A Light on Teaching Magazine - 50 Years of Teaching

2017-18 Issue ISSN 2292-0161

Feature Article Threads in a Teaching Life

by Dr. Shelly Wismath, 2017 National 3M Teaching Fellowship Winner

Also in this issue Teaching with a Stutter

They Can’t Hide in This Room!

In this issue feature

Contents 2 Threads of a Teaching Life with a Stutter. Thinking About 8 Teaching Teachers and Disability in the Next 50 Years at UofL

Can’t Hide in this Room.”

11 “They An Experiential Account of How Classroom Space Affects Student Engagement in an Education Setting.

Ethnography: Using Co20 Embedded Inquiry with Students in Classroom Research

the Classroom: Meditations 25 “UnSettling” on the Necessity of Failure

and Practices of Using 15 Motivations Team-Based Learning

Project Manager Design And Layout Cover Photo

Feature Writers & Contributors

Copy Editor

Brad Reamsbottom Glenda Martens and Brad Reamsbottom Dr. Shelly Wismath - 2017 3M National Teaching Award Winner Photographers: Glenda Martens and Bernie Wirzba Olu Awosoga, Davina DesRoches, Victoria Holec, Jamie Lewis, Jeffrey MacCormack, Richelle Marynowski, Jeff Meadows, Jan Newberry, Jake Vinje and Shelly Wismath Betsy Greenlees

Director’s Message

by David Hinger

W

elcome to the fifth annual Teaching Centre’s “A Light on Teaching” magazine. The theme of this year’s magazine is 50 Years of Teaching, in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the University of Lethbridge. It has been very inspiring being involved in many of the 50th anniversary events around campus and celebrating not only the past 50 years but also looking forward to the opportunities of the next 50 years. High-quality teaching has been a hallmark of the UofL since its inception and continues to be at the heart of our institution.

In looking back at the past 50 years through many of the campus events and activities, including our 50 Years of Teaching video series, we have had much to celebrate. This year, our very own Dr. Shelly Wismath received the 3M National Teaching Fellowship for her contributions to teaching excellence and leadership. It is faculty, instructors, librarians, and staff like Shelly who work hard to elevate the experiences of our students.

The creation of our new School of Liberal Education marks a commitment to the next 50 years of exemplary teaching and learning at the U of L and our commitment to providing unique and innovative learning experiences for our students. I look forward to working with our many talented colleagues and students as we prepare for the teaching and learning opportunities the School of Liberal Education will create.

This year we received an impressive number of article submissions and my only disappointment is that we are not able to publish all of them. This demonstrates the commitment to teaching and learning at the UofL and is a testament to the quality of teaching and research on teaching and learning taking place at our University.

I hope you enjoy the articles in this year’s magazine as much as I did and that they provide you with inspiration for the 2017-18 academic year.

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Reflections on Teaching

of a

Teaching Life This is a written version of the keynote address I gave at the Teaching Centre’s Spark Teaching Symposium in April 2017. It will weave together a number of threads that have been important in my teaching: some personal experiences and thoughts about teaching in math and liberal education, about gender and its impact on teaching, about research in teaching and learning, and recent research I’ve done on the learning of problem-solving skills.

by Dr. Shelly Wismath

2017 3M National Teaching Fellowship Winner

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’d like to start with a bit of personal narrative.

As a teacher, I modify the 70s women’s movement slogan that “the personal is political,” to argue that “the personal is pedagogical.” This resonates for me with Mi’kmaq Elder Albert Marshall’s claim that “the knowledge is in the stories.” My story starts with the fact that I didn’t actually ever set out to be a teacher.

Growing up in the 60s and 70s in small-town southern Ontario, there wasn’t a sense for me of many options; girls became nurses or secretaries or teachers. None of those appealed to me, and in fact there were stages when I emphatically did NOT want to become a teacher.

One of the threads in this narrative that I will keep coming back to is the liberating effect of education. University education was to me a way out of a life that I found narrow and constraining, un-intellectual and often outright anti-intellectual. A library card and my school work were my windows to the wider world and to the life of the mind. Being the first in my family to go to university felt like setting out on a huge adventure into the unknown, and I arrived there with a feeling of finally finding “my people.” So I have experienced first-hand the liberating and transformative power of education, and have tried to help others find that experience. I care about introducing students to

the ongoing conversation that is the life of the mind, and about accessibility in all its many guises, whether that’s for aboriginal students, for women in traditionally male areas like science, and more broadly for women and other minorities in academia in general, for people with physical or mental disabilities, for refugee students, and so on.

University education was to me a way out of a life that I found narrow and constraining, un-intellectual and often outright anti-intellectual. A library card and my school work were my windows to the wider world and to the life of the mind.

So off I went to university at age 18, not sure what I wanted to do but determined not to be a nurse or a secretary or a teacher. Math was what I always found easiest and did best at, so I studied math. After graduation I worked for a few years in a boring office job, and got married, and did the 70s hitchhiking/backpacking around Europe thing for six months, and tried to figure out what I would do with my life. It gradually became clear to me that I needed to use my mind and go back to school, but I wasn’t sure what to study – I thought about an MBA, or nutrition, or history, or...

Then my husband got a one-year term position at the U of L as an instructor in computer science, and I was offered a similar term position as an academic assistant in math. I took the job because I didn’t know what else was I going to do in Lethbridge, but I remember with absolute clarity the moment I realized I was a teacher. Walking down the hill one lovely Friday afternoon at the end of September, one month into my job and buzzing from a tutorial I’d just done, it hit me like a thunderclap that I loved my job and my students and I wanted to be a teacher!

So I went back to school, did a master’s degree, got hired back by the U of L as an instructor, did my PhD part-time while teaching large classes here, finished my PhD and won the Distinguished Teaching Award and got a tenure-

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track job and had a baby – the last three all in the same year!

That’s the story of how I became a mathematician and a math teacher. For many years, I taught math, about 15 different courses, including many large sections of calculus and stats for management students. Compared to the teaching I do now, this was in some ways quite easy: the content is standardized, very linear, and straightforward, and I knew who the students were, what they knew, and what they would have trouble with. Since I’d won the Distinguished Teaching Award so early in my career, people often asked me for advice, wanting to know what I did in the classroom. I found that hard to describe: I’m not a great believer in tricks and techniques in the classroom, and in some ways all I could say at that point was that I went in and taught my heart out. But that was also the start of what I see now as the most basic and most important teaching practice: moving beyond teaching by instinct and actually reflecting about what and how one teaches. I think my basic strengths then were twofold. First, I could explain things clearly – I could see the heart of a proof or an argument, lay out the logical structure, and understand where students might find gaps and help to fill them in. Second, I cared about the conversation, the sharing of the life of the mind, and I wanted students to learn. This expanded to getting to know them, asking them about their lives, and showing that I valued them and their learning. I treated lectures, even in big classes, like conversations, and made eye contact, walked around the room before class and talked to the quiet people in the back row, and learned their names and their strengths and weaknesses.

Another key thread in my teaching, even back then, was an interest in process over content.

Math is a very heavily content-driven area, very hierarchical and cumulative, and so for most math courses the main teaching goal is simply to get through the necessary content. The way most of us taught, because it was the way we’d been taught, was what I’d call a “sink or swim” method: go through the content carefully and systematically, and those who knew how to think mathematically and were going to become mathematicians would thrive, and the rest would muddle through somehow. At this stage I developed an increasing sense of the importance of teaching process as well: not what the finished result – the content – was, but how we got there, how to create new math, and generally how to think and write like a mathematician. That process versus content became a key theme in my teaching, as I will describe.

I can’t talk about teaching math in those years without reflecting on the gendered aspects of the subject and its teaching. It was rare in those days to find women professors in math or science, and I dealt with all the usual issues for women in science, including lack of confidence and gender

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discrimination. I had a different style than my colleagues, in both research and teaching, and I worried constantly about whether I was good enough. When I first started teaching as a lecturer, many of my colleagues warned me that I would get “eaten alive by students” – I was young and small and smiled a lot, and that seemed to equate with being a pushover. On the other hand, I found that most of my students in the large service courses were so scared of math that they respected anyone who could do math and was willing to help them learn it. The other women profs I knew dealt with feminism and gender as topics in the content of their disciplines, but I didn’t – math is at least in content more gender neutral. That made my teaching easier, since there was a separation of technique and content.

But my style was often different from that of my male colleagues: things like encouraging discussion rather than just lecturing, trying to teach students a process and not just cram them full of content, helping students to manage their own learning, treating students as full human beings and not just learning machines, etcetera.

There is a large body of literature about how students (and colleagues) rate women faculty members on things like student evaluations (Boring, Ottoboni, & Stark, 2016): women who are supportive and nurturing, “motherly,” are rewarded by high ratings; women who do not follow this style are ranked low, and seen as bitches, shrill and angry. My style meant I benefited from that, but there was always still a delicate balance and a constant negotiation between being warm and friendly but also having professorial authority in the classroom.

Feminist viewpoints helped me articulate a lot of these issues, and helped me reflect on process and style, as separate from content. And of course, feminist pedagogy is an inclusive movement, and I was very interested in how to welcome more women into science in general, especially into math and computer science.

So many careers depend on having and using mathematical knowledge, often the higherpaying and technical ones, so again there are issues of accessibility and equity and freedom to participate in the work world (see for instance Tobias, 1993).

in my career meant that many people assumed that I was not a serious or strong researcher: there’s only room for one label. I think we in the academy still have very mixed feelings about the balance and value of teaching and research, and this shows up in formal processes like tenure and promotion, but also informally in the mixed messages we send young faculty members.

Yet another thread in my teaching has been the relationship between teaching and research.

Many professors talk about how important it is to bring one’s research into one’s teaching, and how one can’t be a good teacher unless one does that. But there are issues here that I found very frustrating. First, for me, bringing my math research into my teaching was never a possibility, because of the abstract nature of my research work and the lengthy and hierarchical path in mathematics from undergraduate courses to the so-called research frontier. The only way that being active in research helped in my teaching was that trying to figure out and learn new things in research kept me grounded in what being a student feels like. But I also found that being labelled a “distinguished teacher” early

That early lib-ed experience, teaching the capstone course for five years and then the Quantitative Reasoning course, led me in 2009 to move from the department of Mathematics and Computer Science, to teach in the liberal education program. That move coincided with my appointment as the inaugural Board of Governors Teaching Chair, and related work with the Teaching Centre, and allowed me to shift both my teaching and research in new directions. Following on my distinction between process and content, I became increasingly interested in the teaching of skills, not only quantitative skills to non-math, non-science majors, but also critical-thinking skills and problem-solving skills in general. I became interested in Ken Kay’s model of 21st century

These threads of accessibility, liberation, process over content, gender, and lack of research connection, defined the more than twenty years of my teaching. But things changed for me in some quite dramatic ways, in both my teaching and my research, in about 2007. I was asked to design and teach a course called Quantitative Reasoning, a math course specifically designed for non-math, non-science students, and those who are afraid of math. During my first few years teaching this QR course, I made a transition into teaching math and general quantitative skills to non-math, non-science students. This course led me to a number of changes, in what I teach, who I teach, and the way I teach.

Teaching a liberal-education course picked up on another thread in my teaching experience.

I’d had a long-standing interest in liberal education, complicated by and almost in spite of being a mathematician. Most undergrad math degrees are based on depth, on content, and at first I wondered why anyone would do a math degree at the U of L, where you could only take 13 math courses instead of the 30 or more that is standard elsewhere. But in the early 1990s, I got involved in the lib-ed capstone course. When students asked me what they could do with a degree in math, I always said that although there were no specific jobs labelled “mathematician,” other than becoming a math prof, that degree would nevertheless teach you to think, not just about math but about anything. The libed capstone seminar was a chance to test that claim for myself! Could I in fact think about areas other than math, and were my own skills transferable? This touches on another thread: the need to be a student in my own teaching as well as research, to challenge myself to learn and teach new things in new ways.

skills: problem solving, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration (Kay, 2008).

