This year, the TransCanada International Forum on SoTL, sponsored through the Institute for Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, will be hosted in partnership with the 2016 Canadian Association of Community Service Learning conference, May 25-27 at Mount Royal University.  The Forum features 3 sessions with leading scholar Patti Clayton:

Session I (Wed, 9:00 – 12:00): Integrating Critical Reflection and Assessment to Generate, Deepen, and Document Learning
In this first of three opportunities to collaboratively explore Community Service-Learning and Community Engagement (CSL/CE) as the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) with practitioner-scholar Patti Clayton, we will focus our attention on designing critical reflection so as to both generate student learning and provide a basis for inquiry into the processes that support such learning. For over 15 years Patti and colleagues around the world have been refining a research grounded model for integrating critical reflection and assessment. This highly interactive session will invite participants to build on their work, co-create critical reflection assignments and rubrics that are well-aligned with shared learning goals, and begin to co-design SoTL questions and methods that tap critical reflection products and processes.

Throughout the session participants will be invited to identify colleagues in the room with similar interests and to explore possible collaboration during the lunch break.

Session II (Wed, 1:30 – 4:00): Revisioning SoTL for Service-Learning and Community Engagement
Who conducts SoTL? And whose learning is in question in SoTL? In this second in a series of three opportunities to collaboratively explore CSL/CE as the scholarship of teaching and learning, Patti Clayton and Janice Miller-Young will invite participants into an international conversation about broadening and deepening the meanings and the practices of SoTL, within and beyond CSL. Patti, Janice, and their colleague Peter Felten are advancing efforts to conceptualize and implement engaged pedagogies as spaces of co-teaching, co-learning, and co-generating knowledge and practice; and they are seeing in trends in this direction indications that it is time to revisit and revise Hutchings and Shulman’s seminal work defining SoTL. SoTL can be a powerful means of developing practitioner-scholars; improving teaching and learning; nurturing communities of inquiry and practice around shared commitments to learners and learning; and building bodies of knowledge, practice, and policy in support of same. To fulfill this potential in the context of engaged pedagogies and to retain its cutting edge orientation as scholarship, they suggest that SoTL can no longer be understood and enacted primarily by faculty as a vehicle to improve student learning and to produce scholarship by and for faculty. This highly interactive session will engage participants in revisioning SoTL in ways that honor CSL/CE’s foundational commitment that everyone involved teaches and learns and that leverage the questions, experiences, and learning of CSL/CE practitioner-scholars to help define the future of SoTL in CSL/CE.

At the end of the day participants will be invited to form pairs or small groups of potential collaborators and to engage in the rest of the conference accordingly (e.g., having meals together, meeting between sessions to share questions and insights).

Session III (Fri, 9:00 – 11:45): Continuing our own SoTL Journeys: Questions, Collaborators, and Next Steps
In this third opportunity to explore CSL/CE as SoTL with Patti and colleagues, we will reflect on related work we have encountered during the conference, examine Canadian examples, and further develop our own questions, collaborations, and inquiry methods. Participants will be invited to skim an article/chapter related to the SoTL interests shared by the pair/small group they formed on Wednesday (examples will be provided) and to bring a worksheet completed during the conference to the session as aids to focusing our time productively. The intended outcome of this concluding gathering in the series of 3 sessions is for participants to leave with specific ideas, collaborators, and next steps in their own journeys with CSL/CE as SoTL.