3 SoTL sessions at the upcoming CACSL conference, May 25-27 at MRU
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.
Sept 10 SoTL Exchange presentation: Implementing Reflective Writing in Combination with Labatorials in Science
Dear colleagues,
Please join us for our first SoTL Exchange presentation of the year, presented by Mandy Sobhanzadeh, MRU Senior Physics Lab Instructor, and PhD Candidate in Physics Education at UofC:
Thursday September 10, 12-1 pm, Y324
Implementing Reflective Writing in Combination with Labatorials in Science
Students tend to memorize the materials that they see in science textbooks without thinking about their meaning, because they believe that language and words hold the knowledge and they need to use the same words and terms in order to show their understanding (Eger, 1993; Kalman, 2006). Such students who think that knowledge in science is a body of settled facts that comes from authority take a passive role in learning and become a receiver of knowledge. It is up to us as teachers to motivate students to think about the meaning of concepts rather than memorizing the terms and definitions. Thinking about the meaning of concepts is related to the topic of hermeneutics which is the theory of interpretation. Having a hermeneutical approach to science helps students gain a deeper understanding of the meaning (Eger, 1993). To help students approach science textbooks in the manner of hermeneutics, we use a writing activity called “reflective writing” in a new style of introductory physics labs called “labatorials” at Mount Royal University. Students interpret the concepts related to each lab and reflect their own understanding of them before doing experiments. We have studied students’ perspectives on reflective writing and labatorial activities. We used the disciplined-focused epistemological beliefs questionnaire (DFEBQ) developed by Hofer (2000) to find out whether the combinations of these activities can change students’ beliefs of knowledge and learning. This presentation will describe the activities and present data showing students’ perspectives on them as well as changes in their epistemological beliefs.
holiday reading: some examples of Patti Clayton’s work in SoTL-CSL
The DEAL Model for Critical Reflection and Assessment that she co-developed through a long-term SoTL project has formed the basis for several projects/articles:
The first research-grounded one was:
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/mjcsl/3239521.0011.204/1/–integrating-reflection-and-assessment-to-capture-and-improve?view=image
The following piece is the product of a long-term project grounded in DEAL. This is a primary go-to piece on critical reflection and assessment in experiential learning (which this journal calls “applied learning”):
http://www.missouriwestern.edu/appliedlearning/journalvol1/Ash%20&%20Clayton,%20Generating,%20Deepening,%20and%20Documenting%20Learning.pdf
Also:
An article on a less social-sciency example of a SoTL project can be found at:
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/mjcsl/3239521.0011.106/–shifts-in-perspective-capitalizing-on-the-counter-normative?view=image&seq=1&size=100
Congratulations!
Kudos to Jodi Nickel on the recent accceptance of her SoTL paper for publication. Jodi’s paper – Formative Assessment and Syntheses in Reflection Journals – is published in Transformative Dialogues. Congratulations! – posted by Jim Zimmer
Honourable mention for April McGrath, “Students’ Experiences Learning Statistics” poster at STLHE 2013
Congratulations to April, whose poster entitled “Students’ Experiences Learning Statistics” won an honourable mention at the 2013 Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (STLHE) Conference. The abstract from the conference can be found here and is copied below:
Statistics is a core requirement for majors in different disciplines and pedagogical techniques developed to help students learn statistical concepts are valuable. Given the anxiety and self-efficacy struggles of many students when learning statistics (Onwuegbuzie & Wilson, 2003), it can be a challenging topic for instructors to teach. Research has focused on exploring the effectiveness of various pedagogical techniques to improve the learning of statistics (Christopher & Marek, 2009; Lesser & Pearl, 2008; Neumann, Hood, & Neumann, 2009; Segrist & Pawlow, 2007). One yet unexplored possibility is that the interaction between an instructor and student during office hours, followed by reflection on the part of the student, may also be a powerful pedagogical tool to help students succeed in learning statistics. Psychology students enrolled in two sections of an Introductory Statistics course volunteered for a research study (N = 45) that sought to determine the influence that office hour attendance and learning reflections can have on students’ statistics anxiety and their learning. As part of the requirement for this course, students attended one meeting with the professor and completed a learning reflection and study plan. The types of questions raised by students during their meetings and the themes found in their learning reflections will be presented. Student reaction to the scheduled meetings was positive and during meetings several participants expressed anxiety about the course and math in general. In line with past research, a negative relationship between anxiety and performance was found.
References
Christopher, C. N., & Marek, P. (2009). A palatable introduction to and demonstration of statistical main effects and interactions. Teaching of Psychology, 36, 130-133.
Lesser, L. M., & Pearl, D. K. (2008). Functional fun in statistics teaching: Resources, research and recommendations. Journal of Statistics Education, 16, 1-10.
Neumann, D. L., Hood, M., & Neumann, M. M. (2009). Statistics? You must be joking. Journal of Statistics Education, 17, 1-16.
Onwuegbuzie, A. J. & Wilson, V. A. (2003). Statistics anxiety: Nature, etiology, antecedents, effects, and treatments – a comprehensive review of the literature. Teaching in Higher Education, 8, 195-209.
Segrist, D. J., & Pawlow, L. A. (2007). The mixer: Introducing the concept of factor analysis. Teaching of Psychology, 34, 121-123.