In particular, I got to design my dream course, a liberal-education course called Problems and Puzzles, which I piloted in 2010 and have offered yearly since 2012. This course has definitely been the peak of my teaching career, allowing me to put into practice all I’ve learned about teaching and learning over many years. I was also lucky enough to connect with Doug Orr from the Teaching Centre at the start of this course; Doug helped me design a research project around the course, and mentored me through my first forays into a new teaching and research area.

That early lib-ed experience, teaching the capstone course for five years and then the Quantitative Reasoning course, led me in 2009 to move from the department of Mathematics and Computer Science, to teach in the Liberal Education program.

That move coincided with my appointment as the inaugural Board of Governors Teaching Chair, and related work with the Teaching Centre, and allowed me to shift both my teaching and research in new directions.

I want to emphasize how huge a transition this was, and how lucky I was to be able to make it. At a time when I might have coasted to retirement, growing bored and stale, this problem-solving project has been a huge source of renewed excitement and energy for me. In some ways, it was like being a PhD student again: doing a lit review, learning a new area and new methods,

being fully engaged, interacting with new colleagues, and going to new conferences. But I was also doing this without the pressures and stresses of being a PhD student just starting out, due to my career stage – I no longer had so much to prove, I had paid my dues over the years in both teaching and research, and so was now able to do what I wanted. Another exciting aspect of this new work was that the Problems and Puzzles course and the research project fed off of and into each other, with ongoing loops of ideas and activities that enriched both. For me, this has been the first time my teaching and research have connected! And what I was learning in and about that course certainly spilled over into all my teaching, in all my courses, in various ways I hadn’t really expected.

This brings me to my recent research on problem solving, and more broadly about the research area called SoTL, the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. First, this is a research area, and an important one. Like most academics, I was trained to be a researcher, not a teacher; and like most I assumed that good research about how to teach was done in the Faculty of Education, where it was passed on to generations of future K-12 teachers. The most we might talk about teaching was content based: our professional society meetings might have a section on “Teaching of Mathematics” or “Teaching of Physics,” etcetera.

But there is a body of knowledge about teaching at the university level, and a need for more such knowledge. As Craig Nelson (n.d.) writes, Much important expertise on teaching resides in the day-to-day practices of good faculty. Typically, this knowledge remains private and is totally lost when its possessor retires. A key task in this field is systematically making much more of this expertise public.

Again, I think this highlights the fact that the knowledge is in the stories!

The cross-disciplinary study of post-secondary education began in 1990. A major influence was work by Robert B. Barr and John Tagg (1995), who proposed a paradigm shift FROM universities as places to produce instruction TO universities as places to produce learning. They pointed out that improving teaching doesn’t always improve learning, and that teaching and learning can be quite separate. This led to the name “Scholarship of Teaching and Learning,” and the SoTL acronym. The goals of SoTL are threefold: to improve teaching, to add to the body of knowledge on teaching and learning, and to create a community of scholarly teachers.

[For more information, see the websites of Nancy Chick (n.d), and of the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (n.d.).] This approach to both teaching and learning really resonated with me as I made the

connection that content is teaching, but learning is a process!

Randy Bass in “The Scholarship of Teaching: What’s the Problem?” writes about how differently we approach teaching and research: In scholarship and research, having a “problem” is at the heart of the investigative process; it is the compound of the generative questions around which all creative and productive activity revolves. But in one’s teaching, a “problem” is something you don’t want to have, and if you have one, you probably want to fix it. Asking a colleague about a problem in his or her research is an invitation; asking about a problem in one’s teaching would probably seem like an accusation. (Bass, 1999) Bass then asks us to consider “How might we think of teaching practice, and the evidence of student learning, as problems to be investigated, analyzed, represented, and debated?”

The practice of SoTL research can be described as a continuum (Chick, n.d.): • We start with reflective practice: we write teaching-philosophy statements, we write about our teaching in our PARs, we reflect on what we taught and how we taught it and what worked and what didn’t, and what we’ll do differently next time. Many people see this process of reflection as the fundamental core of good teaching.

• We aim for “scholarly teaching,” to bring our skills and practices as scholars to our work as teachers.

• We move to systematic inquiry of learning: not just hit-and-miss reflection from semester to semester, but being systematic about what we do and how and why.

• Then comes formal research on teaching: we ask meaningful questions, collect evidence (whether quantitative or qualitative), and write about and share our results.

• The final step is peer-reviewed publishing, to share our work with others.

My own research on the Problems and Puzzles project, through six papers written with various co-authors, illustrates this continuum.

The first offering of the Problems and Puzzles course was in Spring 2010, and it was exciting and scary, simultaneously both terrible and awesome. I’m not a good problem solver myself, so I had to teach myself about how to solve problems, then figure out how to teach others.

I started both the teaching and the research project with three basic questions: What are problem-solving skills, how do we teach them,

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and how do students learn them? I was still working on all of those questions when the course started. The first thing I realized, the first week, was that when I lectured the students’ eyes immediately glazed over, whereas the minute I gave them a puzzle they worked and consulted and learned in a whole new way. So the first paper I wrote about the course (Wismath, 2013) is one I think of as “the kicking and screaming paper:” how a traditional 20th-century lectureand-content mathematician got dragged kicking and screaming into 21st-century teaching. I had to learn to let go of complete control of linear and predictable content, and go with the flow.

For a type-A compulsive perfectionist like me, that was incredibly hard. It also was a final step for me in that letting go of content and focusing on process: the Problems and Puzzles course almost literally has no content; the puzzles are a vehicle, but the course is all about the process.

The second paper from this project (Wismath, Orr, & Good, 2014) was about metacognition as a key component of problem solving and indeed of learning in general. I’d always thought that even basic good teaching requires such reflection, but this course took that understanding to a whole new level for me.

The “process” I’d always tried to focus on is a metacognitive process, and figuring out how to get students to do metacognitive work was a key stepping stone for my teaching and research.

In one of those teaching-research-life feedback loops, I began to apply the metacognitive reflection I was making students do to my own teaching. I learned to better articulate to myself my goals for my teaching, and to share those goals explicitly with my students: to put them on my course outline, as a starting point, but more importantly to refer to them frequently in class and to reinforce them as much as I could in practice. This connected my shift from content to process to the shift from teaching to learning, with a student-centred focus. The next paper (Wismath, Orr, & Zhong, 2014) was about student perceptions of problem solving. What do students think problem solving is? Do they see it as valuable or useful, in their majors or in their careers or their lives? Do they think they are learning skills by doing puzzles, and what skills are they, and do they transfer? The answers are generally a strong YES: students talked very eloquently in their reflections about how the puzzles course helped them do better in a range of other courses, and identified important academic and life skills they gained.

These first papers reflect the SoTL continuum discussed above. The first paper was basically “I tried something new and it was scary but it sort of worked,” the first step along the SoTL road. The next couple of papers were based on some quantitative data we collected, pre- and post-course surveys with a number of items we thought might be interesting or relevant, along with some qualitative data in the form of student reflection assignments. The next

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paper (Wismath & Zhong, 2014) resulted from a couple of survey items we threw in at the last minute in the second offering of the course: On a scale of 1 to 5, rank “I have good problemsolving skills” and “I am confident about my problem-solving skills.” We hoped of course to see some improvement in scores from before to after the course, as evidence that students were improving their skills, and we did see this. But what turned out to be quite surprising was that the results were extremely gendered. That is, the male students almost all started out the course confident or very confident, and went up a bit by the end of the course but not much (because they were already at the top). The female students, on the other hand, started out ranking themselves as Neutral or more often Disagree or Strongly Disagree. They did show significant increases over the course, which is great, but that meant catching up to the males. I’ve talked about gender already as one of my threads, and the inter-connections of gender and confidence in math has been extensively studied and worked on for decades [see for instance Hyde & Mertz (2009) and National Center for Educational Statistics (1997)]. This shows how much we still have to do on that front, unfortunately, even in 2017.

The last two papers I want to mention are farther along the SoTL continuum, as they both involve a deeper analysis of what is going on in the classroom and with the students’ skills development. One (Wismath, MacKay, & Orr, 2017) deals with threshold concepts: what are the stages in developing problem solving skills, and where are those liminal moments when things seem to click and a student moves to a new plateau of understanding? We were able to identify three such stages that occurred every semester in the course, and to work on how to scaffold learning to help students make those transitions. The other paper (Wismath & Orr, 2016) is about the collaborative learning that occurs in the problem-solving classroom, how students work together, and when and why.

Rather than the simple binary of collaborative = good and solo = bad for learning, we produced a very nuanced look at collaborative work, showing that effective collaboration depends on personality, type of problem, and most importantly, stage of problem.

This quick overview of these six research papers shows I think how much my research themes resemble the list of teaching threads in this talk. The papers related to process over content, which is really learning over teaching; to gender and related confidence issues; to increasing reflection and growth in my own teaching, as seen in metacognitive learning; to increasing interest in the student point of view, as I focused less on teaching and more on learning; and to learning to share knowledge and learning techniques, to make thinking accessible to my students by enhancing their learning, and by becoming a learner in my own classroom. One

of the highlights for me, for my own learning in the puzzles course, was the first time I took to class a puzzle I myself didn’t actually know how to solve: I was sure that someone would figure it out, and someone did, and then taught me and the other students how to do it. That’s successful student learning!

I’d like to close by mentioning my more recent work in lib ed as well. In 2013 I was honoured to become the Chair of the Liberal Education Revitalization Team, or LERT, the work of which just culminated in the formation of a School of Liberal Education at the U of L. One of the first things our team did was to articulate clearly our model of liberal education here at the U of L, around four key pillars. In a way, these four pillars also connect for me personally to all the teaching threads discussed here: Breadth: I’m thankful for the great breadth of teaching I’ve been able to do, across sciences, social sciences, and humanities, and that being in a liberal-education institution makes possible for many of us, and for the wonderful richness of colleagues, ideas, talks, and courses we have available to us.

Integration across disciplines: liberal-education classes bring together students (and instructors) from a huge variety of different majors, each bringing their own backgrounds and knowledge and skills that they can share with each other.

Critical thinking: I have learned to articulate what this is, for myself and for my students.

In a nutshell, it is evidence-based reasoning; it includes problem solving by asking questions, unpacking assumptions, finding evidence, using reasoning, explaining, and defending if necessary your conclusions. This is exactly what my Problems and Puzzles course is all about!

Civic Engagement and Citizenship: This takes me back full circle, to Liberal Education as liberation. We invite students into the life of the mind, including ideas of justice and inclusion, and we prepare people to be better thinkers in all the ways and levels they will interact in society, from local to global.

This has taken on for me the feel of one of those “last lecture” events, trying to sum up in one last lecture both my teaching life and any wisdom I may have accumulated to date. So I’ll finish by saying how grateful I am to the U of L, and to my colleagues, for hiring me, for supporting me, for allowing me to pursue such amazingly satisfying work, for all the great opportunities I’ve had to grow as a teacher and scholar, and to live the life of the mind. The U of L truly has been a home to me.

References: Barr, R. B., & Tagg, J. (1995). From teaching to

Bass, R. (1999). The scholarship of teaching: What’s the problem? In D. DeZure (Ed.), Learning from change: Landmarks in teaching and learning in higher education.

Boring, A., Ottoboni K., & Stark, P. (2016).

Student evaluations of teaching (mostly) do not measure teaching effectiveness. Science Open. Retrieved from https://www.scienceopen. com/document_file/0bc459de-6f8f-487f-b925863834a74048/ScienceOpen/bos15.pdf Chick, N. (n.d). Scholarship of teaching and learning. Retrieved from https://my.vanderbilt. edu/sotl/ Hyde, J. S., & Mertz, J. E. (2009). Gender, culture, and mathematics performance. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 106, 88018807.

