting to know my students. I also started using online discussion groups and today have more discussion groups in-person, but the discussions are less content-based than they might have been before.”

I was sure that Arloene would have many memories of her past students and their experiences, and indeed she did. “In one my SIP classes we had a student with a lot of anxiety. But one of the requirements was doing an in-class presentation, and she did not want to do it. I am always gentle with requirements and honour that people have different ways of being and learning so try to provide alternatives. However, I’ve also feel that it’s good to challenge yourself. So, we worked with this student, provided support, and in the end, they gave an amazing presentation. It was fantastic to see someone go from self-doubt to challenging themselves and being successful. All we did was give the student a gentle nudge, provide support, and give them the opportunity to do their best.”

Arloene had one more memory to share about the classroom community she values so much. “I had a student with severe epilepsy who often in class would have a seizure. It was a class of 40, and we had a plan of what to do if she had an episode in class. Those students worked together and supported her – it was such a community where everyone came together, and she was able to complete the class.”

As we moved towards the end of our conversation, I asked Arloene what advice she might have for new faculty coming to Camosun. “I would really encourage new instructors not to lose sight of what excites them. It’s easy to worry about the curriculum and the learning outcomes and forget about what sparks us. I know for myself there’s been a few times I was more concerned about outcomes than the excitement of the content.”

I was curious how Arloene keeps that spark going herself during those times when there is so much content to cover you lose track of the engagement. “Sometimes when I’m talking in class, I tune out and go on autopilot because I’ve said this thing many times over the years. That’s my little red flag to move away from talking too much, to having more opportunity for dialogue and hearing different opinions and perspectives.”

I appreciated Arloene sharing that, because one of the things we wonder in our Centre, with each other and with other faculty is, just what is our role these days as instructors? “That’s tricky because there’s so much content students need to learn, how do we help them not get overwhelmed or lose that foundation of critical thinking,” how do we help students navigate their way through all that information? Arloene tries to give her students opportunities to explore what is important to them which in turn “ignites interest from others because it may open up something they hadn’t thought about before that may be personally relevant.”

To conclude, Arloene reflected on her role as an educator: “I continue to be open to growth and the opportunities that life presents, particularly as aligned with my values. I hope that this affords me the opportunity to be a model for students to choose a meaningful life while being open to new directions.”