Teaching and Learning Winter Festival 2016

Virtually all of our actions including our thoughts, attitudes, desires, and feelings are either directed toward or produced in response to others. It is not astonishing, therefore, that a person’s ability to understand others and experience their thoughts and feelings in relation to oneself – to empathize with others – is tantamount in developing and maintaining genuine relationships. In recent years, scholars have echoed the need for empathy in pedagogy (e.g., Nussbaum, 2010). In this interactive workshop, John Vongas will lead participants through a journey that is intended to explore the meaning of empathy and the ways in which pedagogues can decide when, where, how, and to whom they are going to practice empathy.

John is currently an Assistant Professor on a limited-term appointment in Management at Concordia’s John Molson School of Business. His research interests fall at the intersection of motivation, emotions, and physiology, with an emphasis on empathy and power. He has published in the fields of management and psychology, and was the recipient of the 2015 Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence.

Date: Friday, January 22, 2016
Place: SGW FB 620
Time: 9:30 am - 11:00 am
Facilitator(s): Dr. John Vongas, Management

Research in the broad domain of learning sciences has pointed to the importance of engaging learners in authentic tasks to foster improved outcomes and to better enable transfer of learning. This workshop will provide participants with an opportunity to discuss how to incorporate case studies and problem-solving activities that are based in real-world scenarios. Drawing upon cases from Engineering, Computer Science, Communication Studies as well as the Social Sciences, attendees will be able to leave the session with a framework to develop these activities as well as ideas for how to evaluate learners progress and completion of authentic tasks.

Date: Friday, January 22, 2016
Place: SGW FB 620
Time: 11:15 am - 12:45 pm
Facilitator(s): Dr. Vivek Venkatesh, Education

Though we tend to learn more and experience more when learning is fun, as we and our students get ever more stretched and harried in our work we risk forgetting it. In this workshop, we will explore ways we may help ourselves and our students to remember to enjoy ourselves in class or rather to have fun and learn. More broadly, we will explore how we may create space in our classes for students to connect more fully, perhaps even emotionally, with their own learning, and the potential consequences of doing so. If that fails, we will hang out and eat chocolate.

Date: Friday, January 22, 2016
Place: SGW FB 620
Time: 1:00 pm - 2:30 pm
Facilitator(s): Dr. Raymond Paquin, Management

“Passion is energy. Feel the power that comes from focusing on what excites you.” - Oprah Winfrey.
I believe that education is all about being excited about something, be it making a deep impact on something we truly care about, being a catalyst for change, or instilling a sense of wonder in our students. Teachers with passion inspire students. They get students interested and excited about what they are learning. 
What does this passion look like?
How do you cultivate it when it is lacking or lying dormant? 
In this workshop you will have the opportunity to reflect on how you express and sustain your passion for teaching and reflect on the ways in which you can infuse passion into your lessons. 
Join me to explore, find and rekindle your passion in teaching.

Date: Friday, January 29, 2016
Place: SGW FB 620
Time: 1:00 pm - 2:30 pm
Facilitator(s): Professor Tara Ramsaran, Accountancy

A key goal of higher education should be to scaffold a deep appreciation that things are not always as they seem or what we are told they are, and that what we call obvious or even reality is in more often interpretation through a series of filters and lenses rather that objective fact. In this workshop, we will attempt to experience the power of demonstrations that lead to surprising, unexpected and counterintuitive realizations that should shake our beliefs in a firmly established reality. These epiphanies serve a double purpose: (1) they have a saliency that make them memorable moments and therefore have strong pedagogical impact and (2) they bring about a new way of looking at both specific issues and the world as a whole that makes one wary of the obvious, precludes blind acceptance of received ideas or second-hand thoughts, and in the best of cases fosters truly conscious thinking and living.

Date: Friday, February 05, 2016
Place: SGW FB 620
Time: 9:30 am - 11:00 am
Facilitator(s): Dr. Benoit-Antoine Bacon, Provost and Vice-President

Everything we do when we teach a course, the pedagogy we select, the technology we adopt and the delivery format have important impacts on students learning of concepts and on the development of higher-order thinking skills and team-building skills. Relating the concepts being taught to real life situations, utilizing the latest technology and exploring potential applicability, while sharing personal experiences, enhance learning and strengthen the impact. 
In this workshop, through sharing anecdotes and experiences, as well as research results, the impact of the choices made by the professors will be discussed.

Date: Friday, February 05, 2016
Place: SGW FB 620
Time: 11:15 am - 12:45 pm
Facilitator(s): Dr. Danielle, Morin, Business Statistics

Teaching with fun is something faculty contributing to the strategic directions initiative have deemed very important. There is consensus, therefore, that playing around with our educational materials in focused and productive ways encourages learning. On a basic level, fun and play keep students interested - more engagement means more active learning, which we know is valuable in terms of comprehension and knowledge retention. But what is play? And how does it function in the classroom? Gregory Bateson believes that the context of play renders real world actions unreal, while Johan Huizinga argues that ...genuine, pure play is one of the main bases of civilization. This lecture-workshop will combine theories of play with team-based games to bring us to the philosophical heart of why humans play and what is achieved when they do. You should come. It will be fun.

Date: Friday, February 12, 2016
Place: SGW FB 620
Time: 9:30 am - 11:00 am
Facilitator(s): Dr. Emer O'Toole, Irish Studies

This workshop is about the use of storytelling in higher education. It focuses on harnessing the power of storytelling for the design of online courses using innovative pedagogy, such as problem-based learning (PBL). Such pedagogical innovations are complex in nature because they require a shift from focusing on the content of the course to focusing on the learner experience. It also requires rethinking the role of the teacher from a transmitter of knowledge to a facilitator of discussion. 

In the first part of the workshop I will cover the theoretical framework of both storytelling and PBL. In the second part I will present an online course I co-designed, co-developed and co-taught using storytelling and PBL. The workshop will end with an open discussion where participants will be asked to share their ideas about how to reinvest the concepts in their own course design.

Date: Friday, February 12, 2016
Place: SGW FB 620
Time: 11:15 am - 12:45 pm
Facilitator(s): Dr. Ann-Louise Davidson, Education

Spaces available: 19

At Concordia and other universities, courses may be designed using a variety of instructional approaches. Examples of designs include, but are not limited to, more traditional classroom structures, online courses, and hybrid teaching. 

Recently, we have begun to use a hybrid teaching style in a section of one of the core undergraduate courses offered at the John Molson School of Business, namely, COMM 210 (Contemporary Business Thinking). Our study aims to examine the effectiveness of hybrid teaching, as one method that can be used by instructors for both engaging students and facilitating learning. We explore the perceptions, attitudes and behaviors of students who took a hybrid course, as well as of students who did not take a hybrid course. In addition to perceptions related to blended learning, we collected data on student engagement, student attendance, and overall learning (assessed as per the final grade in the course).

The study gave us the opportunity to learn more about the effectiveness of hybrid teaching, the degree to which our students are engaged, and reasons why students attend/do not attend classes. In particular, information on the latter points can help us to design more engaging classes that students look forward to attending.

Date: Friday, February 12, 2016
Place: SGW FB 620
Time: 1:00 pm - 2:30 pm
Facilitator(s): Dr. Isabelle Dostaler, Management & Professor Melanie Robinson, Assistant Professor, Management

Spaces available: 20