Kay, K. (2008). http://www.p21.org/storage/ document/ken_kay__testiony_for_rnc_platform_ committee.pdf

National Center for Educational Statistics.

(1997). The condition of education 1997, Chapter 11: Women in mathematics and science.

U.S. Dept. of Education, NCES 97-982.

Wismath, S., Orr, D., & Zhong, M. (2014).

Student perception of problem solving skills.

Transformative Dialogues: Teaching and Learning Journal, 7(3).

Nelson, C. (n.d.). SOTL GENRES. Retrieved from http://php.indiana.edu/~nelson1/ SOTLGenres.html

Wismath, S., & Zhong, M. (2014). Gender differences in university students’ perceptions of and confidence in problem-solving abilities.

Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering, 20(1), 1-10.

http://researchguides.library.vanderbilt.edu/ content.php? pid=387737&sid=3192568 Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (n.d). What is SoTL? Retrieved from http://www.stlhe.ca/sotl/what-is-sotl/ Tobias, S. (1993). Overcoming math anxiety.

Norton.

Wismath, S. L. (2013). Shifting the teacher learner paradigm: Teaching for the 21st century. College Teaching, 61(3), 88-89.

Wismath, S., Orr, D., & Good, B. (2014).

Metacognition: Student reflections on problem solving. Journal on Excellence in College Teaching, 25(2), 69-90.

Wismath, S., Mackay, B., & Orr, D. (2017).

Threshold concepts in problem solving. Teaching and Learning Inquiry: The ISSOTL Journal, 3(1), 63-73.

Wismath, S., & Orr, D. (2016). Collaborative learning in problem solving: A case study in metacognitive learning. The Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 6(3).

CONTINUE

THE

learning: A new paradigm for undergraduate education.

Conversation @uoflteachingcentre @teachingcentre

Photo taken by Arden Shibley

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Reflections on Teaching

Teaching with a

s tu tter

Thinking about teachers and disability in the next 50 years at UofL

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Dr. Jeffrey MacCormack

Faculty of Education, University of Lethbridge

T

eachers tend to be a chatty bunch. There, I said it. And don’t worry, I can say it because I am a teacher. Want to have something explained four different ways? Ask a teacher. Even though we teachers universally agree there is value in learning by doing, when it comes down to it, we’d rather just talk about it. It’s not our fault.

The profession attracts the most verbose among us and education programs promote the best speakers and communicators. Like a butcher’s cuts of meat or an artist’s palette, words are the form and expression of teaching. It may not be for the best but, fundamentally, teaching is talking.

So, here’s the thing: I’m a stutterer.

Is that a little surprising to you? If you think the idea of a teacher with a speech impediment sounds strange, I don’t blame you. I’m sure we have all had the experience of talking to someone with a severe stutter. That awkward time while we waited for a word, when you knew perfectly well what he or she wanted to say. Should you help out and offer a word? Or is it best to be patient? Ever feel trapped in the conversation?

Now imagine what it must feel like to be in a room full of students and the stutterer is the instructor. Oh, the horror!

Lately I’ve been wondering about how we choose and train our teachers. At the Faculty of Education here at UofL we enjoy a reputation for producing excellent teachers. Where do stutterers fit into that program? Indeed, how central to teaching should communication and fluency be? It is relatively easy to understand that the classroom should be a safe place for students with disabilities, but is there a place for teachers with disabilities? To what extent will classrooms and universities be places for teachers with disabilities and different abilities in the next 50 years?

The etymology of the word stutter shows that its origin is related to stoten (Middle Low German, to knock, strike against), which may explain why stuttering can feel like a violent thing at times.

Words spill out jumbled and banging against one another. For some stutterers, their words slap out as sounds: “Let’s g–g–go to Wa–wa– waterton P–p–pa–pa–park.” That is not my kind of stuttering. My stuttering is the kind where the word gets blocked and has to be forcefully expelled: “Let’s go to the... (no sound) … (still no sound) …WAH-TER-TON PARK!” Like forest fires, the best thing to do with blocks is to prevent them. I learned early on to have a list of synonyms available for problematic words.

You can get pretty far by avoiding difficult words.

Can’t say couch? That’s okay! Try sofa or love seat. Chesterfield? Perhaps a settee? Davenport might work, if you’re feeling fancy.

Other times, you can’t avoid saying the word.

I was completely terrorized by my Grade 10 literature class, where we took turns reading paragraphs from the text. I found that by counting students and paragraphs I could predict which paragraph I would have to read. I spent that time reviewing the lines and identifying problematic phrases. Sometimes I could work through a block with a strong gust of breath or, alternatively, I mumbled the phrase quietly, skimming over the identifiable sounds.

When I was an adolescent, my stuttering seemed like a monster that was intent on ruining my life.

It was there in Grade seven, when it spoiled my speech presentation. I managed only 42 words before my 4-minute time limit ended. Stuttering was also the monster that stole my lines during the high-school theatre production of Into the Woods. Despite the fact that my mouth clomped open and closed under the hot flood-lights, no words came out. Another time, my stuttering left me speechless at a basketball game, when the referee called me for charging and asked me for my name and number to record the foul. I remember the shame I felt as the gymnasium watched me completely unable to utter a sound.

“Forgot your name, boy?” he asked me loudly.

“Before we go any further, there is something you should know about me. I have, since about Grade five, been a stutterer. So, over the course of my talk, you may see moments of disfluency. I don’t want you to feel weird about it. I don’t feel weird about it. It is a part of me and I’m okay with it.”

This is my little piece that I spiel off when I speak to a room of people. I say it, word for word, every time I start a class, lecture, or a conference presentation. I say it so often I know it word for word. I like it because the opening (“before we go any further”) has a conspiratorial tone, like I’m sharing a secret, so people tend to look up from their computers or lean in slightly.

The next two sentences are my full confession.

People often respond with shock at this point.

The final three sentences are instructions for moving forward. The message is this: my words don’t always come out the way I want them to, but that’s okay with me and you don’t have to feel anxious on my behalf. After I give this little speech, I can almost feel the room relax.

You should know that all that talk about me not feeling weird about my stuttering may sound brave and evolved but, even now, speaking is a struggle. When I am preparing for a lecture, I write out everything that I am going to say so that I can carefully curate each sentence to avoid

problematic word combinations. Let me give you an example. One of my big block words is “heterogeneity.” Not a common word usually but, in my line of work, that word tends to come up quite often. There is something about the soft /h/ and /e/ sounds at the beginning that stops me cold. If you hear me say heterogeneity in public, you know that I’ve worked very hard to do so.

When I’ve decided that I’m going to say a word like heterogeneity in class, there are a few things I might to do to prepare. I might repeat the word a few hundred times beforehand, maybe in a sing-songy voice or in funny accents, while I’m walking between classes or on my lunch. This strategy may be a much-needed explanation for any of you who have caught me mumbling to myself on my way to class, in a twangy drawl à la John Wayne, “what we got here, little buckaroo, is what we call heterogeneity of ability.”

I may also listen to a recording of my lecture, or possibly have Siri read the text document in her effortless mechanical voice. I also have to watch my breathing. If I come up to a word like heterogeneity with most of my breath exhaled, I may get blocked, so I plan out my breathing based on what blocking words are coming along. In my little pre-class speech, I split two sentences with dependent clauses (“since about Grade five,” “over the course of my talk”) because the commas ensure that I take my breaths in the proper places. These strategies are often enough to prevent a stutter but, if not, then I’m going to be blocked. This is when the fight begins.

Trying to force out a word during a block is often a full-body task. In those moments, my blood pressure elevates and I can hear my heartbeat in my ears. My throat feels like it has clamped shut.

I feel angry and have flashes of embarrassment.

My chest tightens. My face contorts. I might snap my fingers or slap my leg. I often twist my head or jerk it to the side. I’ve been asked if I’m having a seizure! I often close my eyes so I can concentrate. Sometimes I imagine the word writ huge, like on a billboard, or lit up with bubble letters. I strip the word down to its smallest parts and focus on the starting sound. I shape my mouth for that first sound and I exhale.

Does a word come out? Not really. I usually end up huffing and saying the first sound like a long groan. A word started is a word finished, I tell myself, and I plow through the rest of the sounds. When the word is finally out, I am often physically and emotionally exhausted.

I tell you about my experiences as a stutterer because I don’t want you to have any illusions about the difficulty I face: speaking is not easy for me. My difficulties are real and, as such, I don’t fit into a tidy model of teacher. That said,

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First, I know there are young people who are mentally crossing off potential careers in education because of their speech impediments.

Don’t be discouraged by your struggle with speaking. We already have plenty of teachers and instructors who speak very clearly. Children all over need teachers who struggle; they need teachers who model resilience. Be scrappy because the world needs more scrappy teachers.

Second, I would like us to think about how we envision teaching at UofL over the next 50 years. My impairments may seem like deficits but I encourage you to take a second look. In

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many ways, my stutter is fundamental to my effectiveness as an educator. There are plenty of advantages to the effort I put into my lessons.

Because I spend hours choosing words and reviewing my materials, my work has been carefully constructed to provide the most impact.

Additionally, I bring a perspective of difference to the classroom that I believe is valuable. When I talk about difference and disability, I am not talking about it in the abstract. This is my life.

I would like to leave you with a thought from a colleague of mine, Dr. David Garćia, provost of Carthage College in Wisconsin. He has a severe stutter and is completely unapologetic about it. Garćia fearlessly stutters through classes and convocation speeches. He never

avoids conference calls or media interviews. He taught me something really important about the difference between what is easy and what is best: “Do I wish I could just pick up the phone and make the reservation at a restaurant? You betcha! That would certainly be easier. Not necessarily better, mind you, just easier.” Easier is not always better—what an important idea in a field where we strive for excellence!

CONTINUE

THE

I don’t tell you this because I want any pity. Far from it. I tell you this for two reasons.

Conversation @uoflteachingcentre @teachingcentre

Reflections on Teaching

They can’t

HIDE in this room!

An experiential account of how classroom space affects student engagement in an education setting.

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Dr. Richelle Marynowski and Victoria Holec Richelle is an associate professor in the Faculty of Education. Victoria Holec is a former member of the Teaching Centre, and is currently completing her Ph.D in Cultural, Social, and Political Thought, at the UofL.

A

lthough the learning environment has not changed much in the 50 years of the University of Lethbridge’s existence, new evidence shows that matching the classroom to teaching style can enhance student outcomes (e.g., Lasry, Charles, Whittaker, Dedic, & Rosenfield, 2013). A recent study in conjunction with the Learning Environment Evaluation (LEE) project showed that classroom spaces can positively impact student engagement when pedagogy and space align (Holec & Marynowski, under review). The following interview illustrates how one faculty member at the University of Lethbridge has experienced and works within classrooms spaces to actively engage her students in learning. In particular, the affordances of relatively new active-learning spaces are discussed and juxtaposed with traditional classrooms at the University.

VH - Victoria Holec, interviewer RM - Richelle Marynowski, interviewee VH: Before we can start talking about student engagement, I would like to ask you how you would define student engagement.

RM: I would say it is student interaction, either visible or non-visible (in their brain), with the ideas and concepts that the class is about.

It can be manifested in physical engagement like talking, writing, working in groups, or it could be a thoughtfulness, a thoughtful silent engagement with the topic. Both of those I see as student engagement.

VH: Your definition is very much in line with some of the literature on student engagement, which more recently proposes a framework that includes behavioural, psychosocial, and cognitive factors (Fredricks, Blumenfeld, & Paris, 2004; Kuh, 2009). When you talk about talking, writing, and working together, you are talking about behavioural aspects of engagement, and when you talk about thoughtfulness, you are alluding to cognitive aspects. What do you think are the factors that contribute to student engagement?

