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Festival of Learning February 24 & 25, 2009
OverviewDr. Janice Newton, Associate Professor of Political Science and Women’s Studies at York University, was awarded a 3M National Teaching Fellowship in 2005. Her publications include Feminist Challenge to the Early Canadian Left (McGill Queens 1995), Voices from the Classroom: Reflections on Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (Garamond 2001), and articles on preventing plagiarism, classroom assessment and feminist pedagogy. Dr. Newton has also been invited to present teaching workshops in Canada and the United States. Currently, Dr. Newton’s sabbatical research is focused on the following question: if we want students from a broad range of disciplines to graduate with the democratic skills needed for a democracy, what implications does this have for our teaching practices? In particular, Dr. Newton is focused on democratic listening skills: What are they? Why do we need to teach them across the disciplines? What pedagogical practices would help students learn these skills? How would we assess student learning of democratic listening skills? Return to Festival of Learning Overview Dr. Pychyl is an associate professor and graduate chair in the Department of Psychology at Carleton University. He has established an international reputation with his research on procrastination (procrastination.ca) which complements his passion for teaching with a clear focus on students and their learning. He has won numerous teaching awards including a 3M Teaching Fellowship from the Society for Teaching and Learning Higher Education (1999). Most recently he became the inaugural recipient of the University Medal for Distinguished Teaching (2006) at Carleton University. An early adopter of technology for teaching and learning, Dr. Pychyl (Tim) was a member of the Council of Ontario Universities Task Force on Learning Technologies and he served on the CANARIE E-Learning program Committee. His most recent work related to teaching with technology is Integrating information literacy into a large-class research assignment: A case study of "Team Personality" (In T.P. Mackey & T.E. Jacobson [Eds., 2008], Using technology to teach information literacy, New York: Neal Schuman). When not in the classroom, Tim enjoys family life on his hobby farm with his wife Beth, daughter Laurel (almost 4 years old) and son Alex (17 months). After his sabbatical next year, this 50-something “dinosaur dad” will be moving to a reduced-time appointment to spend more time as Mr. Mom. As time, children and energy permit, you will find Tim and Beth on the local trails with their team of sled dogs or riding the family horses. Return to Festival of Learning Overview P.K. Rangachari I got my medical degree (M.B.B.S.) from the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi in ’65 and a Ph.D in pharmacology from the U. of Alberta in 1972. In the early eighties, when I learned the problem-based learning approach at McMaster University, it transformed my views on teaching and learning. Since then, I have been involved in teaching students in a variety of programmes (medicine, nursing, basic sciences, liberal arts) and have adapted the PBL/Inquiry approach to different settings. I have conducted workshops on teaching in many countries, published papers in both basic sciences as well as on educational issues and serve on the editorial boards of educational journals. I believe that the modern research University, situated in a pluralistic society, should provide a privileged space for fostering disciplined dissent: it often fails to do so. Undergraduate students are often neglected in our standards-based world which sanctifies objective tests and fails to recognize that true learning needs time. Teachers become mere passport control officers busy checking off lists rather than being agent provocateurs inspiring students to change the world. Our obsession with documenting and assessing mere competence forces us to short-change our students who get little or no opportunities to demonstrate their creative potential. Inquiry-based/Problem-based approaches offer rich opportunities for instituting necessary corrective measures. In the workshop I will demonstrate the potential for such approaches to encourage students to take charge of their learning and demonstrate not merely competence but flair and imagination. Return to Festival of Learning Overview John Wadland is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Canadian Studies at Trent University. In the course of his tenure of 36 years he served as Editor of the Journal of Canadian Studies, Chair of the undergraduate Canadian Studies Program, and Director of the Frost Centre for Canadian Studies and Native Studies. He has a special interest in interdisciplinary research and pedagogy, most of which has focused on environmental themes. More recently he has turned his attention to the emerging field of visual culture, especially as it relates to ideas of place, space and landscape. Currently he is Chair of the Program Advisory Committee of the General Arts and Science Program in the Interdisciplinary Studies suite of courses at Sir Sandford Fleming College. Return to Festival of Learning Overview Prof. Barry W. K. Joe was appointed to Brock University’s Germanic and Slavic Studies in 1980 where he taught 19th-century German literature and German language. In 1996, he was cross-appointed to the department of Communication, Popular Culture and Film Studies when he developed three core courses for that unit’s Digital Culture stream. The following year, he was seconded to Brock’s Centre for Teaching, Learning, and Educational Technologies where he served as Director for 5 years. During his tenure at the Centre, he was co-chair of the 2000 STLHE conference. In 2003, Prof. Joe left the CTLET to found the Centre for Digital Humanities, serving as its first Director until 2005. He left the German section of the department of Modern Languages in 2006 to become the first fully-appointed faculty member in the Centre for Digital Humanities, where today he teaches the foundation course in Interactive Arts and Science along with the second year follow-up course. His pedagogical interests include inquiry-based learning, transformative learning, and proximal learning (social constructivism). He is the recipient of the Brock University Distinguished Teaching Award (1999), the national 3M Teaching Fellowship Award (2000) and the provincial Leadership in Faculty Teaching Award (2007). Return to Festival of Learning Overview
Return to: Festival of Learning at Staff Development, George Brown College Revised: February 6, 2009 |
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