Here’s just a reminder of our upcoming Forum – everyone is welcome, but registration is required.

Registration link and details can be found here: isotlforum.mtroyal.ca

And here’s a copy of the nice write-up from the May 9 FaceTime newsletter:

Mount Royal is excited to welcome Mick Healey, PhD, a higher education consultant and researcher, as well as Emeritus Professor at the University of Gloucestershire, as the keynote speaker at the TransCanada International Forum on Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.

Healey will be on campus during the May 20 event hosted by The Institute for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. The event brings together administrators, faculty, students and staff from post secondary institutions across Western Canada. The aim is to create opportunities to discuss interdisciplinary topics on teaching and learning in higher education, and to promote local scholarship on these issues. The topic of this year’s forum is Engaging Undergraduate Students in Research and Inquiry. As undergraduate teaching institutions topics like these provide practical and relevant information for attendees. The day will include an interdisciplinary panel presentation from Mount Royal faculty and students who are engaged in scholarship of teaching and learning, and lots of time for interactive discussion.

Everyone on campus is welcome to attend ($50 for faculty and staff, free for students) – registration is available online.

Healey has written and edited over 150 papers, chapters, books and guides on various aspects of teaching and learning in higher education. His most recent work Developing research-based curricula in a college-based higher education aims to fill a major gap in knowledge and understanding of the development of research based curricula. The professor has been interested in and researching this topic for more than 15 years and argues that all undergraduates should learn through and about research and inquiry. Integrating this into the curriculum is the only way in which this can be achieved.

“Engaging students in research and inquiry helps students to become the producers of knowledge, not just consumers,” he says. “(Research) helps them address issues of complexity and uncertainty which are at the heart of the higher education experience. I see this topic as part of a growing movement in higher education to treat students as partners in learning and teaching.”

Through an interactive keynote, Healey hopes that participants will take away two main things

• Ideas about how students and faculty can work together through research and inquiry into both discipline based topics and into the learning and teaching they experience. Some of these will come from the many mini-case studies of practices from a wide range of disciplines, institutions and countries that I will present in a handout, and others will arise from exchanging ideas about their own practices and experiences with other participants.
• Some frameworks for thinking about this topic which will give them confidence to implement some of the ideas we discuss.

Healey has had the opportunity to present on this subject more than 250 times at a wide range of higher education institutions and conferences in upwards of 20 different countries.

“My experience has been that despite differences in structures and cultures there are wider differences within countries than there are between them,” he says.

Following Healey’s participation at the TransCanada Forum, the Academic Development Centre(ADC) is excited to offer several teaching-oriented workshops on May 21 with the researcher.  In these workshops Mount Royal faculty members will be able to get some hands on techniques and ideas on how to incorporate Dr Healey’s research into the classroom. Registration for these workshops can be done through the ADC system.

May 9, 2014 — by Adam Thurston