RM: There are so many. Interest in the topic at hand or connection to the topic at hand. It could differ minute-to-minute, day-to-day, within a class, depending on what’s being addressed at the time. There are also all sorts of personal factors; for example, whether a student has external things that are happening in their world that are

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not allowing them to engage with the material, that’s overwhelming them at the moment.

In addition, there is the connection with the instructor. The instructor has to present why students could be interested in the topic at hand even if it might not be of primary importance to them. For example, one of the items that I teach in the assessment course in this room is Examination Design and Development, and the drama majors don’t believe that that’s one of the most important things to learn, and it may not actually be for them. However, I have to present it in a way to get them to buy in that this is a really important thing for them to learn, because they’re not always necessarily going to teach drama and they may have to make a test one day.

Or they may have to administer an examination about which they need to know whether it’s good or not. So making the content relevant to students is a big factor.

[T]he teaching (or learning) strategies that I employ fit within the social constructivist paradigm and also fit within the intention of the SCALE-UP classroom space, where a lot of understanding comes about by experiential investigation, by learning by doing.

VH: The next question pertains to the classroom.

When we at LEE studied your classroom, we were fortunate to study two very similarbcourses that you taught that included the same students, but in different classrooms. Tell me a little bit about your experience in those two rooms and whether you think the classroom affects student engagement.

RM: The first time the students walked into the SCALE-UP classroom AH177, they said: “Wow, this is a great room!” They immediately had an outward response to the space: “Wow, this is cool, we must be doing cool stuff in here if we’re in this cool room.” I said, “Yeah, you’re doing assessment and evaluation, come on!

What’s cooler than that?!” [laughter.] But joking aside, the space itself allows for engagement

to happen. This is partially because there are fewer barriers in the way to getting students to engage. In my other, more traditional classroom in Turcotte Hall, there is a lot of unused space, inefficient space. And that’s what’s frustrating, it’s inefficiently used space. I don’t like it. There is a huge long table in front that separates the teacher from the students. And it only has two whiteboards. However, if I want to set up centres for students to work on, again in groups of three or four, I have eight different centres for them to move through, I can at least spread it out and they’re not all crowded in one little corner.

VH: Now, I wonder here if your own teaching philosophy changes depending on the classroom in which you teach. Could you talk about your teaching philosophy a little bit? Is it affected by space at all?

RM: Both courses were based on the philosophy and beliefs about teaching in the social constructivist paradigm. I designed the courses with the belief that we, as human beings and particularly as students, construct our own understanding of the phenomena we experience or the ideas we are being presented with. That means that our understandings develop based on our past experiences and knowledge. It also means that our understanding evolves over time with new experiences and learning. As such, the teaching (or learning) strategies that I employ fit within the social constructivist paradigm and also fit within the intention of the SCALE-UP classroom space, where a lot of understanding comes about by experiential investigation, by learning by doing. Therefore, the room can facilitate my pedagogy, but I don’t teach differently in other classrooms.

Rather, other rooms make it more difficult, because we have to work around barriers. For instance, I have to set students up in groups, whereas in the SCALE-UP room, that happens naturally. In my teaching, I provide students with opportunities to engage with the ideas and to have experiences that will help them develop their own understandings. The teaching and learning strategies integrated into the classes include active learning, cooperative learning, and project-based learning.

Because I teach pre-service teachers, my goal is also to provide students with strategies that they can employ in their own teaching practices.

So they experience a strategy and then debrief about that strategy. One of my courses, and this was in the more traditional classroom, highlighted the importance of students doing mathematics by getting students to engage in mathematical activities called “rich tasks” (Van de Walle, Karp, Bay-Williams, McGarvey, & Folk, 2015) that they could incorporate into their teaching. What that looks like is that in each class during the semester, we began with students completing a rich mathematical task.

The mathematical tasks were then debriefed with respect to the mathematics that was being

Overall, I think that my teaching philosophy and pedagogy are consistent with the intent of the SCALE-UP design. I put students in groups and then regroup them all the time during a class session. In the SCALE-UP room, I can take advantage of the configuration of the tables.

When they are sitting together, students can engage in smaller group work to solidify their understandings. When I regroup them, they can now share ideas they discussed in a previous group. This is what we in education call “jigsaw activities:” For example, during one particular class session in the SCALE-UP room, students were asked to fill in specific sections on a Venn diagram of assessment terminology based on readings they had done prior to class. Then I regrouped them so that each new group had one member from each original group. They shared with their new group the kind of information they had included in the Venn diagram, and then figured out what specific examples of assessment practice would go into the overlapping sections of the diagram. Afterward, students went back to their original groups to share the specific practices that they identified in their new groups.

VH: We asked your students about the atmosphere in the class in the SCALE-UP classroom, and they thought that both the instructor and the classroom helped to create a positive atmosphere in the class. What did you perceive your students energy or the atmosphere to be in the room?

RM: The energy in the class was very, very high.

I felt the students were very engaged in this class. By both allowing them and getting them to move around and switch groups, to use the

whole of the space, not just the tables of the space, it really contributed to that energy. When I would see students’ energy levels starting to dip down a little bit, then I’d get them up and moving and interacting on the vertical spaces.

That would just pump the energy back up in the space. Even the ability for them to connect just by eye contact with people in the classroom, as the content was going on, or as there was a classroom discussion, I think helped with the engagement as well. There were fewer places for them to hide. They can’t hide in this room, which is awesome.

VH: You talked a bit about interaction in your room, which is what the literature would call psychosocial engagement, as it is focused on relationships between people. In fact, that was part of your initial definition of student engagement. Could you elaborate on interactions among your students, and you and your students in the SCALE-UP room?

RM: Overall, there was a very high level of interaction. That is what my classes are about.

Students work on developing their ideas and understanding together. While I hesitate to call my teaching style a “flipped classroom,” however, it is in the sense that students do their reading and they do some thinking outside and then we work with those ideas in the class. And whether those ideas are applying it to a context or whether we’re just working with the ideas and struggling through them and talking about them, there is very little direct information or direct instruction given by me to the students in any class. At the most, 15 minutes worth, at the very most. My understanding is that students’ attention span is about as long as their age is, up to about 20. So, 20 minutes is all you have their attention for, and it’s somewhat random, as you don’t have their attention for the whole 20 minutes, either. They pop in and out of focus, and the more I can get them to focus on each other, and stay engaged, instead of allowing them to fall out of attention, the more they learn, the more they think. That is what I want them to do. And I don’t need to be in control of all of the ideas that are going on at all the tables, in all

CONTINUE

the groups. I can float around and get a sense of the ideas that are going on, and then I can redirect if necessary. I can then address some of the common or unique things I heard to the whole group. But I recognize that if I say it out loud, it doesn’t transfer exactly as I say it. And sometimes it just disappears into this space, into the air. And when our students, future teachers, finally realize that, that just because you say it out loud doesn’t mean they got it, that really improves their own teaching.

As we look forward to the next 50 years of teaching and learning at the University of Lethbridge, considering classroom spaces as places of engaged learning for both students and faculty will allow our faculty and students to continue to be active participants in their postsecondary education.

Special thanks to Bernie Wirzba, project manager, Learning Environment Evaluation (LEE) project, for participating in parts of the interview.

References Fredricks, J. A., Blumenfeld, P. C., & Paris, A. H. (2004). School engagement: Potential of the concept, state of the evidence. Review of Educational Research, 74(1), 59-109.

Kuh, G. D. (2009). The national survey of student engagement: Conceptual and empirical foundations. New Directions for Institutional Research, 141, 5-20.

Lasry, N., Charles, E., Whittaker, C., Dedic, H., & Rosenfield, S. (2013). Changing classroom designs: Easy; Changing instructors’ pedagogies: Not so easy…. AIP Conference Proceedings, 1513, 238-241.

Van de Walle, J., Karp, K. Bay-Williams, J., McGarvey, L., & Folk, S. (2015). Elementary and middle school mathematics: Teaching developmentally. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Canada.

THE

engaged in, the preparation the teacher would need to do to implement the task, the formative assessment data that are being collected by the instructor during the task, and the decisions that the instructor made while the task was being engaged in. The metacognitive conversation after the task brought forward for students elements of the teaching that were not necessarily visible during the task implementation.

Conversation @uoflteachingcentre @teachingcentre

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14

Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

Motivations & Practices

of using

TEAM-BASED LEARNING

by Dr. Davina DesRoches, Dr. Olu Awosoga, and Jeff Meadows

T

eam-based Learning (TBL) (Michaelsen, Knight, & Fink, 2004) can be defined as a structured, small-group approach to teaching that is designed to provide students with an opportunity to work together to better understand key concepts within course material or how to apply key concepts to further their understanding. TBL is designed to provide students with both conceptual and procedural knowledge (Krathwohl, 2002). According to Michaelsen, Sweet, and Parmalee (2009), TBL must go beyond merely covering content and provide students the opportunity to practice using course concepts to engage in higher level critical thinking, including analysis, synthesis, evaluation, and problem solving.

The implementation of TBL is based on four underlying principles (Michaelsen & Richards, 2005):

1.

Groups should be formed with care, as these teams are fixed for the whole course.

Higher-achieving students should be distributed among all groups.

2.

Accountability and responsibility are placed firmly on students’ shoulders – this includes both “pre-learning” activities as well as work completed in teams.

3.

Team assignments must not only promote learning course material, but also facilitate team development.

4.

Teams should receive frequent and timely feedback.

TBL can be used in a wide variety of teaching situations and subjects, and it is important to understand not only the motivations behind selecting this method of delivery, but also how these practices are enacted in the classroom.

Two individuals who have been employing TBL at the University of Lethbridge are Olu Awosoga and Davina DesRoches. Olu utilized TBL in his third-year Applied Statistics for Clinical Practice course in the Health Sciences

department and Davina incorporated it into her Sociology 1000 class this past year.

Enacting Team-based Learning in a Large Introductory Class: Davina’s Experience Davina completed her PhD in sociology at Queen’s University in 2016, and was hired as an instructor by the University of Lethbridge for the 2016-17 academic year. She was recently appointed assistant professor (tenure-track) in sociology at the University of Winnipeg.

Davina first encountered team-based (or cooperative) learning in 2005 while employed as an Enriched Support Program (ESP) Workshop Facilitator at Carleton University’s Centre for Initiatives in Education. The ESP provides a supported transition into university for students whose performance in high school did not reflect their academic potential. In addition to attending classes, students must also attend a weekly three-hour workshop, led by a senior undergraduate or graduate student

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trained in collaborative learning. As a “facil,” Davina learned about the affective and cognitive issues in supporting student learning, as well as specific techniques to foster a supportive, collaborative learning environment. Later, as a graduate teaching assistant running tutorials and as a teaching fellow designing and running her own classes, Davina continued to integrate cooperative learning into her classes. Today, it is a central component of her overall teaching strategy. She has used cooperative learning activities in classes as small as 25 students and as large as 300 students.

Davina’s use of cooperative learning in her courses has academic, social, and psychological benefits:

Academic: Team-based learning helps students clarify their ideas through discussion and debate, which promotes critical and higher-level thinking skills. TBL creates an environment of exploratory, active learning – students aren’t simply passively listening to the instructor talk, but must actively engage with one another to answer questions and solve problems. This benefits both weaker and stronger students – weaker students improve when grouped with higher-achieving students, and stronger students gain a deeper understanding of the material when teaching others. Students also benefit from TBL because these exercises improve their recall of content, and can help develop their oral and written communication skills. As an instructor, Davina benefits from a classroom structure that encourages student responsibility for learning and higher class attendance. TBL allows her to assign more challenging tasks without creating an unreasonable workload for the students (or an unreasonable marking load). Finally, TBL gives both the instructor and students a break from the traditional lecture – as Davina is a new instructor, and creating all of her notes from scratch, having days set aside for cooperative learning activities gives her some breathing room.

Social: TBL acts as a social support system for students. It helps establish an atmosphere of cooperation and helping on campus. Students learn about others’ perspectives (which might be especially important at an institution like the U of L, where many students come from “a small town in Saskatchewan/southern Alberta...”).

TBL helps majority and minority populations learn to work with each other, and encourages friendly interactions among students – students learn to criticize ideas, not people. Importantly, TBL allows students to practice the teamwork and leadership skills needed in the workplace.

Psychological: TBL enhances student satisfaction with the learning experience (as indicated by comments in the classroom and on teaching evaluations). It can also reduce anxiety,

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especially with regard to challenging course content.

At the U of L, introductory sociology is a single-semester lecture-based course, ranging from 140 (night class) to 300 students (early afternoon class). The course introduces students to the “sociological perspective” and the way sociologists approach and study the social world. In Davina’s classroom, the focus is primarily on the macro-sociological frameworks of Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber. For many students, this is the first time they’ve encountered these historical figures – as well as the first time they’ve been expected to read significant excerpts of source texts, as opposed to simplified summaries. Davina’s use of TBL in this course facilitates engagement with theory-intensive material as students work together to develop a deeper understanding of course content.

In Davina’s classroom, four TBL activities were held throughout the semester. Using Moodle’s random function, students were placed into groups of six, and a listing of these groups was posted online prior to the first TBL activity.

Each group received an identical assignment in an envelope marked with their group number. Groups were given a physical copy of the assignment (usually 3-4 pages), and were expected to write their answers directly on the paper provided. The assignments featured questions on the readings and lectures, and were designed to take the entire class session to complete. Assignment questions were designed to encourage debate and discussion (e.g., “Which five terms best encapsulate Marx’s viewpoint and theory? Define and explain each term, and also how they interrelate.”)

No special classroom set-up was required.

Davina posted a diagram of the classroom to Moodle that clearly listed where each group was to sit (e.g., members of group 1 were to sit at the far back of the classroom). This diagram was also projected onto the screen on the day of each in-class assignment, allowing students to quickly find their fellow team members and seats. Davina and her teaching assistants encouraged students to organize themselves so that they were all facing each other (move chairs, sit on the floor in a circle, for example).

Each in-class assignment was marked out of 5 and was worth 5% of a student’s final grade.

One mark was given for attendance and a good attitude (i.e., a student who came to class but then ignored their team and played on their phone would not receive this mark). One mark was given for completing an anonymous online peer evaluation (numerical evaluations only, no comments). The remaining three marks were based on the quality of the written assignment (1 = below expectations, 2 = meets expectations, 3 = exceeds expectations). This

evaluation structure meant that 2 marks (40% of the assignment total) are solely based on the individual student’s effort. Thus, a student willing to put in the effort (show up, have a good attitude, complete the peer evaluation), could achieve a great mark (A- range) on the assignment, even if their understanding of course material met, rather than exceeded, expectations. For many students, the assignments acted as a slight boost to their grades – the only other evaluation measures were two multiple-choice exams (mid-term and final).

Enacting Team-Based Learning in the Quantitative Classroom: Olu’s Experience Olu has been a member of the Faculty of Health Sciences since July 2009 and has been utilizing TBL in his Applied Statistics for Clinical Practice course. The course is offered in the third year of a four-year baccalaureate program and all students within the Faculty of Health Sciences are required to take this course during the fall, spring, or summer semester.

The course is offered in a team-based learning (TBL) format with classes of up to 60 students per course, and focuses on using descriptive and basic inferential statistics to analyze datasets to help solve real-life clinical problems. Rather than focusing primarily on theoretical and/or formulaic approaches to statistics, the course focuses on using computer software, such as the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS), to create, manage, analyze, and interpret datasets containing clinically related data. The course was taught using the same assignments, course outlines, teaching materials, and overall teaching style and philosophy across the semesters.

Students often feel some trepidation about taking statistics, and Olu’s motivations for using TBL in this class stem from his desire to spark student interest in a so-called “dreadful” course, as well as to overcome any communication barriers associated with his accent. In Olu’s classroom, all activities count for assessment, which gives students a real incentive to learn materials beforehand, attend classes, and contribute to team discussions. The readiness assurance process holds students accountable for coming to class prepared and working together as a team, and helps students develop interpersonal skills. This approach helps students who seem uninterested in the subject material and/or have difficulty understanding the material.

In Olu’s classroom, students are organized strategically into diverse teams on the first day of class (four to seven students work together throughout each class in the semester).

Coursework includes pre-class preparation (blended materials [audio/video lectures prepared using Articulate 2.0 software] and PPT

slides), in-class work (Q&A, mini-lecture, team problems, individual and team quizzes), and application-focused exercises (lab assignments and exams). Classroom set-up is kept simple.

Students are expected to sit with their team members, which allows each class to be executed with minimal digression.

Students’ final grades are comprised of five components: individual quizzes (25%), team quizzes (10%), team participation (5%), a midterm lab quiz (25%), and a final exam (35%). All tests are in multiple-choice format.

Effectiveness and Impact of TeamBased Learning: A Case Study To gather feedback from the students within the applied statistics course on the efficacy and impact of the TBL approach, a survey was administered during two back-to-back semesters. The authors used a pre-experimental research design by administering an online survey to undergraduate students registered in the course in two different semesters (fall and spring). The teaching style was changed to incorporate TBL (Michaelsen, Knight, & Fink, 2004) so students were constantly working and learning in small teams, began to use a broad range of visual aids and blended materials, and

made greater use of humour, cartoons, and funny/engaging videos. After reviewing the literature and incorporating student feedback from previous course evaluations, the authors developed a 10-item online survey questionnaire that consisted of statements regarding four main areas: general attitudes toward the group-based learning approach, instructor-teaching style, usefulness of learning resources available to students, and confidence level in the course.

In addition, a few questions asked about basic demographic information (year of study, gender, and specific program of study). For each statement in the 10-item survey, students indicated the extent to which they agreed with each statement using a four-point Likert scale that ranged from strongly disagree (score of 1) to strongly agree (score of 4), or did not contribute (score of 1) to were very important (score of 4), or never (score of 1) to most of the time (score of 4).

Results The online survey instrument was administered toward the end of the semester to all students registered in either the fall or spring semester in an applied statistics undergraduate course.

A response rate of 33% was achieved. 87% were female while 13% were male. A summary

of the year of study and program of study of participants are shown in the pie charts below.

Similarly, charts of students’ responses to survey questions are shown in Figures 1 - 6.

The majority of students who volunteered for the study expressed their appreciation for the introduction of blended materials and the use of a TBL approach throughout the semester.

They gained much understanding by engaging in group discussions on real-life application problems, and their ability to listen to the blended materials before every class. Students also appreciated being held accountable and responsible for teaching and learning materials covered in the course. This encouraged in-depth preparation before each class, class participation, and meaningful contribution within their teams. As a potential reflection of TBL, students identified it as the preferred teaching-andlearning approach through the use of real-life examples/exercises, clear explanations, timely feedback, and a well-paced course. Students also appreciated instructor characteristics such as patience, approachability, in-depth knowledge of statistics, and a sense of humour.

Students were also asked to respond to two openended survey questions dealing directly with the TBL approach as well as a general open-ended question for comments. These three questions

Figure 1 – Student Year of Study

Figure 2 – Group Function

Figure 3 – Course Components

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Figure 4 – Instructor Rating

Figure 5 – Student Comfort/Learning

Figure 6 – Program of Study were: (a) Compared with other courses that you have taken here at the University of Lethbridge, what comments would you make about the team-based approach that was used?; (b) Would you recommend that more classes adopt teambased learning? Why?; and (c) Please comment on any other areas of the HLSC 3450 course or instructor that you would like to discuss.

Between the two semesters of collected data, there were 250 individual comments made between the three questions. This data was collected and all comments were thematically coded using the Nvivo software package. The results of this process are shown in Figure 7.

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In general the responses were very positive with respect to the experience and the learning that took place. There were a few students who expressed negative comments with respect to the group-work process. These concerns ranged from issues related to dysfunctional group dynamics and students not “liking” their group members to one student feeling that they were paying to be taught by their professor and not their peers. While these are valid concerns and should not be dismissed, they were greatly overshadowed by positive student comments and reactions to the method of instruction.

One student even went so far as to state that

this was “the best course they have taken at the University to date.”

Conclusion and Recommendations As Davina and Olu’s experiences demonstrate, there are a variety of ways instructors can integrate TBL strategies in the classroom at the U of L. TBL can be utilized in any subject, and, as evidenced by Davina’s experience in SOCI 1000, with any class size! Instructors can choose to fully embrace this teaching style and organize their entire course around the precepts of TBL, or can selectively incorporate elements of TBL

Figure 7 – Most Common Themes

Regardless of whether you choose to go big or small, Davina and Olu share the following recommendations for adopting TBL in your classroom: 1.

2.

3.

Design assignments and activities with intended outcomes in mind. The primary strength of TBL is that it provides students a space for learning how to use course material in a meaningful way. When creating assignments, instructors must ask themselves: What is important that students take away from a particular reading or module? Assignments need to reflect these desired learning outcomes. When reviewing and evaluating assignments, it should be evident to instructors whether or not students can apply the theory or formula in question.

Figure out logistical issues prior to class time.

The more prep you do prior to entering the classroom, the smoother your TBL will run. If you have handouts or quizzes, have them assembled and ready to go. To reduce the amount of time students spend getting into or finding their groups, post an image on Moodle of where you want each group to sit; display this image on the projector at the start of class. It is well worth your time to show up a few minutes early to make sure the classroom is properly configured.

Set expectations early and often. Tell students on the first day of class that your course is structured around TBL. Explain to students

4.

5.

why you’ve adopted this teaching strategy – inform students that TBL is applicationfocused, and that they will spend less time learning about concepts and more time learning how to use these concepts in meaningful ways. Emphasize that, despite working in teams, students are responsible and accountable for their own learning and success in the class. Students will follow your lead; act with confidence.

Michaelsen, L. K, Knight, A. B., & Fink, L. D. (2004). Team-based learning: A transformative use of small groups in college teaching. Sterling, VA: Stylus.

Michaelsen, L., & Richards, B. (2005).

Drawing conclusions from the team-learning literature in health-sciences education: A commentary. Teaching and Learning in Medicine, 17, 85-88.

Fixed groups are critical. An important aspect of TBL is team development – it’s not just about learning course material, but learning how to communicate and work with others. Students learn to function as a team throughout the semester (which can, at times, include learning how to manage interpersonal conflict), and as such, it is important that groups remain the same throughout the semester. This said, to keep students accountable to you and to each other, provide students with a mechanism for registering discontent, such as peer evaluations.

Michaelsen, L. K., & Sweet, M. (2008a).

Fundamental principles and practices of teambased learning. In Michaelsen, L. K., Parmelee, D. X., McMahon, K. K., & Levine, R. E. (Eds.).

Team-based learning for health professions education: A guide to using small groups for improving learning. Sterling, VA: Stylus.

Assemble allies! Make use of the resources available to you at the U of L. In larger classes, teaching assistants are an invaluable help with monitoring students, grading assignments, and inputting grades.

The staff at the Teaching Centre can assist with both pedagogical (assignment and/ or classroom structure and more technical issues (group creation, Moodle support) associated with TBL.

Sweet, M., & Michaelsen, L. K., Eds. (2012).

Team-based learning in the social sciences and humanities: Group work that works to generate critical thinking and engagement. Sterling, VA: Stylus.

References

Michaelsen, L. K., & Sweet, M. (2008b).

Teamwork works. NEA Advocate, 25(6), 1, 5-8.

Michaelsen, L. K., Sweet, M., & Parmalee, D. X. (2009). Team-based learning: Small-group learning’s next big step, 7-27.

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into their classroom, such as group quizzes or reading activities. Even partial adoption of TBL is beneficial in terms of student engagement with course material – knowing their teammates depend on them is a real incentive for students to come to class prepared.

Conversation @uoflteachingcentre @teachingcentre

Krathwohl, D. R. (2002). A revision of Bloom’s taxonomy: An overview. Theory into Practice, 41(4), 212-218.

19

EMBEDDING E Using Co-Inquiry with Stud

Dr. Jan Newberry, Jeff Meadows, Jake Vinje, and Jamie Lewis

D

r. Jan Newberry started using Team-Based Learning (TBL; www.teambasedlearning. org) in her Introductory Anthropology classroom in the fall of 2015 to engage students

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in the material and encourage them to interact with each other to discuss the concepts at a deeper level. Pairing this goal with a desire to help first-year students create the social connections that support their success at the University of Lethbridge completely transformed the way that she approached the teaching of anthropology.

The focus shifted from lengthy lectures and multiple-choice exams to abbreviated lectures, more frequent quizzes, and more time for

students to work in small groups to complete these quizzes after each individual completed the same quiz. After working out the rough spots in this process and seeing the way that it changed the students’ approach to the course and the material (reported in last year’s A Light on Teaching), the question quickly became whether or not it was achieving the goals that she had set for it. Was it increasing critical thinking skills and student understanding of the concepts? Was

Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

ETHNOGRAPHY dents in Classroom Research

it increasing the social connections between the students and building a support structure for their long-term success in the institution?

Jan decided to approach these questions like an anthropologist: she put ethnographers in the classroom.

Anthropologists and social scientists have long utilized ethnographic fieldwork as their central method for gathering information and making

observations about cultures, people, and places to better understand how people live their lives.

Ethnographic fieldwork is based on participant observation, and in this case, there was the very happy coincidence that this fieldwork would be conducted among first-year students being taught about the practice and its importance to the discipline of anthropology. Describing this as embedded ethnography references the doubled significance of the approach. Not only

would these young ethnographers be able to gather information not otherwise available to the instructor, but they would both model the method for those taking the class and themselves have the experience of conducting ethnographic research as undergraduate students. Our six ethnographers included three students who took the initial offering of the TBL-based Anthropology 1000 the year before: Jamie Lewis, Brittany Mitchell, and Cecilia

21

Reid. All three of these students were members of the first Faculty of Arts & Science Global Citizenship cohort program. This program had been part of the initial impetus to take up TBL as a way to produce a cohort experience in a large, fixed-seat lecture-based course. The three other ethnographers were fourth-year anthropology majors: Dan Irete, Jake Vinje, and Kai Yee. Hunter Guthrie served as the graduate student teaching assistant.

In the following sections, some members of the research team take turns describing the process and reflecting on what we learned and some of the preliminary results.

Incorporating Co-Inquiry into Research Design - Jeff Meadows After Jan taught the course in the TBL format the first time she realized that she wanted a better understanding of what was going on within the groups. It appeared that the students were more engaged and having a much richer experience with the material (and each other), but was that actually the case? With the first pilot of the course, Jan turned to the Teaching Centre for support, which included not just logistical and technical assistance, but also research-design planning and student mentorship throughout the project. As I had been part of the first offering, I once again took part in designing and conducting the research as well as working directly with the students.

Jan received a Teaching Development Fund grant to hire student ethnographers and engage in research specifically to gather data on what was happening at the group level. Through this grant, six students were hired to help conduct this research. In addition to these six students, a graduate-level teaching assistant was involved in the support and logistics of the course. Once the ethnographers were hired, they were encouraged to attend research planning meetings before and during the project to help inform the direction of the research as well as to get feedback on the approach they were employing with their assigned groups. Cook-Sather, Bovill, and Felton (2014) describe co-inquiry as studentfaculty partnerships in research on teaching and learning. Such collaboration can take place at any point but by including students in the research planning, not only was their experience broadened and deepened, but the benefits of co-inquiry shaped the research from planning through execution.

The class was split into 37 groups of six or seven students with one ethnographer assigned to six (and in one case seven) groups. Jan’s implementation of the TBL approach called for an individual test, group test, and peer evaluation roughly every second week, which constitutes a Readiness Assurance Process (RAP, with the alternate weeks having an application

22

exercise for the groups to work through (see Michaelsen and Sweet, 2011) . Each of these events (RAP or application) was an opportunity for the ethnographers to sit with and observe the interactions of their groups. We decided that rather than trying to observe multiple groups each class, they would sit with one group per class and record their observations. This allowed an ethnographer to observe each of their assigned groups at least once, and in almost all cases, twice.

To help support the ethnographic process, the research team met for weekly workshops to discuss the observations that were being made as well as to help support the ethnographers through the process, with Jan and I facilitating these conversations. These meetings were particularly important for shaping the datacollection process. We heard each week about the particular issues arising and were able to make adjustments to deal with them. Our conversations covered issues such as evidence of conceptual learning, group dynamics, and obstacles to effective learning such as the classroom space as well as the presence of the ethnographers themselves. It was important to shield from Jan the identity of students taking the class in research meetings and notes until after grades were submitted. The ethnographers coded each of their groups and individuals within the groups in a way that would protect the students’ anonymity within the research while still allowing for longitudinal correlation of the data.

It was in these collaborative meetings that the embedded ethnographers honed their approach to field notes and shared what they were seeing.

In some cases, this inspired new attentions in their fieldwork and the identification of emerging themes. The ethnographers were confronted with a variety of issues during the process (some endemic to ethnographic research and some unique due to their similarity in age and status to the students being observed), and our weekly meetings kept Jan and me in touch with those issues and allowed for the method to evolve to deal with them. This demonstrated to us the strength of using co-inquiry during the offering of a class. In one final workshop, the ethnographers began the first stages of coding as they collaborated to identify converging themes from their fieldwork.

In the final weeks of the semester, the embedded ethnographers set up focus-group interviews with students who volunteered to participate.

Again, the ethnographers were able to experience the process of research first-hand, with all its challenges and discoveries.

After the class ended, all of the handwritten notes were collected and thematically analyzed by one of the ethnographers, Jamie Lewis, who remained on the project through an applied study for this purpose. This data will help inform

not only Jan’s future offerings of this course, but also help to shape future ethnographic research within her classrooms.

We are very fortunate to have two of the six ethnographers contribute reflections and insights into the impact that this project had on them (as students and researchers). These reflections are presented below to help provide insight into this aspect of the research.

Jake Vinje My involvement in this research project marked my first experience with Jan’s team-based learning approach to teaching anthropology.

As a student majoring in anthropology, I had previously taken a lecture-based offering of Jan’s introductory anthropology class during my first year at the University of Lethbridge.

Thus, I was introduced to TBL for the first time alongside Jan’s students, and I shared many of their experiences as they navigated this unconventional teaching format. My experiences in both the TBL and non-TBL formats of Jan’s introductory anthropology class allowed me to compare and contrast both teaching methods. One potential drawback of the TBL approach is that it offers less time for structured learning through lectures. This particular offering of the class consisted of two weekly meetings on Tuesday and Thursday mornings of 75 minutes each. Because teambased activities (such as application activities and examinations) were conducted on a weekly basis, this left only 75 minutes each week for Jan to introduce anthropological concepts through lectures. However, students were provided with ample opportunity to reflect upon, engage with, and discuss the concepts introduced in Jan’s lectures with their teams. In this regard, the reduced lecture time did not negatively impact student’s abilities to learn anthropological concepts. Rather, the teamwork-based learning environment fostered in Jan’s classroom encouraged students to critically engage with these concepts through discussions with their teammates, and thus engendered a deeper conceptual understanding of anthropology among students. Moreover, Jan’s TBL approach allowed students to create meaningful social connections with their teams, which eased their adjustment to life as students at the U of L. Alongside the other student ethnographers, I observed the students’ conceptual engagement with anthropology within their teams.

Rather than simply memorizing the concepts introduced in Jan’s lectures for tests, students came to class prepared to engage with these concepts on a deeper level and consider their broader implications with their teams. Although such conceptual learning does occur in more conventional lecture-based classes, it was actively facilitated by TBL. Every week, students were required to engage with their teams in

discussions, reflections, and examinations that constituted their grades in the class. Thus, students often felt obligated to come to class prepared in order to work cooperatively with their teams. Here, TBL facilitated active and engaged learning. This was particularly evident when observing how students interacted in teams. Students would regularly ask one another for clarification on concepts that they did not completely understand. Their teams became another resource for learning, in addition to Jan, the teaching assistant, and the textbook. Indeed, students would often consult their teams when seeking clarification, rather than turning to their textbook or notes. This allowed students themselves to take on the role of teachers as they explained concepts to their teammates.

When teaching concepts to their teams, students exhibited a deep, conceptual understanding of course content that indicated critical engagement rather than simple memorization. In this regard, the teaching and learning occurring within each team greatly benefited each student, as it facilitated students’ abilities to actively engage with course content on a level that may not have occurred if students were not provided with the opportunity to discuss and reflect upon course content with one another.

Being involved in this project has been an incredibly rewarding experience, both academically and personally. As anthropology students, we spend a great deal of time reading about and discussing ethnographic fieldwork, but we often do not get to experience it firsthand. This project allowed me to expand on my coursework by experiencing immersive and long-term fieldwork across a semester and

to navigate methodological issues related to ethics, positionality, and reflexivity, which will undoubtedly be beneficial as I begin graduate studies. My participation in this project also provided me with valuable experience working cooperatively in a group format. Although I initially struggled to mediate my position as both an insider and outsider as a student ethnographer in the classroom, I was welcomed into each team I worked with. This allowed me to join the social networks created by the students throughout the semester. As I worked with these teams as colleagues, I also learned valuable lessons about cooperation, communication, leadership, discussion, teaching, and, most importantly, listening and learning.

information, and did it help them build meaningful social networks that would, in theory, lead to their continued success in postsecondary education. In order to find answers to these questions, the research team brainstormed a number of variables that might have affected the students’ academic and social lives. It was then decided that transcribing and coding the field journals of each of the six undergraduate ethnographers, my own included, would be the most effective way of sorting qualitative findings to align with these different variables, and begin to understand whether or not this teaching approach was doing what Jan and Jeff had hoped it would.

In contrast to Jake’s experience, I have been involved with the team-based learning project since its implementation in the fall of 2015.

During my first two years at the University of Lethbridge, I have been a student within Jan’s TBL classroom, studied the classroom as an embedded ethnographer, and then experienced being a student in one her 2000-level courses organized through TBL the following semester.

My second round as a TBL student also coincided with my position as a research assistant to Jan and Jeff, when I worked to organize existing data, and to transcribe, code, and come up with some of the preliminary findings from the field journals of the undergraduate ethnographers.

Once each of the six undergraduate ethnography field journals was transcribed, I set about coding them using Quirkos qualitative research software, which provides a powerful visual array of converging and overlapping themes. I sorted portions of my and my coworkers’ notes into various bubbles, or Quirks. The majority of these variables were chosen before transcription began, but some bubbles were added as themes became more visibly relevant over time. The major themes, under which smaller subheadings were nested, included social connections, conceptual learning, individual attributes, environmental factors, intra-group dynamics, and participation. Other factors, such as mentions of social-media use, reflexive comments by the researchers, and instances of conflict were also coded.

The driving force of our research came down to two major questions: did this teaching system help students retain and understand conceptual

Once all of the data had been entered and organized, the most commonly mentioned themes included (from most to least): participation, intra-

Jamie Lewis

23

Observations on social networking and conceptual learning were also frequently mentioned by the ethnographers, and of the individual attributes theorized to affect learning in the classroom, the researchers most frequently commented on gender, age, and ethnicity. In my own applied-study research in the fall of 2015, I analyzed my participant observations and the results of an online survey that 12.5% of the classroom participated in to discover which individual attributes were the most influential in the formation of social networks among the students. This limited research indicated that age and year of study were the most influential – something that the initial analysis of my fellow ethnographers seems to support, although all of us were surprised by the salience of this factor.

Moving forward, we’ll be able to use Quirkos to discover much more about these field notes, such as the overlap between different themes, or which themes each researcher was individually likely to notice the most. Jan and Jeff will be able to pull direct quotes from student comments during their writing, and to access feedback on the course from the students’ conversations that were observed in the classroom.

Fieldwork in the Classroom Jan Newberry When I reorganized my large introductory lecture to incorporate team-based learning, I had to rethink my approach to lectures. Having less time to lecture made me focus on what was central to anthropological ways of thinking.

What were the concepts that any introductory student must learn? At the same time, I ceded some of the control in my classroom as students worked in teams to apply these concepts.

The pilot seemed to be a success, despite the many organizational issues of a first run, but this was my view from the front of the room

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based on test scores and standard evaluations.

So when introduced to the idea of co-inquiry with students at a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning conference in Banff in 2015, I saw an opportunity to gather information on how the course was working through the hallmark method of anthropology: participant observation. If students conducted ethnographic fieldwork in the classroom, they would be able to see what I could not from the front of the room. Were students talking about concepts and were they building the kind of social networks and social capital that would help them succeed at university? These were the twin goals of my course redesign in the context of the Faculty of Arts & Science new Global Citizenship cohort program.

So, I embedded ethnographers in the second offering of the course and was rewarded beyond my wildest expectations. Not only did we gain useful information on how students were dealing with course material and how they were and were not developing social networks, but co-inquiry with these undergraduate ethnographers has been some of the most rewarding and satisfying fieldwork AND teaching I have ever undertaken.

My view of the classroom expanded through six new sets of eyes from the other side of the lectern, and their responses, their insights, their analyses have enlivened my own understanding of teaching and student life. I was both student and teacher, just as they were both student and field researcher. And even more, young anthropology students got to experience firsthand what they had learned about in lectures: fieldwork techniques.

Their shared reflections show what the experience meant from their side. Their field notes, their focus-group interviews, and their contributions to our weekly workshops are now central to my understanding of teaching and learning, and they will form the basis for further research and teaching design. I have been immeasurably enriched by this process of co-inquiry with these students. Not only has it expanded my sense of what is going on in my own classroom (which is especially beneficial in a large lecture-based course), but I along with the ethnographers have expanded my engagement with anthropology and its concepts and methods.

I only have space to describe a few things I learned about this approach to teaching. First, there is indeed a great deal of peer teaching that takes place in a TBL classroom. The work of articulating concepts and hashing them out to reach consensus is the kind of meaningful learning one hopes for in a university classroom.

This effect varies by group and by individual student, but there is enough evidence for this to encourage anyone interested in active learning.

Although evidence of social networking was more ephemeral than I imagined, one surprising effect has been how the ethnographers

themselves have become nodes in a campuswide network of acquaintance and connection.

The ethnographers have now sat beside students from their groups in other classroom settings.

They continue to be recognized and in some cases have become friends with students they worked among in the class. They also have become important peer mentors in my other classrooms using TBL, extending the impact of their work exponentially.

What of conceptual thinking? Well, I first learned that I myself had a hard time describing it to my ethnographers-in-training. What did it look like after all? But it was through co-inquiry in our workshopping that it became clear that indeed it was happening. First-year students were moving (sometimes painfully) from an approach that emphasized memorizing content to realizing that they had to do the work of understanding content in context and the fuller meaning of what they had been taught. I would not say this was universal but again there was enough evidence to suggest that the TBL approach can help shift first-year students toward new ways of learning that are consistent with success in university. Finally, and very importantly, we discovered some things about difference within the classroom: by age, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion. Perhaps surprisingly, some of the differences most expected to be divisive were not. In fact, one thing that I learned from this experience is that forms of difference that may be taken to work against a student such as being a new Canadian can actually be a source of strength and a valuable resource for other students. Year in school and chronological age did have an impact on group dynamics. While some students enjoyed being mentors and resources for other students, some did not.

To be clear: I would never have learned any of this from the front of the room. Using coinquiry in a TBL classroom has proven to be one of the most satisfying experiences I have had in the classroom: as researcher, as teacher, as student, and as collaborator.

References Cook-Sather, A., Bovill, C., & Felten, P. (2014). Engaging students as partners in learning and teaching: A guide for faculty. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

Michaelsen, L. K., & Sweet, M. (2011). Teambased learning. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 128, 41-51.

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group dynamics, reflexive commentary by researchers, social networking, and conceptual learning. The two front-runners were intragroup dynamics and participation, with 1,040 and 1,085 mentions respectively – in contrast, the third most-mentioned category, researchers’ observations, had only 383 mentions. These results tied directly to Jan’s and Jeff ’s initial research questions regarding social networking and conceptual learning and also reinforced the opportunities for the undergraduate researchers to self-reflect during the coinquiry process. A number of other trends also emerged: of the Individual Attributes coded, gender and age or year of study were the most frequently mentioned; students and researchers often struggled with the physical space they were in, and its limitations on the ability to hear one another when working in their groups, and there were also many observations regarding authority & power structures or systems within the groups under observation.

Conversation @uoflteachingcentre @teachingcentre

Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

“Unsettling� the CLASSROOM

Decolonization which sets out to change the order of the world is, obviously, a programme of complete disorder. ~Frantz Fanon (The Wretched of the Earth, 2004, p. 27) How to stop a story that is always being told? Or, how to change a story that is always being told? ~ Audra Simpson (Mohawk Interruptus, 2014, p. 177)

Meditations on the Necessity of Failure 25

By Kara Granzow, Emily Kirbyson, and Suzanne Lenon1

T

he University of Lethbridge is dug into Treaty 7 land. We write that it is dug into because to say it sits on Treaty 7 land disavows the removal of that land for the University to take up the space it presently occupies, driving deep into and removing ground, displacing other worlds, those of rattlesnakes, mice, and millions of other living and non-living things.

As we see coulee scraped away before our eyes with the building of the new Destination Project, we consider the rationale for the construction of the first U of L building in 1967 and now again, as the University expands. Our institutional adage is “Fiat Lux” or “Let there be light” and this is precisely the good assumed embedded in the infrastructure of the U of L’s beginnings, its ongoing expansions, and its renovations.

This article reflects on a Teaching Development Fund (TDF) project carried out by the three of us,2 one that contained the same impetus toward light, that is, toward knowing more and knowing better, towards the belief in human rationality and progress. In our TDF application, “Unsettling Settler Colonialism: Resources for the Classroom,” we proposed to foster an “unsettling” pedagogy even while recognizing that the space of the University of Lethbridge is one thoroughly endowed with the logics and sentiments of settler colonialism. Following the release of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report in December 2015, our TDF sought to productively deepen our teaching skills and develop learning resources in ways that were accountable to the TRC’s Calls for Action. Our TDF also sought to be accountable 1 All authors contributed equally to the development of this piece. Kirbyson, in her capacity as an RA for this project, engaged in the creative labour for developing the Pulling the Weeds assignment considered in this paper.

2 It is important to note that each of us has benefited from our enactments of settler colonial entitlement.

Only with a notion of retrospective clarity our ability to learn from the past, to be better as a consequence of our prior failings are we apparently able to redeem ourselves with this writing. We note that this capacity to look back and assume a better future and better selves by virtue of the passing of linear time and a progressive teleology is profoundly colonial and maintains rather than challenges settler common sense (Rifkin, 2014). We have taken/we do take up the comforts of settler colonialism, including structural privileges by virtue of our class, the colour of our skin, and various other forms of capital. In relation to this specific assignment we were/are not socially positioned in the same way, and our capacity to do this work professionally is differentially impacted by these more specific factors. One of us was a graduate student, another an untenured assistant professor and another a tenured associate professor. The risks and rewards incurred with an unsettling pedagogy (and by our reflecting on them here) are realized differently in our lives.

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to Indigenous scholars’ calls for decolonization that foreground “the settler problem” at the heart of why reconciliation is needed in the first place (Regan, 2010, p. 11). As many scholars argue, settler colonialism “must be seen as a living phenomenon,” one that continues to structure present-day Canadian society Arvin et al., 2013; Coulthard, 2014, Monture, 2004 p.

207;). For postsecondary teaching to be actually reconciliatory means unsettling our own and our students’ present-day investments in settler colonialism, and endeavouring to foreground the racial and heteronormative colonial logics through which we are all produced. We aspire(d) to make uncertainty, discomfort and displacement necessary admissions in our classrooms, to make visible “the colonial roots of historical patterns and structures that shape [our own and] students’ contemporary thinking, attitudes, and actions toward Indigenous people” (Regan, 2010, p. 49), and to shed light on spaces and practices of resistance to settler colonialism (Snelgrove et al., 2014, p. 27).

As teachers in disciplines that encourage critical thinking about societal power arrangements, we already include discussions of settler colonialism in our course material. But we’ve hit upon a glitch with this TDF. We want to be good teachers but if unsettling colonialism also means unsettling Euro-American traditions so foundational to postsecondary education, then we are faced with the necessity of disrupting what it means to be a good teacher and our intimate attachments to that idea. Implementing our TDF required us to confront our own personal investments in a kind of enlightened settlerhood as teachers both imparting and occupying such an affective mode. For that reason, we write this paper toward something that is counterintuitive for those like us who work in postsecondary contexts – contexts of light and learning. That is, we reflect here on our failures and in a redemptive sort of twist (hence saving ourselves once again), we go on to make the case that such failures are actually crucial components of any attempt at decolonizing postsecondary education.

Pulling the Weeds

Among the definitions of “to teach” provided by the English Oxford online dictionary, these are the primary two: 1.

2.

Impart knowledge to or instruct (someone) as to how to do something.

Cause (someone) to learn or understand something by example or experience.

(Oxford Living Dictionaries, 2017).

To teach, in the English language, is to impart knowledge or to cause learning. There is order and hierarchy; there are a teacher and a learner; an impetus and an effect. We implemented our TDF through three courses offered in Fall 2016

and at their completion we can confidently affirm that our courses taught students about colonization in Canada. We can also claim that our students experienced the courses in transformative ways. Indeed, they articulated both learning and transformation in their course evaluations, suggesting that we delivered on the imperative “Fiat Lux!” Such evaluations may provide evidence that we imparted knowledge or caused learning, and we will no doubt quote such excerpts on our PARs or as we develop teaching portfolios. And yet, such comments leave us feeling worried. The “light” of knowledge and its silent but loyal counterpart, the dark of ignorance and of primitivism, are basic components of a profoundly colonial discourse. Individual students may leave the course knowing more about settler colonialism in Canada and they may even feel newly motivated by what they have learned, but have we been successful in delivering anti-colonial materials with anti-colonial effects?

We did not “change the order of the world” (Fanon, 2004, p. 27). We do not know whether we fostered any kind of disorder at all. We do know that institutions of education, including the university, have been instrumental in the historical and present successes of settler colonialism (Tuhiwai Smith, 2012), and we know that state education systems are “designed to produce communities of individuals willing to uphold settler colonialism” (L. Simpson, 2014, p. 1). Hence we have to ask to what extent the foundations of our teaching and of this colonial institution were undermined in our courses. We think we must be vigilant because upholding settler colonialism does not necessarily come in obvious forms. One of the dangers in attempting “unsettling” pedagogy resides precisely in producing communities of individuals who see themselves as allies in efforts toward resurgences in Indigenous communities, lands, and nations but who embody and enact another version of settler entitlement, that of the enlightened settler.

To consider these problems, we offer a discussion of one assignment we designed through the TDF. Titled Pulling the Weeds, it had four parts.3 3 Pulling the Weeds was inspired in part by a published conversation between Snelgrove, Dhamoon, and Corntassel (2014) wherein Corntassel describes efforts, largely on the part of Cheryl Bryce of the Songhees First Nation, and a “Community Tool Shed,” to revive Lekwungen “foodscapes and landscapes” (p. 25). The Community Tool Shed, located in what is now commonly called Victoria, B.C., is a site that brings together Indigenous and non-Indigenous folks who work to rid Lekwungen homelands of invasive plant species and to foster traditional plant growth. This ongoing project is an act of resurgence that highlights “the terrain of Indigenous struggles to restore and reconnect a placebased existence” (p. 25).

Students were to (a) read the Wikipedia entry for spotted knapweed (Wikipedia, 2017); (b) seek out knapweed in the local environment; (c) pick knapweed and document this; and (d) write short responses to versions of the following questions: 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

Describe the experiences of seeking out the knapweed.

Describe the sensory elements of picking the knapweed (how did the soil smell, what was the texture of the weed, etc.).

Where did you pick the weeds? Whose land were you on?

What is your relationship to the patch of land that you picked the weed on?

Write on your (dis)identifications with the knapweed or the plants that you left in the ground.

Why do you think I asked you to pull an invasive plant species in this course?

What connections can you make to this week’s readings?4

Students were encouraged not to worry about answering correctly, to be creative and thoughtful, and to make an attempt at responding to the questions even if they were unsure of the meaning.

We hoped the required weed-pulling would foreground land as crucial to anti-colonial projects, including those engaged in by the University and its professors (L. Simpson, 2014).

We borrowed from Tuck and Yang (2012) with whom we share the concern that many attempts to “decolonize” the classroom actually turn decolonization into an impotent metaphor and hence take us further from realizing decolonization in material forms. We hoped that pulling invasive species from local lands might help illustrate the material relationship between students, land, property and nationhood in our more local context. We hoped that students would reflect on their presence with the land and on what it means to pull such a thriving entity up with its seemingly individual plant roots.

Unsettling Failure For this assignment we sent students out of the classroom, onto the prairies. In this way, we attempted to position students such that their encounter with the land would offer up opportunities for learning. Some of this assignment’s failures are tied to the containment 4 In SOCI 3050 and CSPT 5101/7101 students were required to read Leanne Simpson’s (2014) Land as pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious transformation. In WGST 2300, students were required to discuss this assignment in relation to Adrienne Rich’s (1994) Notes toward a politics of location, and in CSPT 5301/7301 to Chapter One of Audra Simpson’s (2014) Mohawk interruptus: Political life across the borders of settler states (among other readings critically interrogating the nation-state).

of our efforts within the parameters of a Eurocolonial institute of postsecondary education. Our classes are 12 weeks long and in this assignment we asked students to pick knapweed just once. The isolated event was a novelty. How can this change the story of settler colonialism that is always being told?

(A. Simpson, 2014). We wonder now about including a weekly weed-pulling quota as part of an ongoing reflexivity assignment. We know, though, that not all of the institutional strictures placed on the assignment are so easily remedied.

Moreover as Leanne Simpson (2014) reminds us, the practice of picking knapweed is not performative of land as pedagogy because the necessary conditions were not and are not in place. Simpson explains that the academy “does not and cannot provide the proper context” for Indigenous intelligences because it has not taken “a principled stand on . . . colonial gendered violence, dispossession, erasure and imposed poverty” as forces that are attacking Indigenous intelligence (p. 17). Simpson makes a crucial point. We planned that the practice of pulling the weed would be unsettling but this had very little to do with requiring that the academy ensure “the full, valued recognition of [Indigenous] freedom, sovereignty and selfdetermination over bodies, minds and land” (L. Simpson, 2014, p. 17).

Under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more surprising ways of being in the world. ~ Judith Halberstam, (The Queer Art of Failure, 2011, p. 2).

Reflecting on our decision to have students pull weeds left us wondering, too, whether the assignment should have focused on the restoration of native plant species rather than only on the eradication of invasive ones. This

might have posed greater logistical challenges.

Our students could not simply head into the coulees, break ground, and plant seedlings. The emphasis on the impressive abilities of knapweed to stunt the growth of other plants seemed to contribute to a trend in student papers marked by strong language regarding colonial settlers who succeeded, or attempted to succeed, in invading and taking over Indigenous bodies, lands, and lifeways. Such language points to several oversimplifications enacted through this assignment. First, despite our attempt to heed Tuck and Yang’s (2012) warning, the assignment provokes primarily metaphorical understandings of settler colonialism and of weed-pulling as decolonization. Second, this metaphor relies upon and reproduces a settler/ Indigenous dyad as though these categories were ahistorical and naturally existing. Third, it naturalizes a hostile relationship between the two, the outcome of which is both anticipated and assumed final. Moreover we wonder if, in attempting to address “the settler problem” (Regan, 2010, p. 11) through this assignment, we inadvertently recentred precisely that which we hoped to unsettle. Our classes were not made up entirely of people situated as “white” or as “settler” and some of our students expressed concern that course materials spoke to and privileged the näivety of primarily settler students. This constitutes yet another failure of ours, though we are aware that even this failure provided an opportunity for students to challenge the teaching and design of the course which, we argue, is also a good.

We required students to identify knapweed with the help of a Wikipedia (2017) article that described the weed’s “systematics and taxonomy”.

We picked this website because it would be among the first sites someone might visit to learn the basics about something and because the literary practices circulating throughout the webpage remind us of those employed in the classificatory work at the heart of scientific racism. However, our decision to assign Wikipedia’s webpage on knapweed may have quietly reproduced Euro-colonial engagements with the land as it describes the plant according to the same system of classification and organization through which racial difference is biologically and hierarchically organized.

Classifications are never value neutral and are always imperfect but this critique and others like it were almost entirely absent from student writing. In fact, many students relied on the language of the Wikipedia reading to explain their process of coming to identify the weed. So this assignment failed for the way that invoked and relied upon colonial systems of classification in ways we did not foresee.

But what could we know about the effects of the assignment in advance? What outcomes could we safely control? We did not know exactly what our assignment would do. Requiring students to write on their experience of picking

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Our point is not to argue that student hesitancies and complicated suggestions are goods in and of themselves. Papers marked by such features, while avoiding the pitfalls of a dichotomized analysis, were also often marked by other kinds of colonial discourse. So it is not that failing at enlightened settlerhood secures innocence. Indeed, though we have provided some examples of what we read as productive student uncertainties, we could not actually foster the kind of chaos Fanon advocates while maintaining disciplinary borders or the kind of requirements for legibility that postsecondary institutions of education require.

Our project was limited from the start. And yet we write about the importance of failing because we worry that success in our everyday actions are precisely those that enact ongoing resettlement. We worry that success in teaching about colonization that leaves any room for a redeemable enlightened and benevolent settler subject whose governments have apologized and who know better than earlier generations, is part of the ongoing remaking of settlement.

Conclusions

For us, the answer to “how to change a story that is always being told” (A. Simpson, 2014, p. 177) includes failure (among other things). It means questioning the many effects that the imperative to deliver light might offer in contexts where such discourses have been so foundationally tied up with the varied ‘successes’ of settler

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colonialism. It means failing at producing the kinds of certainties that colonial orders demand. But failing feels bad. It threatens our aspirations. We want to be good teachers, to feel good about teaching. This is one of our intimate attachments. And what we want to do is to teach anticolonization and antiracism on Blackfoot territory occupied by the UofL while avoiding the pitfalls of too many pedagogies of inclusion and the trappings of claiming to teach in and produce so-called safe spaces. This means that we could not simply instruct students to sever attachments to the intimacies of their everyday lives, whatever those may be. And in fact, our jobs (and so our own political work) actually depend upon us not doing that ourselves.

Retrospectively, it appears that the TDF project was always set up to fail and now we advocate for meditations on the many necessary failures inevitable to attempts at anticolonial teaching.

The TDF does a number of things; it serves an instrumental purpose to our careers. Our writing about it is among our contributions to an academic industrial complex, counted as a measurement of our value to this colonial institution. It also positions us as scholars in relation to our critique; writing for failure in teaching performs a second flip such that as we commend failure we appear redeemed. Have we dodged disorder again? We write to convince our readers and ourselves to nonetheless embrace and write about such failings, and about the difficulties that stem from them. Finally, our reflection includes a critique of university teaching that is oriented toward a rethinking of this project. Wendy Brown writes, “critique is not equivalent to rejection or denunciation . . . the call to rethink something is not inherently treasonous but can actually be a way of caring for and even renewing the object in question” (2005). We aim our efforts toward slowly fostering environments of less control and of more disorder within our pedagogy, and we see this as among the necessary preconditions to any kind of realization of a less colonial, and perhaps eventually anti-colonial learning environment.

References

Arvin, M., Tuck, E., & Morrill, A. (2013).

Decolonizing feminism: Challenging connections between settler colonialism and heteropatriarchy.

Feminist Formations, 25(1), 8-34.

Brown, W. (2005). Edgework: Critical essays on knowledge and politics. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

Coulthard, G. (2014). Red skin, white masks: Rejecting the colonial politics of recognition.

Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Fanon, F. (2004). Wretched of the earth. (R. Philcox, trans.). New York: Grove Press.

(Original work published 1963)

Halberstam, J. (2011). The queer art of failure.

Durham & London: Duke University Press.

Monture, P.A. (2007). Racing and erasing: Law and gender in white settler societies. In S. P. Hier and B.S. Bolaria, (Eds.) Race & racism in 21st century Canada: Continuity, complexity, and change (197-216). Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press.

Oxford Living Dictionaries. (2017). Definition of teach in English. Retrieved from https:// en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/teach

Regan, P. (2010). Unsettling the settler within: Indian residential schools, truth telling, and reconciliation in Canada. Vancouver: UBC Press.

Rich, A. (1994). Notes towards a politics of location (1984). In A. Rich (Ed.), Blood, bread and poetry: Selected prose 1979-1985 (pp. 210231). London: Little Brown

Rifkin, M. (2014). Settler common sense: Queerness and everyday colonialism in the American Renaissance. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press

Simpson, A. (2014). Mohawk interruptus: Political life across the borders of settler states.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Simpson, L. B. (2014). Land as pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious transformation. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 3(3), 1-25.

Snelgrove, C., Dhamoon, R., & Corntassel, J. (2014). Unsettling settler colonialism: The discourse and politics of settlers, and solidarity with Indigenous nations. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 3(2), 1-32.

Tuck, E. & Yang, K. W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 1-40.

Tuhiwai Smith, L. (2012). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and Indigenous peoples (2nd ed.). London: Zed Books.

Wikipedia. (2017). Centaurea. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centaurea

CONTINUE

THE

knapweed was, in many ways, risky because it was unfamiliar and seemed unrelated to the explicit topics of the courses. We did not teach them what to do, how to do it, or what to write about it. Yet many of our students rose to the occasion and a number of our hopes for student thinking were realized when we received several complicated and thoughtful reflection papers.

We think that while students gave us bewildered looks when we asked them to go weed-picking, the stumbling about, the awkwardness of not knowing exactly how to complete the assignment, produced student responses that were often rich and thoughtful, always varied, contradictory, and problematic, in ways we did not anticipate. For example, some students used poetry to identify parallels between the taxonomy of plants in the Wikipedia entry and the ordering of humans in scientific racism.

This response and the deep insight it offers into colonial knowledge formations could have only occurred with an assignment design that included the risk that this parallel may be missed or go uncritiqued. Other students pointed out the irony of assigning this activity in precisely the academic context that Simpson argues is entirely unfit for fostering land-based intelligences. Others wrote with a depth of hesitancy that punctures the sort of certainty and universal claim-making that we often find in scholarship.

Conversation @uoflteachingcentre @teachingcentre

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